Pentagon Releases Pilot’s Chinese Spy Balloon Selfie

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WASHINGTON – The Pentagon on Wednesday released a photograph of a U-2 spy plane soaring over the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon as it transited the mainland United States earlier this month, providing a new glimpse of the information U.S. officials gathered about the craft before shooting it down over the Atlantic Ocean.

The image appears to have been taken from the cockpit of the single-seat U-2 Dragon Lady, a high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft in service since the 1950s. It can cruise at altitudes above 70,000 feet, allowing it look down on the Chinese airship that officials said had reached heights of 60,000 to 65,000 feet.

The photograph shows an Air Force pilot clad in a helmet as the balloon passes below. Large solar panels attached to the airship appear to be visible, with equipment strung from a canopy that U.S. military officials have described as 200 feet tall. The Air Force said the photograph was captured Feb. 3 over the “Central Continental United States.” A day later, it moved off the coast of South Carolina and was shot down by a Sidewinder missile launched from an F-22 Raptor fighter jet.

The image was published Tuesday on the website Dragon Lady Today, a site devoted to the U-2 and its history. A Pentagon spokesman, Sabrina Singh, confirmed the image was authentic during a Pentagon news conference Wednesday afternoon, and the Defense Department released the image about an hour later.

The single-engine U-2 was initially adopted during the Cold War. With a distinctive, narrow wingspan stretching 105 feet, it has been used to photograph Soviet nuclear complexes, observe Islamic State compounds in the Middle East, and carry out surveillance missions over Ukraine just before Russia’s invasion last year.

The balloon initially appeared off the coast of mainland Alaska on Jan. 28 before moving over the state and into Canadian airspace. It surfaced over northern Idaho on Jan. 31, and was observed by civilians over Montana on Feb. 1. Defense officials scrambled jets and considered shooting it down then, but decided it was safer to bring it down off the coast of the Atlantic Ocean.

(c) 2023, The Washington Post · Dan Lamothe 


4 COMMENTS

  1. No no. President Biden and Bob Casey said the balloon was nothing and worthless. No harm or danger were presented to the US with this balloon.

  2. The “Chinese” balloons were launched by the Pentagon. The same Pentagon that funded 46 bio-laboratories in Ukraine. The same Pentagon that controlled the COVID-19 program from the very beginning.

      • No planes were involved in the 4 buildings that were attacked, including the Pentagon. No one actually saw a plane live. They only saw it – the CGI – on TV and thought they saw a plane. You were clearly able to see it was a fake because there’s no way an aluminum place can penetrate a steel and concrete buildings coming right out the other side undistorted. They removed this part of their CGI because too many caught on that it’s fake. There was not even an airplane wreckage or debris at the site. They also forgot to photoshop the blue sky.

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