'We gave them the appropriate salute': Pilots report seeing Chinese spy balloon

[@RyanRoberts15]

Captions must have been the last thing someone had to do before they went on vacation

[@AzimuthAviation]

The captions are fantastically poor!!! I hope none of the two cats cisterns have activated, lol!

[@Partylizard1]

"Okay jeffrey 21, 31" almost took me out. LMAO

[@keenkingjames]

Maybe they wanna scope out the missile silos in Kansas.

[@hankterreros223]

"Where the heck are we"?

[@androidemulator6952]

50,000 feet - well within military plane performance- lets gets some decent hi-res photos

[@EfficientRVer]

OF COURSE they did that already. F-15 ceiling is 65,000 feet, U-2 70,000 feet, SR-71 (yes the government still flies one with a NASA paint job) 85,000 feet. And every fighter can do 50,000 feet, even plenty of private jets can do 51,000. Do you think the military is a bunch of morons and haven't gone up to get some photos from up close? They just don't want you to see the pics, because secrecy is a way to make the military and the politicians feel more important. The Chinese know they've done that, so any claim that they're not showing us pics because that would tell the Chinese "their capabilities" is stupid. Yes, we can take really nice photos from airplanes, big secret. It's ridiculous that they're not even providing a real-time tracking map showing where it has wandered, when everyone can see it. No comment, classified, we don't want to disclose that, don't want to reveal sources and methods, blah blah blah. Everyone knows we can photograph a balloon really, really well. Or shoot it down anytime we decide to, 100 different ways. The generals know what they're doing. If it's still up there, that is because it's best for us that it's still up there, in one way or another. They're working on getting it down in one piece, shooting it down is not nearly as good an idea.

[@threebox11]

interesting how air traffic control was no comment but then the next guy even made up a story about just coming on shift. would have liked to be a fly on the wall of the closed door meetings.

[@REVNUMANEWBERN]

REPORTED shot down Sat 2/4 Just reported