The military took down three UFOs after the Chinese spy balloon. At this point, even birthday parties are worried about air defense systems.

(Trevor Noah, The Daily Show)

Since I was a child, balloons had a way of captivating my imagination. And as an old man living in Myrtle Beach, a small city on the coast of South Carolina, a tourist center for people from the north of the United States and a retirement site for many, they continued to do so. These are some notes on balloons and imagination from two years ago.

The neighborhood where I live is very quiet. Or it was, until Saturday, February 4, 2023, when my front door neighbor called me agitated to come and see the Chinese balloon. I thought he was joking with me.

But when I went out into the street, he and other neighbors were looking to the sky, all excited, observing a white dot, like a little miniature full moon seen at daytime, which could be seen clearly drawn in the sky, like an innocent speck of cotton.

Up until then, the news on TV had been frantically talking about a spy balloon from China, flying over the United States. How it had been observed, with the naked eye, by several people in the state of Montana, near a strategic military base, far away from Myrtle Beach.

But in just three days, it came to our street, and my neighbors were in an uproar. Not only because of the balloon, which actually looked like an innocent speck of cotton, but because of the two warplanes that rotated at a high speed around the balloon, leaving white trails in the sky. Surrounding the innocent but perhaps menacing balloon.

And so, we stood there for a while, looking at a balloon in the sky and the white lines circling it. It was quite a spectacle. Finally, I got tired and went home. But being inside, I heard two explosions, the kind you hear when an airplane breaks the sound barrier. The house rumbled. We went outside. And the neighbor told us, it looks like they just knocked down the object. The balloon. And indeed, you could no longer see the balloon or the planes in the sky. We turned on the television. And they told us that there, on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean that surrounds the coast of South Carolina, near our house, an F-22 Raptor from Langley Air Force Base, using an AIM-9X Sidewinder missile, shot down the balloon. What a thrill!

Later, I read that this balloon had dimensions, about the size of the Statue of Liberty in New York. And, of course, there were accusations and responses from both the U.S. government and China about the nature of the balloon. Some said it was a spy balloon; the Chinese said it was a scientific research balloon that had been deflected. In short, the usual difference of opinion between governments that compete for global hegemony.

The curious thing is that this did not stop there. There were still more balloons to come. Three more objects were spotted over U.S. and Canadian airspace. On Friday, Feb. 10, U.S. officials reported that the air force had shot down a "high-altitude object" off the coast of Alaska. And the next day, an unidentified object was shot down in Canadian airspace, and finally, the U.S. Air Force shot down yet another object over the Great Lakes region on Sunday, February 12.

And let's not forget the sighting of a Chinese balloon over northern Colombia and Costa Rica, which, according to the news, generated alarm in the Latin American region, due to the possible violation of the airspace.

For days, the news on TV was mostly about balloons. And then all of a sudden, boom, all references to the balloons disappeared completely, like the speck of cotton floating over Myrtle Beach on that afternoon. The remains of the three additional balloons were never found, nor was it indicated who put them on the air, and it was never revealed, what was discovered from the parts of the first downed balloon close to home, nor what happened to the Latin American balloon that according to the news flew over Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Colombia and then entered through Venezuela.

I was intrigued by all this. At that time, I was dedicating myself to learning more about AI (artificial intelligence), but I was drawn to this issue of intelligence about balloons.

The absence of official information and the mystery of the origin of the non-Chinese balloons, combined with some official comments hidden in press releases, led me to think that this would be a good question to ask the new AI chats.

Let's start with the cost of this operation, which mobilized part of the air and naval forces of the United States and Canada, to detect, shoot down, and then find the parts of these four balloons, and who was responsible for their launching, and the possible reasons.

The total cost is impossible to know, but it is estimated around at least $8 million to $10 million. Just the five SideWinder rockets (at $472,000 each) that were used to shoot down the four balloons (yes, the aim on the second balloon over Alaska failed once) for a total of more than 2 million dollars.

Check out the news that appears half-hidden between the news feeds of CBS, Guardian, NPR, and Aviation Week, never shown as headline news, after such a big display in early February:

  • The search for small balloons or their remnants recently shot down by U.S. and Canadian fighter jets over Alaska and Lake Huron has been canceled, military commanders said, days after balloon enthusiasts in northern Illinois indicated that one of the unidentified flying objects might belong to their group.

  • An FBI lab in Virginia that was examining recovered fragments of the Chinese balloon said that the search for additional debris was canceled.

  • U.S. defense officials have said the subsequent balloons appear to have had nothing to do with China or any other nation, but were harmless inflatable balloons.

  • Aviation Week reported Thursday that the Northern Illinois Balloon Bottle Cap Brigade was missing one of its party-style balloons and that they had last observed its position on Feb. 10 at nearly 40,000 feet off Alaska's west coast.

  • China has maintained that it was a weather balloon that veered off course. But the balloon was doing something far more sinister, according to the United States.

  • The unidentified object that was shot down near Alaska was about the size of a small car, according to the Pentagon. (One of the late-night TV comedy commentators expressed concern as the air force indicated that the object over Canada was heading towards the North Pole, saying, "what if it was a practice trip of Santa Claus's sleigh?”)

  • The object shot down over Lake Huron appeared to be octagonal in shape, with ropes dangling down, but no discernible payload, a senior administration official said. (Another commentator, on this particular balloon, pointed out, "that it could have been a piñata on the side, from a party of Mexican emigrants in northern Michigan")

  • There may be "completely benign and fully explainable reasons" for why these objects were flying over North America, but the U.S. won't know if that's the case until they're recovered, said Kirby, an official White House spokesman. But the search has already been officially suspended.

  • U.S. officials also said U.S. intelligence tracked the spy balloon that was shot down earlier this month in South Carolina; it took off from the island of Hainan, off China's southern coast. It moved east toward Guam and Hawaii and then headed north toward Alaska, entering U.S. airspace on Jan. 28. Given the path, it's possible the balloon could be blown off course by weather, but officials said that once it reached the south, over the continental United States, it was being controlled by China. In other words, taking advantage of what the wind took away, they activated it to steer it.

  • Rob Fesen, a professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth, said the Chinese balloon appeared to have solar panels and a small "payload" unusually close to its body. Still, Fesen said, “there's nothing in the public footage to suggest it's a spy craft, as opposed to a lost research balloon. This particular balloon is round and doesn't appear to have propellers, which likely means its maneuverability is very limited.”

There are several weird and funny things about this brief incident with balloons, the kind of things that happen, and no one knows exactly what really happened – lots of contradictions, elusive answers, big alarms, and then total forgetting. It's the way a lot of things play out in this world of information and news manipulation; they're like meteor showers, they shine in the night, and then no one remembers them.

Anyway, these balloons distracted the attention for a few days, and God knows what someone wanted to hide that was happening then, and the balloons arose to divert attention. And maybe they did knock down Santa's sleigh, and the lost piñata of the Mexican party in Michigan.

Who knows. And who knows what espionage that balloon from China was doing, on Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Colombia, and Venezuela, which could not have been done better on foot, with greater access, and much more fun.

The line between news and fiction is often blurred, as Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said.