Japan has confirmed balloons have flown over its territory and said it's prepared to shoot them down in future. China has not directly addressed the evidence presented by the BBC. US - China relations were thrown into turmoil earlier this year when an alleged Chinese spy balloon was shot down off the US coast.
See: https://redskyalliance.org/xindustry/the-chinese-balloon-not-a-good-sign
China claimed the balloon seen over north-western US in late January was a civilian airship, used for scientific research such as meteorology and that it was an unintended and isolated event. John Culver, a former East Asia analyst for the CIA told reporters that this "had been not just a one-off, but a continuing effort dating back at least five years." He said the Chinese balloons were "specially designed for these long-range missions" and some had "apparently circumnavigated the globe."[1]
Working with Synthetaic, https://www.synthetaic.com an artificial intelligence company which sifted through huge amounts of data captured by satellites, the BBC has found multiple images of balloons crossing East Asia. The company's founder, Corey Jaskolski, found evidence of one balloon crossing northern Japan in early September 2021. These images have not been published before. Mr. Jaskolski also believes the evidence points to this balloon having been launched from deep inside China, south of Mongolia. The BBC has been unable to confirm this.
Japan is a close ally of the US and more American forces are stationed there than in any other foreign country. Yuko Murakami, from the Japanese ministry of defense, told reporters that the government was "taking all precautions to monitor the situation on a daily basis" and would even be willing to shoot down balloons to protect the "lives and property of people in the territory of Japan".
The US State Department says it believes the Chinese balloons are equipped to gather signals intelligence. It says the aircraft it discovered over the US had "multiple antennas, likely capable of collecting and geo-locating communications." To investigate whether China had launched other balloons, the group first searched social media and press reports across the region for sightings of UFOs in the sky.
The Chinese spy balloon that flew across the US was able to gather intelligence from several sensitive American military sites, despite the Biden administration’s efforts to block it from doing so, according to two current senior US officials and one former senior administration official.
China was able to control the balloon so it could make multiple passes over some of the sites (at times flying figure-eight formations) and transmit the information it collected back to Beijing in real time, the three officials said. The intelligence China collected was mostly from electronic signals, which can be picked up from weapons systems or include communications from base personnel, rather than images, the officials said.
The three officials said China could have gathered much more intelligence from sensitive sites if not for the administration’s efforts to move around potential targets and obscure the balloon’s ability to pick up their electronic signals by stopping them from broadcasting or emitting signals.
Investigators found two photographs taken by Taiwan's weather service, appearing to show a balloon over the capital, Taipei, in late September 2021. Mr. Jaskolski then cross-referenced them with satellite imagery. "Within 90 seconds, we found the balloon off the coast of Taiwan," he says.
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