in california. its capabilities at that that height would expand much more than you would think from a hot air balloon. rachel: although kirk lip old was saying there s no doubt this was a deliberate path that they wanted to see those bases pete: the closer you are to anything, the more detail you get. by the way, we knew about this well before wednesday, and the only reason it went public is because there was a photographer in montana who took photos, and so they were outed on it. this administration knew about this presumably for weeks. it crossed over alaska. and yet joe biden wants to take credit for giving it the command to shoot it down on wednesday but then defers to his commanders who say, no, let it fly across the country over all of our military bases, our b-2 bomber missile sites and because of safety we re going to shoot it down over a specific portion of the coastline off of south carolina when they could have, will, as was pointed out, shoot
we believe based on what analysts from the military think, it came from china and dropped in here. we first became aware of it in montana. there are missile sites there and of course military bases and other things along the way that might be of interest, new nuclear plants it might pass near, any military sites or sensitive sites. we have sightings here, then sightings down here and then down this way. if you look at this, this basically would track along to what you would see from the jet stream that would carry it down in this direction. the jet stream changes all the time. the models were showing it would basically probably come out here in the carolinas. how fast is it traveling? if you take the first sighting up here on wednesday and simply add up the time, at 7:00 tonight
principals, secretary of defense, chairman of joint chiefs, secretary of the state and would have discussed, this is the way it would have been done in the trump administration and you make the hard decision early on and one thing i loved about president trump, trump would have made the decision right now and go with it and my concern what they did, they talked about it, it s slow-moving device, let s think about it and they had all the negative options presented. they should have made immediate decision, the decision to take the balloon now and if we know what kind of balloon it is, a spy balloon and transit over critical sites, 3 missile wings we have in the united states, over 400 missile sites that we have and goes to second member which is b2 bombers fleet. i can t believe the poor decision making that was done. let s be candid about it. this is something that took a real long delay, not like this thing is moving fast. it s moving like a fast jogger. the other thing that griff
balloon hovering over montana was not intended for surveillance. we ll track that now with greg palkot from london with details. this is a remarkable story. we get a bit more clarity in the past couple hours about this. yes, it has big ramifications. the pentagon had said it is a chinese high altitude surveillance balloon traveling above commercial air traffic not presenting a military or physical threat. someone spotted it from the ground in montana wednesday and confirmed yesterday. the u.s. has been tracking it for a few days as it made its way up from china across the mostly alaska aleutian islands and the western coast of canada and to several u.s. military bases including missile sites and that s why the u.s. considered and nixed the idea of
about the size of a fire truck. it s massive. and people need to understand where that thing is moving to. it s going across the northwest moving to the south but the fact is it s going across all of our major missile fields out there. 340 first missile wing, 90th, 91, all the 400 missile sites are under it. and people don t realize the slant range on the sensors is huge, like ok, i m on the first floor of a building, and different on the 50th floor of the building so we are looking deep and vacuuming information. the beauty that balloons give you, they can loiter, they can stay a long time, and so what they are doing, collecting information on us, and i think it s really unfortunate we have not done something about it. i mean, this is agregious, not like they are not just travelling say cross the southwest. these are going across the most sensitive sites that we have, our three missile wings out there, and the icbm field part