so they re going to look at the debris and try and work out what these ones are. but there s certainly growing alarm about it. and in china, they ve responded angrily. they ve said they didn t send any spy balloons and they ve seen american spy balloons over their territory. so as tensions ratchet up between these two countries, balloons are at the middle of it. so what is going on? nick pope is a former ufo investigatorfor the ministry of defence. he joins us now from sanjose in california. morning to you. what is your assessment of what is going on? sadly, this is not aliens, however fun that might be. clearly it is espionage. the first one was a spy balloon. the other three, we are still waiting on gathering data. it looks to be some sort of surveillance platform, weather balloons, airships were drones. it
surveillance platform, the first one, go over the united states, it became a cause celebre around the world. we now own it, and that s not comfortable for the chinese, and of course we canceled the trip for the secretary of state. my guess is the other two objects are not chinese and china is doing everything they can right now to keep as low a profile as possible. but who knows. we won t know until the administration fully briefs on what these things are. to be fair, when you go by one of these things in an f-22 or f-18, you re moving pretty fast. until you pick up the pieces on the ground, there s uncertainty. democrat jim himes, member of the house intelligence committee and the gang of eight. if anybody s going to have information, it s that gang of eight. congressman himes, thanks for coming in. thank you, chuck. let me bring in the panel. we have a couple more reporters that may have more information for us. capitol hill correspondent garrett haake. leigh ann caldwell, jona
theoretically they could have conducted that operation off of alaska. by this time the president hadn t been briefed yet. that raises such an important question. the biden administration says that previous balloons have flown over the u.s. before, but the trump administration may not have been aware. how is that possible? the department of defense not have known and then not briefed the president at the time? so there are a lot of things that could have happened. we re playing a dpeguessing gam here, abby. the fact remains that sometimes we don t recognize these kinds of platforms for what they are. the fact that they re using a balloon as their surveillance platform, takes you back to the civil war, even before that, and we don t think of people often using those kinds of technologies in the modern age. so that might be a failure of imagination on our part and might also mean that we re not
balloons in afghanistan and iraq of a bust size. this is three buses here. you know, suspicion would be somewhere out of the south china sea may be. but i just don t know. i would just be speculating. mark, if you will expand on meet the type of intelligence that they can gather from this balloon. well, in terms of the chinese? the chinese. it is going to be everything from perhaps signals intelligence collection. i say signals perhaps because we have to speculate at this point. signals intelligence, communications, perhaps they re looking at telemetry data from u.s. military testing. and then imagery, there can be high resolution cameras on board. again, from everything we have heard from the pentagon, what is quite interesting is that shiny satellites actually are far better at this type of surveillance platform. it is curious why the chinese
the australian tennis star nick kyrgios is due in court in canberra later, charged with an alleged assault of a former partner in 2021. and covid, vaccines, and those conspiracy theories we speak to the microsoft founder and philanthropist, bill gates. live from our studio in singapore. this is bbc news. it s newsday. hello, and welcome to the programme. we start with breaking news from the us where the defence department says it s confident a balloon spotted over montana is a surveillance platform from china. a short while ago, the pentagon press secretary brigadier general pat ryder put a statement on the us department of defence website confirming the high altitude surveillance balloon is being tracked.