you re live in the cnn newsroom. i m jim acosta in washington. spy balloon down. a single missile took out a chinese spy balloon that floated across america s skies this past week. that dramatic sound just off the coast of south carolina earlier today. recovery efforts offshore are now under way as u.s. intelligence officials want to gain insight what china was up to. president biden said the order to shoot down the balloon came directly from him. on wednesday, when i was briefed on the balloon, i ordered the pentagon to shoot it down on wednesday as soon as possible. cnn has team coverage of this very tense moment in u.s./china relations. i want to start with warren lieberman who is over at the pentagon. what are you learning about the recovery effort that is gong on? i say sum that officials want to get their hands on it as quickly as possible. absolutelily. but the debris, what was left of the payload, the length of three school buses has fallen in 47 feet of water.
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that s all i know. travis, can you tell me a little more about who you are, fully identify yourself, what did you see? caller: yes, ma am. my name is travis hostetler and i am a local photographer in the myrtle beach area. i came out to see the balloon. it was flying over, so i come out here to the water s edge. i got a call from you guys. as i was talking to the lady on the phone, i seen a missile come out from the fighter jet and it hit the balloon. the balloon deflated and it s still floating down right now. travis, i m just going to try and repeat some of what i heard from you because the signal is a little spotty. you re saying you re a local photographer in the myrtle beach area. i don t know if that was us losing the signal there. travis said he was a local photographer in the myrtle beach
a while. i would say i never seen it actually hit the water. i lost track of it once it got down so far. i had phone calls coming in, everything else, try to figure out how to get in touch with you guys. i don t know, maybe five minutes? interesting. okay. wild stuff. what s that? say that again? i said it might have been a five minutes or so. not sure. by the time it actually hit the water. because i lost track of it in the sky. all right, travis, thank you very much for your time, we appreciate it. all right, now the chinese supply balloon s trip across the united states comes at a precarious time for the two countries. much more on the rising tensions ahead. stay with us. approach to pet food.
went in the continental united states, and joining us now to talk about it is travis hostetler. it looks like you re there on the beach as we speak. how did it come down? i came out to get video and photos of it and i didn t realize they were going to shoot it down until right before it happened. and you could see the rocket or whatever it was they shot from the plane. you could see it start to separate from the plane, and as soon as it hit the balloon, you could hear a pop. i couldn t get it on video. i can t catch it actually hitting it. but you just seen the balloon just kind of explode. and you know, it just popped. and above it was like confetti. i just looked like confetti, and it collapsed and just started floating down. i m not sure how fast it went.