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Pentagon wants to get its hands on that. joining us now on the phone, jjoe joey lopes. he was visiting mir tilyrtle be. it looks as though you ve got the money shot. what more can you tell us? what more did you seen? hey, jim, i ve seen a lot of crazy stuff at myrtle beach. this was by far the craziest. we were at lunch. joking around, what if we see it? what if it s right here. like obviously them shooting it down as reports indicated was imminent. we went outside. we saw the fighter jets circling around. there were three or four of them and after that we heard a bang and the balloon was gone. and about how long did all of this take, like a couple of minutes? how much time went by as you watched this? about 15 minutes from when we walked out of the restaurant to when we when the balloon was gone. ....
Here that really tipped us off from this temporary flight restriction when it was put into place around 1:30 this afternoon is that it went up to 60,000 feet which is the cruising altitude of the balloon according to the pentagon, and the idea was for the faa to clear out the air space at the request of the department of defense to try and make it so that anything below it, including airplanes, would not be in the debris field of all of this. it is pretty incredible when you see the video here that these fighter jets were up so high. the f-22 rap tore can fly up to 65,000 feet, that s very high. right at the altitude of this balloon. a bit of overkill, you know. pilots, they have helmet mounted heads up displays. this jet can go mach 2.25. that s more than twice the speed of sound. 1500 miles an hour. it s an incredible plane to ....
Know, common place using satellites alone. ask you a question about how common it is, i think it s much more common than anybody realized until this thing appeared over montana. the you know, recent reporting from the intelligence community says that there have been over 160 cases of balloon or balloon-like sightings in recent history over the u.s. i think there s a good chance that some of those were chinese systems so, you know, it s not that they ve never been there before, it s that now we re forced to confront the reality that the sky is perhaps a little bit more crowded with these things than we would like to think. and what does this say about, you know, this brazen move that the chinese have taken here? to send a balloon over the united states like this knowing the reaction that they would get. i mean, you saw the secretary of ....
Describing, there s a lot of reasons not to shoot it down over the land. we don t know for sure, i have not yet received a classified briefing on this yet how we were monitoring it as it crossed the country. better to be safe, shoot it down over water. also good to clearly expose china for what they re doing. that s a piece of this that i don t think enough people think about. we re looking for allies and friends across the world as we try to figure out how to deal with the threat china is posing. we don t want to look like we re the shoot first ask questions later approach. i think the president handled this correctly. he protected the interests of the u.s. we re in a position to gather that intelligence from the balloon. i think it was the right decision. you have multiple republican lawmakers, i don t need to tell you, congressman, saying this should have been shot down much sooner. yeah. what about the notion this could have been shot down over a remote stretch montana or som ....