following new details about that chinese spy balloon traveling across the country. new video into the cnn newsroom showing the balloon now hovering over asheville, and charlotte, north carolina in the last hour. and it could make it out to sea at any moment. the balloon was first spotted over montana on wednesday. china claims it s a civilian research vessel that blew offcourse, but the u.s. isn t buying that, calling the balloon s flight over u.s. soil an irresponsible act. secretary of state antony blinken postponing a planned trip to beijing in response. cnn s oren liebermann is at pentagon for us. oren, officials say the balloon doesn t currently seem to present a threat, but why is the pentagon also preceding with caution on it? reporter: so the pentagon has said for now that it will not be shooting this down, because of the risks from two different perspectives, first there s the risk to what s below, blow something up at 60,000 feet and that could be scattered over q
Provoke the secretary of state to postpone the upcoming talks and trip to china. do you think that was the proper response? does that alone then elevate that there is some concern, great concern about the intention of this balloon, whether it was inadvertent or not? i think it was appropriate, and obviously, there are domestic political considerations here as well, apart from whatever intrinsic loss that we re incurring, by allowing this balloon to operate over the continental united states. i do think that this affords us, the administration, some potential leverage, in dealing with the chinese, and by the way, if we decide to inadvertently launch a balloon over china, it will be very interesting to see how they might react to that. and if the u.s. doesn t do
East/northeast as we were talking about in the interview. a beautiful sight. a little unusual. a member of the public, not too educated on everything that is going on with the balloon, but it was very interesting to see it and follow the saga that s been playing out across the united states over the past few days. and these are your images we re looking at, right? you saw it with the naked eye, how did you get these images? is this from your cell phone or did you use a, you know, a camera? a professional grade camera? sure, so for the still image, that was with a camera, and a zoom lens. that was pretty tight on the balloon itself. and with some editing and cropping i was able to get it pretty close on there. but for the video, that was actually just shot with an iphone. i zoomed in and as you can see, from the very beginning, it does look small on iphone photos and videos but in reality it looks much large ner person to the naked eye. and you know, you re a meteorologist, you go
Blinken s trip to china. but the whole point of the trip was to put guardrails in the relationship and this event highlights the mutual distrust between both sides and that s why some experts say a face to face meeting right now is still more important than ever. and it s important to note as well, it is not in chinese leader xi jingping s interest for this meeting to be canceled or postponed. this was supposed to be part of the reopening to the world after ending zero covid and reengage with the u.s. and u.s. officials and focus on boosting its damaged economy at home. selina wang in beijing, thank you very much. let s talk more about all of this now and go to former director of national intelligence and cnn national security analyst james clapper, james good to see you. so now we have seen from just ordinary folks who are taking picture, that this balloon is over north carolina, and it seems to continue to drift, so what kind of conversations are happening right now at the
Following new details about that chinese spy balloon traveling across the country. new video into the cnn newsroom showing the balloon now hovering over asheville, and charlotte, north carolina in the last hour. and it could make it out to sea at any moment. the balloon was first spotted over montana on wednesday. china claims it s a civilian research vessel that blew offcourse, but the u.s. isn t buying that, calling the balloon s flight over u.s. soil an irresponsible act. secretary of state antony blinken postponing a planned trip to beijing in response. cnn s oren liebermann is at pentagon for us. oren, officials say the balloon doesn t currently seem to present a threat, but why is the pentagon also preceding with caution on it? reporter: so the pentagon has said for now that it will not be shooting this down, because of the risks from two different perspectives, first there s the