flying higher than that for a while. but it also spent part of its time at a fairly low altitude. all right, well, thank you very much for the weather angle of this. we go back to the military angle. i ve been wanting to say all day there s no way there isn t a gps transponder on this. somebody knows exactly where it is. and jim has more information on that front? just moments ago, an official from norad in colorado was briefing pentagon reporters here, via a phone conference. at the very beginning of his brief, he stopped to say, we just got word that the aerostat is, in fact, down. it s down in montour county in pennsylvania, which is right next to columbia county where it apparently skipped across the countryside, and the tail that it was dragging, took out a lot of power lines and darkened the homes of tens of thousands of people. now, according to the officials,
in pennsylvania as a result of the cable apparently hitting a power station or some sort of a power facility, if you will. a structure on the ground. we don t know the size of it. and there had been reports that as you heard from this gentleman a short time ago with the office of emergency management, 10,000 people without power. he believes in the county and heard there may be more than that in other parts of pennsylvania, as well. but at least, at least the thing is no longer a threat to aviation. clear sli a problem right now on the ground but as far as tracking it, they know where it is. they have a handle on that. i would assume one would think they re probably getting close to being able to completely disable this aerostat and we re not going to go into the evening hours with this thing drifting up the northeast corridor. i m reading from the literature that comes with the sales effort for this product. the j-lens is the acronym. stands for joint land attack
aviation. we have jim miklaszewski at the pentagon on stand-by. both gentlemen and this appears to be new video. you just see the sizeways drift. it looks like a dolphin. this is bloomsburg, pennsylvania. that kind of mid ships from the right of your picture to the left. what an incredible sight. we learned that some very sharp eyes and perhaps bored to tears student at the local school was the first to spot this looking out the window. we suspect and this is sure being borne out on social media where this has taken over twitter. we suspect a whole lot of different views will come in of this. both still and moving images. but what an incredible thing. there s no way to know what you re looking at given the
power, municipal power as it went. yeah. that s clearly the priority at this point. i would point out, asking him what altitude he thought it was at, i was thinking that clearly is not 16,000 feet which was the last reported altitude we have for the blimp and at 16,000 feet, you d be worried about the impact on aviation but if it s only 200, 300 feet off the ground, that s not a threat to aviation. the threat is more immediate to where might this thing come down and the impact on the power grid. we have had reports of several thousand people and tens of thousands of people having lost power in particular parts of p.a. we don t know if it s related or unrelated and clearly a priority with the cable across the ground. and, tom, the cable may actually be our way of stopping this here. if it gets caught, that will stop the forward progress of this thing and at least be
the highly unusual an highly unlikely story we are covering f. you just saw that graphic, if you have ever seen the macy s thanksgiving day pa rid and a blow-up balloon character loses an arm slowly over the course of the parade, this seems to be what is happening. this is an airship. it s called an aerostat for the purposes of conversation we have been calling it a blimp. it is manufactured by raytheon. until this morning, it called its home the aberdeen proving grounds in maryland where it was tethered to a stationary pole. we think about 6,000 feet up, they can go about as high as 10,000 feet. something caused it to come loose. it is unmanned. not prospelled by any on-board means. and as you can see there, it is drifting. it s been drifting as high as 16,000 feet.