Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, characterized the objects that were shot down over the weekend as stratospheric garbage. “I am very confident that none of these objects represents a threat to the national security of the United States, to its people,” he told NPR on Feb. 12. “I’m confident that they are very unlikely to have the kinds of [alleged] surveillance capabilities that the Chinese balloon that was shot down had.”
Himes referred to hearings the committee had last year on “unidentified aerial phenomena,” during which he learned “that there is an immense amount of garbage up there, all kinds of balloons.” These include wayward weather balloons, wi-fi balloons, and so on. “And now we’re just particularly sensitized to it,” he said. “And we also happen to have a lot of our military radars and that sort of thing doing something that they’re not used to doing, which is looking for balloons. So I think because we’re really looking hard, we’re seeing a lot of this garbage. And when there’s an incursion into civil aviation space, I think, at that point, the authorities say, boy, we’d better do something about this.” Later, he added, “I think we’re seeing a lot of things that were there before but that we just didn’t see before.”
