United States.Montana · a Chinese surveillance balloon crosses the U.S.

On January 28, 2023, NORAD detected on radar a high-altitude balloon approaching Alaska. According to Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Hemispheric Affairs Melissa Dalton's testimony to the Senate, it entered the air defense identification zone and U.S. airspace, spent a short time over Alaska and moved on over Canada; on January 31 it re-entered continental U.S. airspace, which it crossed diagonally to the southeast over the following days. It overflew Montana, home to Malmstrom Air Force Base and the 341st Missile Wing's Minuteman III silo complex, and Dalton testified that protecting against its intelligence collection had been relatively straightforward because its location was known at all times. The NORAD commander had initially assessed that the balloon was no threat to people or aviation and that its collection ability at that point was limited; as it approached the border, the risk to sensitive sites in the Upper Midwest increased and the President asked for kinetic options.

The Pentagon advised against shooting it down over land because of its size: according to Dalton, the balloon was about 200 feet (60 meters) tall with a jetliner-sized payload; Biden said the balloon was the size of multiple school buses. Lieutenant General Douglas Sims of the Joint Staff testified that the risk of Chinese collection was assessed as low to moderate and the risk to people on the ground as moderate to significant, which is why it was brought down in territorial waters off South Carolina. On February 1, with the balloon over Montana, commanders considered downing it there and ruled it out because of the ground risk.

On February 4, at about 14:39 Eastern time, an F-22 Raptor from the 1st Fighter Wing (Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia) fired a single AIM-9X Sidewinder missile from about 58,000 feet at the balloon, which was flying between 60,000 and 65,000 feet, and brought it down about six miles offshore, off Myrtle Beach; it was the first air-to-air kill in the F-22's history. Recovery was led by the Navy, with the dock landing ship USS Carter Hall (LSD-50) as lead ship, the destroyer USS Oscar Austin (DDG-79), the cruiser USS Philippine Sea, divers from Explosive Ordnance Disposal Group 2 and the Coast Guard. The wreckage lay in about 45 feet (14 meters) of water, and the recovered material was handed to federal agents and analyzed at the FBI laboratory in Quantico.

China acknowledged the craft on February 3: its Foreign Ministry said it was a civilian research airship, used for "mainly meteorological" purposes, which because of the Westerlies and its limited self-steering capability had deviated from its course, and regretted its unintended entry due to force majeure. Washington rejected that. John Kirby, the National Security Council's coordinator for strategic communications, said there was no question the system was designed to surveil, that the balloon had sped up, slowed down and maneuvered a little to get a look at sensitive military sites, and that it belonged to a PLA-linked high-altitude balloon program that had overflown dozens of countries; the State Department, according to press reports, described antennas able to collect and geolocate communications and solar panels large enough to power several sensors.

Dalton testified that balloons from the same program had briefly transited the continental United States at least three times during the prior administration (the Pentagon added another early in Biden's) and Kirby said that administration had not detected them. The press later reported that some of those episodes had been logged at the time as unidentified phenomena; that link to the UAP category comes from the press and officials it quoted, and not in any AARO document that could be located. Over the following days three more objects were shot down, over Alaska, the Yukon and Lake Huron, which the White House assessed as likely commercial, recreational or research balloons unrelated to the Chinese program.

Later analysis scaled the threat down. On February 13 Kirby assessed that these balloons gave China limited additive capabilities over its other intelligence platforms; on the 17th he said nearly everything recoverable had been recovered, including the payload structure, some of the electronics and the optics. In June 2023, Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said the department's assessment was that the balloon did not collect while transiting or overflying the United States, and recalled that steps had also been taken to mitigate potential collection efforts.

It is a case of adversary technology confirmed through several channels: testimony before the Senate, statements from the President and the White House, physical wreckage recovery, FBI analysis and, above all, the acknowledgment of the state of origin, which admitted the craft was its own while disputing its purpose. It also forces a rereading of the earlier record: if balloons from the same program crossed the country undetected under the previous administration, any unidentified high-altitude object from those years should be considered first as a possible state platform and only then as an anomaly.

The threat was smaller than the noise it generated: the Pentagon assessed the collection risk as low to moderate during the flight and later concluded that the balloon did not collect information over the United States, and the White House credited these balloons with limited additive capability over China's other platforms. The retroactive link to UAP rests on statements by officials and on the press, not on a published AARO tally. Eight days later an object that was never identified with certainty was shot down over Lake Huron (↗); the official assessment of that object pointed to civilian balloons rather than the Chinese program, so after February 4 the system went on to shoot down objects that were probably harmless.