科学美国人再提气球的”间谍“作用，UFO

一助一掣

科学美国人最近好像魔障了，在“高空气球”这一科学议题上逐渐政治化，报道紧盯中国所谓“情报技术”。
以下是这篇观点片面的文章。



美国利特尔克里克联合远征基地（Little Creek），第4突击艇（Assault Craft Unit 4）分队的水兵准备回收高空气球，并运送至联邦基地交给联邦特工

据最新消息，响尾蛇导弹击破了一个中国的气球和三个漂浮在美国、加拿大上空的“不明物体”。
这些被怀疑是间谍的技术让人们意外地关注到一个重要的国家安全问题：气球和无人机被外国势力利用收集情报。
但与此同时，也为过去10年军方的飞行员宣称目睹一系列不明飞行物的事件提供了一种解释。
至少高空气球的解释比外星人更合理。
五角大楼过去习惯把这样的观察结果推给一个古怪而不称职的调查小组，这些调查小组来自一个不起眼的特别工作组，暗示这是制度上的失败。
尽管第一个被击落的气球是一个200英尺高的白色球体，与隐形或不明的说法不符。但最近在阿拉斯加、加拿大和休伦湖（Lake Huron）上空坠落的物体，完全属于不明异常现象（UAP）的范畴，这是五角大楼去年为UFO命名的新名称。
天空中常充满鸟类、派对气球、气象气球和可能被标记为UAP的各类物体，还有无人机、消费品和其他东西。
美国政府称，目前美加北美航空航天防御司令部（U.S.-Canada North American Aerospace Defense Command）已经削弱了雷达，以防止这种空中漂浮物扰乱其屏幕。
到目前为止，优先的目标是飞机和导弹，它们体积大、速度快。小而缓慢的物体、如气球，被过滤并忽略掉。
有多少中国（或俄罗斯乃至其他国家）的间谍无人机被军事和情报官员视为不明飞行物、而不是地面威胁？
美国UAP工作组于2021年6月发布的第一份公开报告列出了144起案件，其中只有一起案件可完全确定不是UAP，它是一个巨大的、正在泄气的气球（国籍不详）。
其余143次都说不准，可能是“间谍”气球，也可能真的没有准确来源。
去年，五角大楼将该工作组重组为一个名为“全域异常解决办公室”（All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office）的新组织，并配备了新的人员。
今年1月，该组织发布了第二份报告。
报告在143个案例的基础上新增加了366个，但有合理解释的案例从1个增加到195个。
奇怪的是，其中大多数被认为是气球。这很可能是通过应用新技术发现的，即审查存档的原始雷达镜头，从这些缓慢移动的气球和一些无人机之前已经被过滤的“杂波”中。
虽然其中大多数可能是普通的空域杂物，如聚酯薄膜派对气球和消费者无人机，但其中一些可能代表中国的情报收集平台。
我们不太可能解决任何历史案例，但当发现新的气球时，可以通过拦截它们、将其击落并检查残骸来确定。
一些不明飞行物爱好者最初跳上了中国的大气球，认为这是一个外国间谍的企图轻易被发现的例子。
结论是，这是其他更模糊的不明飞行物报告不是传统的人类技术的证据。
但随后的发展指向了相反的结论:大气球又大又明显。更小的气球和其他空中平台，无论是字面意义上还是象征意义上，多年来一直不为人知。
来自纽约州的参议院多数党领袖查克·舒默将最新被击落的物体描述为全球“气球团队”的一部分。
五角大楼的新决议办公室做得更好，但它的建立仍然松散地植根于人们希望UFO是外星访客的历史——尽管几十年来缺乏明确的证据，但他们的声明引发了误导的公众骚动。
现在，五角大楼应该把注意力集中在真正重要的任务上，而不是UFO、UAP等模糊不清的议题上。
<hr/>原文 科学美国人：
Chinese Spy Balloon Saga Shows UFOs Deserve Serious Investigations

By shunting pilot observations aside, the Pentagon likely fostered a UFO fad and overlooked Chinese intelligence technology entering U.S. airspace.
At latest count, Sidewinder missiles have burst both a wayward Chinese balloon and three “unidentified objects” floating over the U.S. and Canada. These suspected spies cast an unexpected spotlight on a significant national security issue: balloons and drones gathering intelligence for foreign powers.
But they also provide a likely explanation for some of the last decade’s highly publicized sightings of unidentified flying objects by military pilots. At least a more plausible explanation than extraterrestrials. And the Pentagon’s past habit of punting such observations to a quirky and inadequate team of investigators from an obscure task force was an institutional failure.
Although the first balloon burst, a 200-foot-high white sphere, was the opposite of stealthy or unidentified, the more recent aerial objects downed over Alaska, Canada and Lake Huron, fell squarely in the realm of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), the latest name for UFO’s that the Pentagon settled on last year.
Birds, party balloons, weather balloons and trash that might be labeled UAP fill the sky, along with drones, consumer and otherwise. We now know that the U.S.-Canada North American Aerospace Defense Command had blunted its radars to prevent such aerial flotsam from cluttering its screens, according to the White House. Until now, the priority targets were aircraft and missiles, which are large and fast. Small, slow objects, like balloons, were filtered out and ignored.
That’s why we didn’t know about the balloons that likely explain the “GoFast” UFO sighting made by U.S. Navy pilots in 2015, a seeming high speed encounter over the ocean that, in truth, depicts a much slower object made to look fast by the parallax effect, where the high speed is only relative to the Navy plane, like a tree “flying” past the window of a train. Balloons might even explain some aspects of the 2004 USS Nimitz “Tic Tac” incidents.
Now radars are looking for such objects. That’s why pilots are seeing—and shooting down—UAP. Descriptions of the UAP encountered by some Navy pilots also tally with aspects of newly revealed incursions of Chinese balloons during the Trump administration. Politico reported that intelligence analysts assessed that some small objects detected off the coast of Virginia were Chinese radar-jamming devices. This could correlate with multiple reports of erratic radar returns by pilots training in that area. One visual sighting described by pilots as a “cube in a sphere” is a close match for an inflatable radar decoy.
In observing the Pentagon’s UAP task force and having done detailed analyses of several cases they struggled with, I find abundant reasons to doubt their capabilities to crack those kinds of UAP cases. A slide in a congressional briefing reportedly prepared by the task force head, John Stratton, according to a popular UFO podcast series, claimed to show “three UAP” hovering over a Navy ship. Those UAP were stars, I demonstrated last year, and their curious triangular shape was a camera artifact, a conclusion later confirmed in Congressional testimony. My analyses of other task force cases, involving gun camera footage of indistinct shapes, have also been supported by Pentagon sources cited by the New York Times.
The past mistakes matter, not only because the task force’s initial attempts at identification failed but because that office was notable for its small size, dubious background in paranormal investigations (really), and poor record in not only failing to solve cases but sometimes getting them entirely wrong. This leads us to question how many other cases of foreign surveillance were swept under the rug as UAP.
How many other Chinese (or Russian or other) spy drones have military and intelligence officials sidelined as UFOs, rather than terrestrial threats? The first public report produced by the UAP task force in June 2021 listed 144 cases, of which they could only solve one with high confidence, identifying it as a large, deflating balloon (of unstated nationality). The remaining 143 presumably include the handful that were later identified as Chinese airspace incursions.
After the Pentagon restructured the task force into a new organization called the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office with new personnel last year, a second report was released in January. The report added 366 new cases to the 143, but the number with a seeming explanation jumped from one to 195, with a majority of those, strangely enough, thought to be balloons. It is likely this was achieved by a new technique of reviewing archived raw radar footage, from which the slow-moving balloons (and a few drones) had previously been filtered out as “clutter.”
While most were likely mundane airspace clutter such as mylar party balloons and consumer drones, some of them could represent Chinese intelligence-gathering platforms. It is unlikely we can resolve any historical cases as such, but when new balloons are detected, this could be determined by intercepting them, shooting them down, and examining the wreckage.  
Some UFO enthusiasts initially leaped on the big Chinese balloon as an example of how foreign attempts at spying would be easily detected, concluding that it was evidence that the other reports of more ambiguous UFOs were not conventional human technology.
But subsequent developments point in the opposite conclusion: The big balloon was large and obvious. Smaller balloons and other aerial platforms have, both literally and figuratively, slipped under the radar for years. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York described the latest objects shot down as part of a worldwide “crew of balloons.”
The Pentagon’s new resolution office is doing better. But its establishment was still loosely rooted in a history of people hoping that UFOs are alien visitors—their proclamations sparking misdirected public uproar, despite a decades-long deficit of clear supporting evidence. The reality of persistent Chinese attempts at airspace intrusions and surveillance should lead the Pentagon to focus instead on the very real tasks at hand.