It was a routine flight, one of several Air Canada runs daily between Vancouver and Winnipeg. But as AC292 passed high over the Rockies one year ago on Jan. 31, the pilots made an unusual sighting.
Another 4,000 feet above their Airbus A-320 floated a large balloon “with something hanging from it.” They reported the observation and flew on to their destination uneventfully.
Then, 24 hours later, a former newspaper photographer left his data-processing job at a health-care centre in the Montana city of Billings, looked upward and was surprised by his own discovery.
“Out of the corner of my eye I saw a bright spot in the sky,” Chase Doak recently recalled. “It looked like a big white orb.”
He raced home, fitted his camera with a 500-millimetre telephoto lens and a teleconverter that doubled the focal length, aimed at the “orb” and quickly realized he was peering at a balloon. With something hanging from it.
What happened next was even more unexpected. Photographs of the balloon by Doak and his friend Larry Mayer soon were buzzing around the world. After four days of silence, their images had prompted U.S. military officials to divulge the shocking truth — what those pilots and photographers had spotted was a Chinese surveillance balloon, a massive dirigible hauling an antenna-sprouting container the size of two or three school buses, and twin arrays of solar panels.
And it was now floating across some of the most militarily sensitive sites in America — nuclear-missile silos that would be among an enemy’s earliest targets should atomic war ever break out.
The spy balloon’s slow traverse over Alaska, Western Canada and the continental United States, ending when it was shot down off the coast of South Carolina, riveted the world, sparked heated political debate and touched off a diplomatic uproar. The event continues to reverberate, including with a bizarre criminal trial in Billings itself.
It was quickly followed by the appearance of three more unidentified flying objects over Canada and the United States. That led to the first ever shoot-down by American fighter jets in Canadian airspace, after this country’s aging CF-18 fighters were grounded by freezing rain.
“Things were developing pretty fast,” recalls Gen. Wayne Eyre, who played a key part in handling the episode as Canada’s chief of defence staff, before retiring recently. “Things got really crazy for a while.”
Yet, as often happens, the episode that had saturated news coverage for days soon disappeared from the headlines — along with its crucial lessons.
This is the full inside story of the Chinese spy balloon, its troubling implications for the defence of North America, which relies partly on an early-warning system likened to a gap-filled “picket fence,” and the spotlight it shone on a two-nation military agency that is unique in the world.
Based on interviews with the top two commanders of that agency — the North American Aerospace Defence Command (Norad) — and Canada’s most senior general at the time, plus eyewitnesses and experts, this is a look at the extraordinary events from their surprising beginning, months earlier than previously known, to their explosive end.
The implications may be particularly important now as Russia rattles the nuclear sabre, China asserts its military might globally, and rogue nations such as North Korea develop long-range atomic capabilities. And as U.S. president-elect Donald Trump again treats Canada as an adversary as much as an ally.
The balloon opened up eyes. We’re not going to see long-range cruise missiles. We’re not going to see balloons over the horizon.
Gen. Glen VanHerck, retired
The saga includes moments of surrealism — some of America’s most advanced war planes used missiles worth a half-million dollars each to dispatch what were likely tiny hobbyist balloons. And it also delivered a serious message: both countries urgently need to upgrade that picket-fence warning system.
“The balloon opened up eyes,” says Glen VanHerck, the U.S. air force general who commanded Norad throughout the crisis and retired earlier this year. “We’re not going to see long-range cruise missiles. We’re not going to see balloons over the horizon.
“Today, with missiles being fired off submarines, missiles being fired off aircraft, missiles being fired from the land well beyond curvature-of-the-Earth ranges, your time is limited to respond to those types of things.”
Questions about why the Chinese balloon was not taken out sooner, or its presence made public earlier, persist.
VanHerck, a plain-spoken former fighter and bomber pilot from small-town Kentucky, headed efforts to track and eventually destroy all the drifting intruders.
As it turns out, he’d been waiting for the Chinese craft.
The binational organization the general headed, based in Colorado Springs, Colo., is staffed by scores of Canadian Forces members as well as Americans in an arrangement that dates to the early-Cold War days of the 1950s. Its mission is to detect and respond to air and space threats to the continent; no other two countries have a similar partnership. VanHerck also led NORTHCOM, the U.S. military command whose turf stretches from Mexico to the Canadian Arctic.
The words “Chinese spy balloon” became a household term in February 2023, but VanHerck revealed to the National Post that his first intimation of a slow-floating threat came six months earlier.
American intelligence agencies warned him in August 2022 that China had in place a program of high-altitude surveillance craft and was deploying the airships around the globe. American officials later revealed that at least five had traversed the nation in the previous eight years, while another was spotted early in 2023 over Latin America. Though satellites are the major powers’ chief aerial spying tool, the theory is that surveillance balloons, operating at lower altitudes and able to stay aloft longer over targets, can capture higher-resolution images and intercept more communications.
The Norad commander had no illusions about what the August 2022 warning meant.
“I told my team it was just a matter of time before one of these approaches North America,” he says.
VanHerck had his people prepare for such an arrival, focusing especially on whether such an intruder would still be in U.S. jurisdiction, given they float as high as 80,000 feet. The answer his legal advisers came up with? American sovereignty extends all the way to space.
Then, on Jan. 27, 2023, the intelligence community was in touch again. Just as VanHerck had predicted, one of those spy balloons was on its way, about to hit the westernmost reaches of the continent — Alaska’s remote Aleutian Islands.
By the next day, the balloon would show up on Norad’s radar over St. Matthew Island, a rocky, uninhabited outpost in the Bering Sea, almost as close to Russia as mainland Alaska. In fact, Jan. 28 has typically been cited as the date when the object was first discovered. But U.S. spy agencies were aware of it earlier, perhaps much earlier. Later news reports, quoting unnamed American government sources, suggest it had been tracked all the way from the balloon’s launch in Hainan Island, China.
All of which makes VanHerck wonder why the balloon was just hours away from entering the continent’s jurisdiction before the man in charge of defending the region learned about it.
“To me, that’s a failure of the entire system — to not have the ability to let everybody know this thing’s out there and potentially going to drift into North American airspace,” he says.
“It’s a failure of multiple intelligence, (Department of Defence) agencies,” says VanHerck. “I should not get surprised by something that’s coming into my area of responsibility … Anybody who knows about it should pass that on. It shouldn’t be less than 24 hour’s notice.”
That communication breakdown raises broader concerns of military commanders and academic experts that Norad’s “domain awareness” — its ability to detect threats before they arrive on our doorstep — is seriously limited.
Regardless, just before midnight on Jan. 27, the Canadian Forces’ most senior officer got word that the American Norad commander wanted an urgent video conference.
The next morning, a Saturday, Eyre spoke to VanHerck by secure link and learned for the first time of the uninvited visitor from China. And the fact it might end up in this country.
The episode would dominate the Canadian general’s attention for the next week and more, as he briefed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a half-dozen times and even addressed the entire Liberal cabinet. To Eyre, a 58-year-old from Wadena, Sask., it was a wake-up call, an indication of “unique and emerging threats to our sovereignty,” this time from an increasingly aggressive China.
VanHerck had already spoken to Eyre’s American counterpart, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the evening of the 27th.
Norad tracks myriad craft entering and leaving its airspace every day, most of them innocuous. But, says VanHerck, “I knew immediately this was going to be a huge deal.”
As the balloon floated 11 miles above the outer reaches of American territory on Jan. 28, Norad’s commander scrambled two F-35 Raptor stealth fighters and two armed F-16s to intercept it.
It was not the fast-moving missile menace the agency is most primed to detect, but it was a Goliath. The balloon itself was 200 feet top to bottom — the height of a 22-storey building — and the payload weighed an estimated 2,000 pounds. The solar panels provided energy to power what was assumed to be surveillance gear inside the container, as well as a small propeller motor with limited ability to steer the craft.
VanHerck says the information he received from the intelligence community made him certain by Jan. 28 it was a Chinese surveillance balloon. Intelligence and inspection by U.S. aircraft also made clear, he says, that it did not pose an offensive threat — it wasn’t about to drop bombs or launch missiles.
If anyone thinks you have radar coverage of the inside of Canada, you’ve got another thing coming.
Gen. Scott Clancy, retired
That was a key point. The Norad commander has authority to unilaterally take down anything judged to be what the military calls a “kinetic” threat — a physical danger to the continent. Absent that peril, it was up to government leaders of the two respective countries to order a shoot-down.
It would be another week before such an order came.
Though VanHerck communicated immediately with his direct superior — Milley — and the office of the U.S. defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, he did not actually talk to Austin until Feb. 1, VanHerck told a U.S. Senate committee last year.
Meanwhile, it seems Canadian Lieut.-Gen. Alain Pelletier, then deputy commander of Norad, was less convinced about the nature of the airship in those initial hours and days after its arrival in North America. He does not recall receiving that August 2022 intelligence about a Chinese program.
“That balloon, unlike commercial aircraft or even military aircraft, didn’t carry any indication of country of origin,” says Pelletier, now retired. “So, we’re trying to figure out where is it coming from … what’s the purpose of that flight and so on and so forth.
“We were not sure until it finally got engaged over the east coast of the U.S., until the recovery activity took place.”
In a sparsely populated region with patchy radar coverage and limited assets at Norad’s disposal, it was impossible even to keep eyes on the balloon 24 hours a day, says Pelletier, a former F-18 pilot from La Pocatière, Que.
The situation made clear a stark reality. While the continental U.S. is mostly covered by radar, much of Canada’s vast expanse is outside radar range, even a dead zone for radio communication.
“If anyone thinks you have radar coverage of the inside of Canada, you’ve got another thing coming,” says Scott Clancy, a retired Canadian air force general and Norad’s former director of operations. “If you’re flying around at 10,000 feet over the Northwest Territories, for the most part nobody can even see that you’re there.”
When Norad jets did shadow the balloon, they had other challenges. To keep airborne in the thin air at that altitude, they had to maintain high speeds, meaning they flew back and forth at 400 miles per hour to get a look at the far-slower balloon, says Pelletier.
Still, the balloon’s passage offered a chance to probe its capabilities and technology, VanHerck says.
On the dirigible went, entering Canadian airspace over the Northwest Territories two days later, on Jan. 30, with Canadian jets keeping tabs on it when they could.
At that point, the Trudeau government had its own decision to make: should it have the airship shot down over Canada’s Far North?
VanHerck says he told Eyre that if his country wanted to take action against the craft, the Forces chief should consult with Trudeau, U.S. President Joe Biden, and their respective defence ministers. Eyre says the possibility of destroying the balloon was ultimately rejected.
“We briefly discussed the option,” Eyre says, but officials saw the balloon’s arrival as an opportunity to gather information about novel Chinese technology.
“If we had shot it down over Canada, exploiting it would have been very, very difficult, just given the nature of the terrain … My recommendation was to continue to monitor and try to collect as much intelligence as possible.”
The balloon kept on its voyage south, passing into British Columbia, where it was spotted over Cranbrook by that Air Canada crew on Jan. 31. It entered Idaho airspace the same day.
Yet after four days of flying over the continent, and despite a flurry of activity at the highest levels of the two countries’ governments, not a word about its presence had been uttered to the public.
Pelletier said Norad was planning to issue some kind of statement about the balloon but wanted to first gather as much information about it as possible.
“We always try to be transparent with the public, but we don’t want to create panic — the sky is falling,” he says. “Here we have a balloon. We don’t know where it’s from, who it belongs to or what it’s doing.”
Whatever communications plans were in the works, they soon became moot. The Chinese craft arrived on Feb. 1 over Billings, which was about to play an unlikely supporting role in an international news sensation.
Doak was just leaving work at the community’s RiverStone Health when he logged onto a news site and was intrigued to learn that the local airport had been shut down temporarily.
Even Shane Ketterling, the airport’s assistant director of aviation, was taken aback by the sudden closure, something he’d never experienced in 33 years working at Billings Logan International. He called over to the control tower — under separate management from the airport itself — and was told the order had come from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)’s Salt Lake City Centre, without any further explanation.
“The rumours were running rampant,” Ketterling said recently. “There was very little information. The military did not want this going public.”
Meanwhile, Doak walked out to his car and saw the object far above him, wondered if it had anything to do with events at the airport, and decided to take pictures.
Mayer, the Billings Gazette’s photo editor and an amateur pilot, was also getting curious about the airport’s mysterious ground-stoppage, especially after he noticed unusual jet contrails high in the clear-blue sky. Rather than the usual straight lines, he said recently, they were round, suggesting fast-moving planes, probably military jets, flying in circles. The plot thickened when he heard from another pilot that two F-22 stealth fighters had landed at nearby Boseman, Mont.
Then his friend and former colleague Doak called to point out the object in the sky. Mayer took his own photograph and saw as he examined the image that it was a massive balloon. Worried that it might be something dangerous, he sent copies to the state governor and the FAA, then made a series of calls that landed him eventually with a Norad official.
“I sent him the picture. He said, ‘We’re preparing a response,’” Mayer recalls. “So I just put the picture online … My feeling is that if I hadn’t put it online, posted the picture, I don’t think they ever would have told us what it was.”
Mayer’s photograph was distributed far and wide by The Associated Press. Doak uploaded his own images to the internet, never asking a penny for them.
“At the point that we learned what it was, I thought, ‘This is a national security issue, this is a global issue,’” he says. “I want that photo to be in front of as many eyes as possible.”
The photographers’ work certainly did have an impact. The Pentagon now had little choice but to disclose the balloon’s presence, stirring up political and diplomatic tempests. Anthony Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, quickly announced that he was cancelling a planned visit to China in protest.
The balloon’s slow passage over Montana brought it close to Malmstrom Air Force Base and its array of silos, which harbour a major chunk of America’s arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
China admitted it owned the balloon, but insisted it was an errant weather station. No one was convinced.
U.S. officials made clear they would not shoot it down over populated areas for fear of the pieces landing on people or buildings below. Critics of the Biden administration demanded to know why it hadn’t been blown out of the sky earlier, particularly as it floated over the Aleutians, where falling debris posed little risk to the public.
“I think it was a bad mistake to let a Chinese spy balloon float all across America and only to leak it to The New York Times once some rancher or amateur photographer in Montana spotted it,” Republican Sen. Tom Cotton would say later. “I suspect if they had not … this would have never become public.”
Pelletier admits that “we would have spent less energy if we had actually engaged it way earlier, up in the north.” But little, if any, of the apparatus would have been recovered from Alaska’s frigid seas or challenging landscape with the limited resources available there, he says.
VanHerck says he didn’t have the authority to act alone, and he still refuses to comment on the choice his superiors made. But he also dismisses the aggressive second-guessing of the decision, noting that an initial assessment from NASA suggested the debris field could be as large as 100 by 100 kilometres, increasing the possibility of inadvertent casualties on the ground. That estimate was later modified to 10 by 10 kilometres, still a wide swath of landscape. And he stresses that a lot of valuable intelligence was gathered — both while the balloon was in the air and after it was brought down — by waiting until it trundled off the U.S. Atlantic coast.
VanHerck also confirms a surprising assessment made public by American authorities months later. Forensic examination of the balloon and its payload by the FBI and others after the shoot-down indicated “for sure” that it never actually gathered any intelligence, let alone transmitted it back to China, he says.
“In the end, the best thing happened for the Canadian and American people,” says VanHerck. ”Number one, they (China) didn’t collect (intelligence), we know that for a fact. Number two, we maximized our collection, and we exposed the PRC (People’s Republic of China) and what they’re doing. And number three, and most important, the Canadian and American people were safe.”
Norad is the neglected command. Nobody understands it, nobody cares about it.
Andrea Charron, University of Manitoba, a leading academic expert on Norad
In fact, it may be the balloon was never meant to invade North American airspace at all. VanHerck says his understanding is that winds blew it off course over the Pacific. U.S. media later quoted American officials suggesting it had been deployed to spy instead on U.S. bases in Guam, before taking a wrong turn.
Andrea Charron, a political scientist at the University of Manitoba and a leading academic expert on Norad and North American defence, agrees with the decision to wait and shoot down the balloon in a place where recovery would be easier. But she questions the assertion that the spy craft never, in fact, spied.
“That they hovered over some pretty important, key areas … makes me wonder.”
She and colleague Nicholas Glesby, a doctoral student at Trent University who has been studying the incident, also lament that Canadian officials said little publicly throughout the whole affair. National Defence issued only three official statements, while Trudeau commented — falsely, it seems — that the three later balloons were linked to China, Glesby says. A spokesman for the prime minister declined to comment to the National Post about Trudeau’s role in the affair.
“What I noticed was very clear communication on the U.S. side but next to nothing on the Canadian side,” says Charron, director of the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Defence and Security Studies. “This is a pretty significant incident, and it just seems that, ‘It happened; oh, well.’”
That was a missed opportunity, she says, given that Norad is already underappreciated, even within the military world. It has been derisively called SNORAD and the overlapping NORTHCOM — a command the U.S. created only after the 9/11 attacks — nicknamed SLEEPYCOM, despite their crucial role, she says. Meanwhile, the incoming U.S. president lives by the motto “America First” and is suspicious of international alliances.
“Norad is the neglected command. Nobody understands it, nobody cares about it. It’s out of sight, out of mind,” she says. “They are raced off their feet but it doesn’t seem to resonate with Congress or Parliament.”
Regardless, three days after photographer Doak spotted it high above Billings, the balloon drifted out over the Atlantic Ocean, where it would meet a deflating end in shallow South Carolina waters.
VanHerck assigned the U.S. air force’s 1st Fighter Wing, based at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, to take it down. The unit decided that peppering the balloon with machine-gun fire might not do the trick. So, on Feb. 4, an F-22 Raptor fired a single AIM-9X Sidewinder missile at the balloon. Evolving versions of the Sidewinder have been the go-to “dogfight” missile on U.S. and allied fighters since the mid-1950s, credited with 270 air-to-air kills in various conflicts. Each one costs about $550,000. The shot fired off that day was a direct hit — if something of an aerial mismatch — that sent the balloon and its cargo plunging to the sea below.
U.S. authorities have been largely silent about what was learned from the debris that Navy units picked up in the following hours and days. But the worrying episode was over, so it seemed.
Indeed, Pelletier hosted a post-Christmas party for his Norad colleagues and spouses on Feb. 10 in Colorado Springs, a welcome release, presumably, from the tension of the previous days. But the revellers were interrupted by another alarming discovery: A new balloon-like object had been spotted heading for the Yukon.
“My wife was kind of, ‘What’s happening?’” recalls Pelletier, who told his spouse, “I can’t tell you right now, we’re busy.”
Eyre had travelled from National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa for meetings in Toronto, accompanied as always by a Forces “signaller” — a service member specializing in secure communication. Before heading to breakfast on Saturday, Feb. 11, the CDS knocked on the signaller’s hotel room door to see if there was any important news.
“I didn’t leave that room until after dinnertime, because of what happened with that Yukon balloon.”
The new object would be one of three spotted in the days after the demise of the Chinese surveillance craft. Norad had recalibrated its radar to pick up slower-moving objects and was getting hits. Their lower altitude made them a potential risk to commercial aviation, so this time no one took any chances.
As one of the objects drifted over Yukon, Norad tasked Royal Canadian Air Force CF-18s based at Cold Lake, Alta., to take it down. Eyre says he “absolutely” wanted Canadian planes to destroy the object over Canadian soil. But their potentially historic mission was not to be. Freezing rain hit the northern Alberta base the morning of Feb. 11, making the runways too slick for takeoffs.
F-22s based in Alaska got the nod instead and one of them fired another Sidewinder at the far-smaller new target. Trudeau had earlier given permission for American planes to open fire over Canada, reflecting the Norad principle that the two countries’ forces are essentially interchangeable in defending the continent.
The CF-18s eventually did scramble and were “minutes away” when the shoot-down occurred, says Andrée-Anne Poulin, a Department of National Defence spokeswoman.
Meanwhile, American jets had earlier destroyed a second balloon over Alaska and dispatched a third above Lake Huron on Feb. 12 near the border between Michigan and Ontario.
The RCMP led a search for debris in the mountainous region where the Yukon floater went down, but called it off a week later, the terrain and weather making finding fragments all but impossible. A spokeswoman for the Mounties says that she cannot comment on whether the search was ever renewed because, almost two years later, “the investigation remains ongoing.”
But it’s unlikely anything with intelligence value would be found. Norad believes the three follow-on objects were not spy craft, but hobbyist or research balloons that lacked transponders broadcasting their identity, though both countries require the devices for any high-flying object weighing more than a couple of kilograms.
In fact, the whimsically named Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, a Chicago-area group that sends its small — i.e. 32-inch — Mylar balloons on treks around the world, revealed that it lost contact with one of them after it drifted over Alaska on Feb. 11. That’s the same day the Yukon balloon was obliterated with a powerful — and very expensive — missile. The balloon club, which has said it fully complies with FAA regulations, did not respond to a request for comment.
Some of the balloons may have been laughably non-threatening, but they all shared a common trait — they were more or less already here before they appeared on Norad’s radar. And nothing about that has changed.
“Today, we would see the balloon again, but we wouldn’t see it until it’s almost right upon North America,” says VanHerck.
In fact, technology has often been a limiting — and evolving — factor for Norad. It was founded in 1957 chiefly to identify Soviet bombers heading to the continent to drop loads of gravity-propelled nuclear or conventional bombs. The emphasis later shifted to the trickier threat of intercontinental ballistic missiles, which soar into space and then hurtle down toward their target. Mostly, it was hoped that the spectre of a cataclysmic response to a first strike from either side — the chilling concept of mutually assured destruction (MAD) — would deter atomic war in the first place.
The North Warning System, when it was designed, it was certainly state of the art. Today, it’s a picket fence that (hard-to-detect) missiles can navigate their way through.
Gen. Glen VanHerck, retired
The Distant Early Warning (DEW) line was the original radar network to detect a possible attack from Russia over the polar region, replaced in 1988 by the North Warning System. Its 50 stations stretch 4,800 kilometres from Alaska to southern Labrador and remain North America’s first line of defence in the Arctic.
But the trip wire that Norad’s radar provides is less than comprehensive and, as the spy balloon showed, the warnings are relatively last-minute. At the same time, the threats from Russia and China mount. Both have nuclear-tipped and conventional cruise missiles that fly close to the ground and at high speeds. They can be fired from land, aircraft, ships and submarines well outside current radar range. Those nations’ newer, hypersonic missiles — soaring at five times the speed of sound or faster — pose an even more alarming challenge.
“The North Warning System, when it was designed, it was certainly state of the art,” says VanHerck. “Today, it’s a picket fence that low radar-cross-section (hard-to-detect) missiles can navigate their way through.”
Those missiles should ideally be spotted as they’re being launched, not when they’re almost here, says Charron. “We need to go after the archers rather than the arrows.”
Then there is the lack of radar and other visibility over large swaths of Canadian territory.
One key answer to the predicament is, governments insist, in the works. Radar functions by blasting out radio waves, which then bounce off objects and return to a receiver, revealing the size and location of the object. But they can only “see” in straight lines, meaning their range is limited by the curvature of the Earth. Canada has promised to install “over-the-horizon” radar (OTHR), the most common of which works by shooting shortwaves off the atmosphere, which bounce down toward Earth as much as thousands of kilometres away, then ricochet back after hitting an object.
Under a $38.6-billion, 20-year Norad modernization plan unveiled by Ottawa in 2022, one OTHR system designed to cover the area from the Canada-U.S. border to the Arctic Circle is to be fully operational by 2031. Another, based in the North and designed to detect threats beyond the northernmost approaches to the continent, is projected to be fully in place by 2033.
The new radar network is to be augmented by another string of sensors across Northern Canada with “classified capabilities.”
National Defence spokeswoman Poulin says the project is on schedule and the government has looked at more than 500 possible sites for the first OTHR system, which she said would have as many as four linked locations. Still, Poulin adds, “should plans evolve, timelines may be updated as required.”
The history of defence procurement in Canada is marked by lengthy political and bureaucratic delays, and Charron says this country stands out among its allies for the volumes of documentation needed to proceed with any kind of military-related spending.
“That (OTHR project) has gone very, very quiet,” she says. “Which makes me concerned.”
Meanwhile, Canada should reconsider another, more controversial way to defend against airborne threats, says Clancy, the retired Air Force general and former top Norad leader. That would be ground-based missile-defence weapons — missiles launched to take out incoming missiles. Such systems could offer an alternative to MAD, deterring enemies by making their attacks less likely to succeed, Clancy argues, while admitting it would be impossible to shield all of Canada that way.
But Canadian politicians have repeatedly rejected being part of any missile-defence program along those lines, which critics worry could touch off a new arms race.
Charron notes that such equipment is enormously costly and wondered if investing the money in health care and education “maybe makes us more resilient than missile-defence systems.”
Experts will undoubtedly keep debating the balloon’s meaning for the defence of North America, and prodding governments to act. Meanwhile, the saga’s fallout has continued in some very different ways, perhaps suggesting the airship was as much a political phenomenon as it was a military one.
The whole thing’s been a wild ride.
Larry Mayer, Billings Gazette’s photo editor
Mayer, the Montana photo editor, says Republican Congress members invited him to attend one of Joe Biden’s state-of-the-nation addresses as a symbol of what the GOP considered a weak response to the intruder. He says he found the experience a bit comical, but received a congressional citation, while his words about the famous photograph are now an official part of the institution’s record.
“The whole thing’s been a wild ride.”
And just two months ago, Doak discussed his experiences in testimony for the defence at a strange criminal trial in Billings. Local resident Richard Rogers had been charged with making telephone threats against Republican Kevin McCarthy, then speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, because he was angry the balloon had been allowed to fly across the county. There were unrelated harassing calls to other federal government offices, too. Rogers was found guilty.
Doak suspects that court appearance and his interview with National Post won’t be the last time he’s quizzed about the balloon. But he says he’s still happy to talk about his own, unique part in history.
“I have committed to the fact that this will probably be what I’m known for for the rest of my life,” he says with a chuckle. “So I figure I better lean into it.”