In early February 1945, the captain of the USS New York was playing golf when he spotted a strange object pursuing the battleship. The radio-silent ship was en route from Pearl Harbor to Eniwetok Atoll, a waypoint before its ultimate destination of bombarding Iwo Jima.After investigating the “luminous metallic balloon” through binoculars, he ordered the ship’s gunner to mark the range of the threat, and then had marines and gunners take aim at what they assumed was a Japanese secret weapon a mere 800 yards away. The ship even signaled for the destroy escort to join the salvo.
“Finally, the navigator, who’d been asleep, came topside, rubbing his eyes,” William McGuire and Mark Murphy write in the regimental history of the battleship:
He put his hands down, looked around, and said, “What the hell you shooting at? That’s Venus, a damn planet.” “That’s what Venus looked like out there,” the yeoman concluded, “a Japanese secret weapon. The gunnery officer said he guessed he was pretty short on that range.”
Against the familiarity of the sky, balloons, satellites, and planets can all appear alien. Sometimes literally: Project Blue Book, which sought to document and study UFO sightings for the Air Force, frequently included sightings of Venus at dusk and dawn in its recording of unidentified flying object sightings. On Feb. 1, a high-altitude balloon launched from China drifted into the sky over the United States, disrupting air traffic in Billings, Montana. Its wind-blown course carried it to the Atlantic four days later, where an Air Force pilot in an F-22 stealth fighter shot it down with an air-to-air missile.
It remains to be seen what information, exactly, the balloon collected. After the shoot-down, the U.S. Navy sent ships and sailors into the area to recover the wreckage and, presumably, its sensors and data storage. Much has been made of the balloon’s path over silos housing nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles. Those same sites are visible from space, under satellite surveillance, and in open-source information. When information does come out, it will most likely be by selective release, disclosures chosen by the U.S. government and, possibly, China, aimed at explaining what exactly the balloon was doing, and how ominous or benign the world should treat that activity as being.
As a specter haunting American skies and, for a week, American news, the balloon made visible two undeniable but forgettable facts: The United States is part of a connected world, and other countries can use those connections to observe what is happening on and above the surface here—just as the U.S. does to its allies and enemies alike.