Images obtained by BBC Panorama have revealed fresh evidence of China’s spy balloon programme, showcasing recent flights over Japan and Taiwan. Japan has confirmed the presence of these balloons in its airspace and expressed readiness to shoot them down if necessary. China has yet to directly address the evidence presented by the BBC.
Earlier this year, US-China relations were disturbed when an alleged Chinese spy balloon was shot down off the US coast. China claimed that the balloon spotted in northwestern US in late January was a civilian airship used for scientific research, such as meteorology, and that it was an unintended and isolated incident.
John Culver, a former CIA analyst for East Asia, claims that this is part of a sustained campaign that has been going on for at least five years. The Chinese surveillance balloons, according to Culver, are created specifically for long-distance missions; some of them even appear to have completed a whole orbit of the earth.
In conjunction with Synthetaic, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to analyse massive volumes of satellite data, BBC Panorama found numerous photographs of balloons flying around East Asia. Early in September 2021, Corey Jaskolski, the company’s creator, discovered proof of one balloon traversing northern Japan; these photographs have just been made public.
Jaskolski believes that the evidence points to the balloon being launched from deep inside China, south of Mongolia, although this has not been confirmed by the BBC. Japan, being a close ally of the US with a significant American military presence, has expressed its commitment to monitoring the situation and even shooting down the balloons if necessary to protect the lives and property of its citizens.
The US State Department has stated that it believes these Chinese balloons are equipped to gather signals intelligence, citing the discovery of an aircraft over the US with multiple antennas capable of collecting and geo-locating communications.
The Panorama crew searched social media and local press outlets for reports of sightings of unusual flying objects in order to look into the likelihood that China will deploy additional surveillance balloons. They discovered two images that purported to show a balloon passing over Taipei in late September 2021 and were apparently captured by Taiwan’s weather agency. Jaskolski cross-referenced these images with satellite imagery and quickly located the balloon off the coast of Taiwan.
Jaskolski disputes the Taiwanese government’s assertion that the object was a weather balloon, citing parallels in size and operational altitudes with the object that travelled over the US and Japan.
Taiwan, which is democratically run, has long been a target of China’s monitoring programme, with the Chinese military conducting a full-scale attack drill last year. US President Joe Biden has previously said that if China attacked Taiwan, the US would defend it.
Corey Jaskolski started with a sketch of the balloons’ appearance from space and then used AI technology to find them. He entered this outline into his AI programme along with the general coordinates of their most recent encounters. The routes and origin of the balloons were tracked using wind model analysis. Jaskolski used his software, RAIC (rapid automated image categorisation), to locate the balloons using satellite pictures provided by Planet Labs.
These surveillance balloons, which are the size of several buses, are equipped with sophisticated technology that can gather a significant quantity of data about targets below. However, they show up as little white blobs in satellite photography taken from orbit.
Jaskolski’s research revealed that the balloon that flew over the US in February came within approximately 80 miles (130 km) of a nuclear air force base in Montana. He also plotted its flight path back to its most probable launch site, Hainan Island in the South China Sea.