“Would you like to ride in my Chinese spy balloon….”

Or both!

 

Sounds like they literally shot down an unidentified flying object today.

Agents Mulder and Scully to the courtesy phone …

 

Description made me think it was a drone of some kind.

 

So if China gets pissed at us, we really can tell them to blame Canada?

 

And another one.

 

Any thoughts on why these encounters are happening so often now?

Did they just avoid the mainland U.S. before and now that we saw one, we have to shoot every one down?

Or should I be putting out milk and cookies for our new overlords when they visit?

 

The Cleveland Browns nod their heads.

 

I joked about 99 after the first was noticed … at this rate we’ll hit that number by summer.

 

Probably the main reason is that we're looking harder now — and looking differently.
If you do a little homework on these types of balloons, you find out that they are excellent surveillance vehicles. They can fly higher than most planes, loiter over areas longer than satellites, and are very difficult to detect. They're exploiting a weakness in our defense. Seems that our radars are set up to filter out anything traveling below a certain speed, or above a certain altitude, and these balloons are well below and above those respective thresholds.
After the first incident, the radar parameters were changed and now we're finding them. It's entirely possible that they've been sending these things over for years without us having a clue.