Chinese spy balloons spotted over Asia, report
Months after being spot and shot down over US off coast, similar flying balloons, alleged to be China's spy balloons, were spotted over Asia, according to BBC report
PremiumMonths after the shooting down of a Chinese spy balloon off the US coast, a few more such airships were spotted over Japan and Taiwan lately, reported the British media broadcaster, BBC on Monday.
Based on the pieces of evidence collected by an artificial intelligence company, BBC reported the presence of China's spy balloon program in the Asian subcontinent.
The BBC found many images of such balloons crossing East Asia under its analysis of huge amounts of data captured by satellites. The analysis was carried out in collaboration with Synthetic, an artificial intelligence firm.
Synthetic founder, Corey Jaskolski, found evidence of one balloon crossing northern Japan in early September 2021. These images have not been published before, reported BBC.
According to Jaskolski, these balloons were launched deep inside China, south Mongolia. As of now, there has been no official statement by China addressing the evidence presented by the BBC.
The shooting down of China's spy balloon aggravated US-China relations
The appearance of a balloon, which was alleged to be China's spy over the US airspace led to a sharp reaction from the USA, which immediately shot down the object. However, China rejected the US claims of the object being a spy for the country and criticised the US for its action. The incident led to the postponement of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken's visit to China in early February.
China claimed that the balloon seen over the US airspace was a civilian airship. The airship was operated for scientific research purpose.
How China's spy balloons were spotted over Asia?
In its investigation, BBC found that China had launched a balloon over Taiwan's capital Taipei in September 2021.
BBC found two photos taken by Taiwan's weather service, appearing to show a balloon over the capital, Taipei, in late September 2021.
Later the AI company Jaskolski cross-referenced the image with satellite imagery. "Within 90 seconds, we found the balloon off the coast of Taiwan," BBC quoted Jaskolski.
He also created a sketch of a balloon that he thought would look like from airspace. Then he used AI software to track the path of the balloon and where it was last seen.
He used the satellite images provided by the company Planet Labs, Corey, and fed all the information into his software, known as RAIC (rapid automatic image categorisation), to locate the balloons.
Generally, surveillance balloons are huge, equivalent to several buses. They carry a lot of sophisticated equipment, that can enable them to collect large amounts of data on targets below.
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