The United States has detected another “spy balloon” from China and assured it is flying over Latin America, the Pentagon reported Friday.
“We are seeing information from a balloon flying over Latin America. We are now determining that it is another Chinese surveillance balloon,” Pentagon spokesman Brigadier General Patrick Ryder said in a statement to the press.
The Costa Rican newspaper La Nación had just published an article about a white flying object, which looked like a hot air balloon, that had been sighted over the Latin American country.
Speaking to CNN, a senior Pentagon official said the balloon sighted over Latin America does not appear to be headed for the United States.
The Pentagon announced on Thursday that it was tracking the movements of a Chinese “spy balloon” that flew over the state of Montana (northeast of the US), where one of three existing nuclear missile silos is located on US soil.
The other two nuclear silo fields are located in two states bordering Montana: North Dakota to the east and Wyoming to the south.
As the Pentagon explained this Friday, the balloon has moved east in recent hours and is now in the center of the country, some 60,000 feet above the surface (18,288 meters).
Meanwhile, as the balloon crosses the North American country, the Pentagon leadership has strongly recommended that President Joe Biden take no action against the device for security reasons as debris could fall on the population.
The presence of this Chinese “spy balloon” in US airspace has sparked a diplomatic crisis between Washington and Beijing and led to the suspension of the trip that Foreign Minister Antony Blinken was planning to make to the Asian country .
For its part, Beijing admitted on Friday that the balloon is his, though he assured that “it is a civilian airship used for research purposes, mainly meteorological.”
Source: El heraldo
Karen Clayton is a seasoned journalist and author at The Nation Update, with a focus on world news and current events. She has a background in international relations, which gives her a deep understanding of the political, economic and social factors that shape the global landscape. She writes about a wide range of topics, including conflicts, political upheavals, and economic trends, as well as humanitarian crisis and human rights issues.
