Welcome to balloon talk

The Super Bowl could open with Tom Cruise hanging off the side of a balloon at 60,000 ft and I would only be slightly surprised https://t.co/eB0Yd9nLaz

— Jason Goldman (@goldman) February 12, 2023

so the Americans had blimps over Kabul for years, something I learnt as a result of the recent balloon frenzy, and locals would regularly shoot at themhttps://t.co/g2MnFUcfvu

— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) February 11, 2023

("An average Kabul resident will see it every time he looks up, no matter what time. It’s always there"; "When the blimps are brought down due to bad weather, the military often finds hundreds of bulletholes in them")

After 12 hours of painstakingly searching, mile after mile, all Inner Mongolia using Apple maps I've finally found the location of the alleguedy Chinese balloon launch facility mentioned recently in a WSJ article.

It is located in the Siziwang Banner, 138 km N of Hohhot. pic.twitter.com/nmlvl0aSze

— StratoCat (@stratoballoon) February 11, 2023

tinfoil possibility that there were lower level forces both in china that steered the balloon to the US and in the US that hyped it

— csz (@cszabla) February 11, 2023

Im a simpler, better time (2018) Elon would have tweeted at least a dozen times about the UFOs by now including at least three promising to use one of his rockets to shoot them down

— Tom Gara (@tomgara) February 12, 2023

from 2014:

At about 6am local time on Friday, in a field about a mile from Bluffdale, Utah, two activists from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Greenpeace launched a 135ft airship and drifted the dirigible over the NSA's massive data center there.

With some cars below entering the center's office park, the lighter-than-air vessel hung a banner reading 'NSA illegal spying below' and a web address for a new EFF site grading members of Congress on their surveillance positions.