There's more than just Chinese spy balloons soaring America's skies

Somebody better quick message James and Giant Peach and tell him this would be the wrong month to go drifting into American airspace.

Balloons have become the new classified documents of the national psyche. Just when you think you’ve routed out the last one, along comes another flotilla. We haven’t seen this many balloons since Wonder Bread.

If you're a spy agency, don’t you feel a little silly in the year 2023 using balloons? No one else uses balloons anymore except clowns. And then they send them over the great open wastelands of the American West, of all places. Montana hasn’t gotten this much attention since Lewis and Clark.

OK, I get that we shot down the Chinese spy balloon. I guess. (Whatever you do, don’t tell the Chinese about Google Earth.) Except you go higher up and you’ll find Chinese spy satellites and nobody says anything about them. And when we flew a U2 over the Soviet Union it was OK because it wasn’t spying, it was national security.

Every nation on Earth seems to think that it has the right to spy on other nations, but other nations don’t have the right to spy on them. In any normal culture, you shoot it down, act highly offended for a couple of days and then everybody moves on.

In those days of normalcy, at a time such as this, both American political parties would have put aside their disagreements and patriotically spoken with one unified voice against a foreign threat.

Today, political parties say “Oh goodie!” whenever a foreign, or any, threat comes along because they perceive it as something that can be used against their opponents, causing the opposition party to overreact so they cannot be accused in campaign ads of being “Soft on (fill in the blank)” or “Insensitive to the feelings of (fill in the blank).”

And that’s where we are today, with the government blowing everything that moves out of the sky, like some guy in his underpants sitting on the deck of his trailer with a .22 shooting groundhogs.

You just know some of the things we’re knocking out of the atmosphere are going to turn out to be some harmless object floating high above the ground, like a weather balloon or Rihanna.

Imagine taking out some Wisconsin eighth-grader’s science project with an F-22 Raptor:

“Dad?”

“Just don’t look, son, I’m sure we still have enough time to grow some mold.”

One of these days we’re going to shoot something and a bunch of little green men are going to come spilling out, and then we’ll be sorry.

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Of course, what’s interesting is that there are so many of the darn things floating around up there of every conceivable shape and size.

According to The New York Times, “At any given moment, thousands of balloons are above the Earth, including many used in the United States by government agencies, military forces, independent researchers and hobbyists, said Paul Fetkowitz, president of Kaymont Consolidated Industries, a maker of high-altitude balloons in Melbourne, Fla.”

Is this supposed to make us feel better or worse? Apparently I am the only person in the United States who does not own my own personal high-altitude balloon.

The National Weather Service alone launches 60,000 a year. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Can you imagine? The entire upper atmosphere must look like one big baby shower.

Beyond that, “Experts in the balloon industry said that DARPA, the secretive defense agency in charge of advanced technology development, was experimenting with a new class of long-duration balloons for battlefield use … .”

So this is what the next great conflict is going to look like: a bunch of high-altitude balloons trying to pop each other. That’s just great. The winner of World War III is going to be the country that develops the planet’s biggest knitting needle.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: It seems nearly everyone has a high-altitude balloon these days