BS! UTTER BS!
There’s this thing we’ve had since before WW2 called.. RADAR and it’s perfectly capable of detecting weather balloons because it was used to track such things post WW2 when we were tracking the Russians and the cold war.
No. Even commercial air traffic systems don’t display radar return targets in normal mode of operation.
Military systems likewise have such filters. It’s a form of stealth, i.e. using system weaknesses (’vulnerabilities’), just like they did during GW1 by flying the F117s through the throughs between Soviet built radars to reduce the threat of detection.
It’s the purpose of such flights (and, I believe, the drone swarms encountered by the navy).
Wots that?
These days, there’s a computer between the human operator and the raw radar signal, processing the signal and filtering out noise and birds, and highlighting stuff that corresponds to what we’re interested in (conventional aircraft).
It could be that balloons were not making it through the computer filtering, and examination of old recordings of the raw radar signals turned them up.
It could also be that Chinese students or H1Bs in the US got access to the software and noticed what might get missed by the filtering.
Radar!!!
It’s been around since WWII tracking balloons
The story would not have changed all these times if it was something like this.
Sigh. There is a huge difference between modern radar and WWII radar which could not see things at 40,000 feet, between looking for fast moving objects and looking for slow moving objects.
No, we were not tracking high altitude balloons during the Cold War.
YES! Absolute Smelly Bull Excrement. i.e. LIES!
BS! UTTER BS!
There’s this thing we’ve had since before WW2 called.. RADAR and it’s perfectly capable of detecting weather balloons because it was used to track such things post WW2 when we were tracking the Russians and the cold war.
The thing had huge solar panels and was supposedly as big as a bus. Had to have had a huge radar profile.