The Biden White House took a more cautious approach. Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said the balloon did not present a military threat but called its presence a “violation of our sovereignty.”
As more Americans logged on to stare at the balloon on Friday, a spokesman for the Pentagon said the U.S. military was not going to be providing regular updates on its whereabouts. On Friday, the balloon remained in the sky, above the “center of the continental United States,” Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said.
“What we’re not going to do is get into an hour-by-hour location of the balloon,” he added. “The public has the ability to look up in the sky and see where the balloon is.”
Beijing said on Friday that the craft was indeed from China, but described it as a “mainly meteorological” blimp that had strayed (very) far from its original course. The spotting of a second balloon — this time over South America, on Friday night — made the coincidental-lost-balloon theory much less likely.
Still, the brouhaha briefly called us back to the early days of collective social-media viewing, when it was still novel to watch something bizarre unfold on television alongside a cascade of tweets and cackle-inducing memes. Recall that time in 2009, when it seemed like the entire country was captured for several hours as some sort of large silver bag — thought at first to be carrying a six-year-old boy, of all things — zipped around in the sky over Colorado.
It was the day Balloon Boy was born. After the boy, named Falcon, was found hiding out in the attic of his house, his parents were convicted of misleading a public servant and falsely reporting an incident.
They were later pardoned, and their lawyer called the whole matter “balloonacy.”
In 2012, balloon enthusiasts around the globe were again transfixed as Felix Baumgartner, an Austrian daredevil, rode a helium balloon to an altitude of 128,100 feet, breaking the sound barrier before landing safely back on the ground. That event set a livestream record, racking up some 9.5 million views.
