AA Edit | Beware of spies in the sky

What’s going on up there is no more a rhetorical question. It appears the world is suddenly looking up to scan the skies, avowedly for man made objects and shooting them down as security threats. In the space of eight days, including on three successive days last week, the US air force was kept busy locking on to unidentified flying objects with missiles and bringing them down regardless of whether they were indeed threats to national security.

Not to be outdone, China has also begun looking skywards and intends now to shoot at least one UFO that entered its airspace. This is no bizarre Star Wars of the cinematic kind, but the spotting of a large China spy balloon with a one-ton gondola as big as three school buses sporting multiple antennas and solar panels to power intelligence-gathering sensors, which was brought down off the South Carolina coast on February 4, has set off this unique hunting sequence in the skies.

Given the rapidity of these recent sightings that may have set the community accustomed to spotting flying objects and pondering over their mysterious alienness, what we can surmise is countries are getting better at sighting these UFOs after tweaking their radars. And they have done so because the 1950s style spying missions seem to have become common in the 2020s and heightened awareness of visible incursions in the last 10 days is causing a very filmy kind of excitement.

The greater scrutiny of airspace will become routine now, adding to the burden of those tasked with keeping countries safe from eyes in the sky spying upon nuclear silos and the like. India, warned by the US about Chinese having floated innocent-looking weather balloons over the subcontinent in the past, must raise its atmospheric surveillance too. China is now warning the world that its currently not-so-friendly competing superpower USA has also been accustomed to sending up aerial spy missions, perhaps with greater stealth than the purported balloon studying meteorology at a height of 18,000 metres.

If espionage, and possible close encounters of the extraterrestrial kind, were not such a serious business, Hollywood could easily produce satire in the ‘Don’t Look Up’ style and worthy of the prevailing paranoia over spying eyes in the sky. But vigilance is the price free nations must pay for their sovereignty lest any superpower with territorial ambitions sends up balloons and devices to serve surveillance purposes.