...In 2019 it was reported that the U.S. military used 25 experimental solar-powered high-altitude balloons to conduct surveillance tests across six midwestern states. “The balloons were equipped with hi-tech radars designed to simultaneously track many individual vehicles day or night, through any kind of weather, and were intended to be used to monitor drug trafficking and potential homeland security threats.”

Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, expressed concern that “Even in tests, they’re still collecting a lot of data on Americans: who’s driving to the union house, the church, the mosque, the Alzheimer’s clinic. “We should not go down the road of allowing this to be used in the United States, and it’s disturbing to hear that these tests are being carried out, by the military no less.”

While this technology may not be exclusive to the United States, the description of the balloon — both in size and capability — matches that described recently soaring over Montana. Notably, the balloons are subject to fewer restrictions and regulations than drones.

Furthermore, private companies like ‘World View’ are dedicated to advancing this very technology. World View purports to be “a global leader in stratospheric exploration and flight.”

Per The Guardian, in 2019, World View announced that “it had carried out multi-week test missions in which its own stratospheric balloons were able to hover over a five-mile-diameter area for six and a half hours, and larger areas for days at a time.”

According to Ryan Hartman, the CEO of World View, “The challenge is how to harness the stratospheric winds to be able to create a persistent station-keeping capability for customers.” Who are the customers?

World View is one of many balloon-operating companies in the United States. Another company, Raven Aerostar, has supplied balloons to Southcom, run by the Department of Defense and also the Alphabet subsidiary Loon.

According to FCC documents filed, the balloons provided to Southcom “carried small, satellite-like vehicles housing sophisticated sensors and communication gear," The Guardian reported.

The FCC filing also suggested that the balloons might also carry a Sierra Nevada video capture system called Gorgon Stare; a wide-area surveillance system comprised of nine cameras capable of recording panoramic images across an entire city simultaneously.

As the Guardian noted, “it is unclear from the FCC documents whether Southcom’s tests within the US are linked to any active narcotic or counter-terrorism investigations. Also, none of the parties involved would say whether the Midwest vehicle data would be deleted, stored or passed on to other federal or local agencies.”

Even more alarming is the relationship between DARPA, the Pentagon’s own research arm, and stratospheric balloon companies like Raven Aerostar. Notably, DARPA had made high-risk investments in mRNA technology years before the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, DARPA helped fund and develop the COVID-19 vaccine.

According to the Washington Post in July 2020, “if it weren’t for DARPA’s investments over the past decade and earlier, largely outside the glare of Washington’s partisan politics, the American race toward a vaccine and antibody therapy to stop the coronavirus most likely wouldn’t be moving as quickly as it is today.”

Scott Wickersham, the Vice President of Raven Aerostar, told the Guardian that it had been working with DARPA to “perfect stratospheric balloon navigation which has included multiple launches across the country.” This is part of Darpa’s ‘Adaptable Lighter than air’ program, known as Alta.

Hartman, CEO of World View, said in 2019 that it had completed a dozen surveillance test missions but wouldn’t say for whom, or what specific data had been collected.

In light of this, it makes little sense that the Chinese sent their own stratospheric balloon from a Chinese island all the way to the United States mainland — as the Biden administration is now claiming. The administration now says it tracked the balloon all the way from Hainan Island and still waited to shoot it down until it had finished surveilling the United States.

Despite Biden’s worrisome ties to China, it makes more sense that the administration was reluctant to shoot the balloon down because it was part of a U.S. DARPA program — a U.S. balloon — rather than a Chinese spy balloon.

The question isn’t what is China doing with these balloons, but what is the U.S. government doing with these balloons and what are they being used for....