U.S. Representative Comments on New “Object” over Montana | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Representative Comments on New “Object” over Montana

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69 pointsbison348 comments

Update: NORAD and U.S. Northern Command confirmed the TFR put in place and later rescinded over Havre, Montana was in response to a "radar anomaly" that it sent fighter aircraft to investigate. Those aircraft did not identify any object to correlate to the radar hits, and NORAD is still monitoring the situation.

Source: https://twitter.com/NORADCommand/status/1624596337890058240

Could this be a distraction from train on fire that rains hydrochloric acid on entire town? For how large disaster it is, it's completely absent from the news.

Context:

> An air quality disaster resulted on Friday night after about 50 cars on a Norfolk Southern Railroad train traveling from Illinois to Pennsylvania derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. Ten of those cars contained hazardous materials, five of which contained vinyl chloride, a highly volatile colorless gas produced for commercial uses.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/toxins-ohio-train-derailment-p...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34758525

From the tweet: "I am in direct contact with NORCOM and monitoring the latest issue over Havre and the northern border. Airspace is closed due to an object that could interfere with commercial air traffic — the DOD will resume efforts to observe and ground the object in the morning."

Seems like they are waiting to shoot it down in the morning.

Why is a member of Congress commenting and not the DOD or the Governor of Montana? Is someone spilling classified information to show off?

Because we're not being told the whole story.

It's worth noting that in the US government hierarchy, the United States Congress is superior to the Department of Defense. Why? Because they (both House and Senate) write the laws stating who and what the DoD is, the House funds the DoD, and the Senate confirms appointments of officers.

Specifically with regards to Matt Rosendale, he is a Representative from Montana. He is in a position where he can demand (and will get, within reason) information from the US military and represent Montana in demanding and publicizing said information.

That is not how the chain of command works for the military. The president is the commander in chief, and senators do not report to him.

Ultimately their paramount allegiance is to the Constitution and the people of the United States. This can supercede the chain of command when Commander-in-chief places orders contravened by the People.

Congress performs oversight of the military and sets budgets, so they're briefed on operations like this which have some outsized political impact. It doesn't seem to me like these things should be a big deal but the rest of the people in the US seem to act like it is, so Congress is naturally very interested.

He’s a freshman congressman buddying up with Lauren Boebert and joining the “rebel” GOP faction that was opposing the speaker.

It’s all about making noise to stay alive - how often do you hear from congressmen from Montana?

Petty politics doesn't belong on HN. Please take this to reddit.

I agree with peepeepoopoo

Then a highly political story of shooting down balloons or whatever shouldn’t be front and center.

Live in Montana. Very confused. Mildly concerned. Obviously they don't want to divulge everything they know....

Anyone else feel like we aren't getting the whole story here?

No, I feel like we are jumping with both feet to conclusions rather than gathering data and then evaluating.

> jumping with both feet to conclusions

What conclusions?

I'd actually like to see some conclusions. So far all we have is 'objects'.

"Reported" objects. On a complex radar system which has filters in the process of being re-tuned, because of concern things have been missed but now, there are more false positives: radar is complicated and weather, dust, floating metallised party balloons, insects, migrating birds can generate signals.

>migrating birds can generate signals.

Great, so you're setting up Pearl Harbor 2.0

"Bird doughnut" https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/roost-ring-long-point-...

The conclusion that this is even worthy of the attention of everyday citizens, and not a routine case of floating trash?

"everyday citizens" shouldn't have an interest in what the US military is shooting at over North America?

WSJ is reporting the Alaska object was metallic balloon with suspended payload.

I feel like we have a couple of weird but completely plausible events involving balloons. And now everyone is thinking about it, so people start noticing it more.

Isn’t this a well-studied behaviour? X happens and suddenly lots of people are calling in about X.

Yeah, it's a big distraction from other, non-balloon important world events that we should be focusing on, of which there are many. These balloons taking over the news cycle for days on end eats into peoples precious attention spans. Suddenly balloons are the hottest thing to focus on right now though.

https://newsasfacts.com/

Even my most unbiased source of news can’t come up with much distraction-worthy news outside of a small kerfuffle in the Philippines.

Is this your site? It looks neat

I wish lol. Someone smarter than me posted it here and I’ve been using it ever since.

FYI it's just an alternative frontend to a current events page wikipedia has:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

I’m surprised it doesn’t have anything about Turkey’s earthquake response. Things happened today.

The train in Ohio seems moderately distraction worthy.

Right, what are the Kardashians up to since all of the balloon activity? We can't forget the important stuff. Or the 18 versions of RHO...

There's that war in Ukraine some powerful folks would probably prefer The West stopped paying attention and sending aid to...

I don’t understand what’s so interesting about a spy balloon anyway. Doesn’t China already have satellites in orbit able to take high resolution pictures anywhere in the country anyway?

11km is a lot closer than 350km. closer, and a lot less air in the way.

about the balloons themselves? Nothing. But how the US responds, how much they tolerate, that's all important signals. A lot of geopolitical competition is about poking and seeing what you can get away with.

Let’s say you had a rival, and they had a spy balloon floating above your house. No big deal?

A balloon 60k+ feet above my house? Yes no big deal. Not like they will see anything better than they could from the public road, or what's on google maps.

Google Maps can show a live overhead video feed of you sunbathing in your backyard?

Google maps doesn't, but satellites (where google maps gets some of its image data) can already capture live video, so this point is irrelevant.

What evidence do we have that these balloons are of terrestrial origin, other than Occam’s razor? It could be Venusians, who have experience building lighter than aircraft for their floating cities. Other than how wildly improbable it is, the alien theory still makes more sense than the CCP thinking balloon espionage is a pretty neat idea.

There's no released info on the second or third but China acknowledged ownership of the first balloon (as an errant weather balloon) and complained when it was destroyed. Remains of the balloon were recovered and the Chinese companies that built the balloon were identified. None of that behavior is consistent with a Venusian origin.

Relevant

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9q7tN7MhQ4I

Interesting flight patterns over the Dakotas/MN border, not like we have anything near Grand Forks that anyone would care about.......

Seriously, why are there a few dozen "UofND" planes flying about right now?

https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ab6866

Couldn’t possibly be the UND Flight School program.

UND has over 120 aircraft and the weather was beautiful today. Good day for flying, I imagine.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Odegard_School_of_Ae....

A large number of ICBM sites are in northern and western ND.

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