The Chinese balloon that crossed the United States from Alaska to South Carolina for a week early this year — before being shot down offshore by the U.S. military — stirred a blizzard of fears. NBC News reported on April 3 that the balloon had been collecting electronic signals from U.S. military sites and sending them in real time back to China. President Biden said in May that it “was carrying two freight cars’ worth of spying equipment.”
Now, the Pentagon’s press secretary, Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, has announced the balloon was not doing surveillance across the continent. “We were aware that it had intelligence collection capabilities,” he said at a briefing last week, but the United States believes “that it did not collect while it was transiting the United States or overflying the United States.” He said U.S. measures to mitigate any intelligence collection might have thwarted it.