The United States has been having "a bit of a floaty-bag problem over its airspace", as South Africa's Daily Maverick news site put it.
Indeed it has. Four balloons or other flying "objects" shot down by the US Air Force over American or Canadian territory in eight days got everybody's attention and made the already fragile state of US-Chinese relations a good deal worse. But it all turns out to be an innocent mistake. Sort of.
The first unknown flying object, a big Chinese balloon -- 70 metres high, with an instrument payload the size of several buses -- was obviously in the wrong place. It was clearly designed to gather "sigint" (signals intelligence), but flying it across the United States, even 20km up, was just asking for trouble. Are the Chinese really that stupid?
