What the Biden administration isn?t telling Congress about spy balloons

Members of Congress say they are pushing the administration to improve the way it collects and analyzes UAP data.

“We can’t tell based on the data we have – based on the photographs or the video or the radar we have – whether it was a drone or a balloon, whether it was an aircraft,” said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) of difficulty in identifying some of the previously detected unidentified aerial objects. Gillibrand wrote legislation to help fund better investigations of these objects.

The National Security Council and the Office of the Director for National Intelligence declined to comment. A second senior U.S. official presented the administration’s stance, arguing that it has a good sense of how foreign governments are trying to surveil from the air but that it is still trying to determine whether hundreds of UAPs are spy tools or benign objects. The administration has shared with Congress in recent weeks a policy plan that will guide how it responds to aerial objects in the future, the official said.

“UAP are objects that cannot be immediately identified and may exhibit anomalous behavior. Anomalous behavior means that DoD operators or sensors cannot make immediate sense of collected data, actions or activities,” Gough said.

An unclassified report from the Office of the Director for National Intelligence from last year said that there are at least 171 “uncharacterized and unattributed UAP reports.”

Many of the UAP reports came from Navy and the Air Force pilots who witnessed the aerial objects while flying, the report said. The U.S. also uses radar to detect the objects, but that often doesn’t provide enough detail to identify clearly what type of object it is.