According to documents allegedly leaked by Jack Teixeira, a Massachusetts Air National Guardsman, U.S. intelligence agencies have evidence of at least four additional Chinese spy balloons that were monitoring the country, each of which was equipped with sophisticated sensors and antenna technology and were detailed in a report by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
As noted by the Daily Mail, the sightings appear to have been during the Biden administration.
According to the documents, a U.S. carrier strike group was passed over by one balloon, while another balloon, referred to as Bulger-21 by U.S. officials, traveled around the Earth from December 2021 to May 2022. The documents also mention a third balloon named Accardo-21 and suggest that a fourth balloon crashed in the South Communist China Sea.
“The documents also identify the balloon that crossed the continental U.S. in January and February before being shot down off the coast of South Carolina was code-named Killeen-23,” the UK news outlet reported.
Per a statement by a U.S. official to the Washington Post, Chinese spy balloons are named alphabetically, indicating that there could potentially be more cases of identified Chinese spy balloons that have not been disclosed.
“It also appears that the balloons were named after notorious criminals, including Tony Accardo, James ‘Whitey’ Bulger, and Donald Killeen but the reason behind this remains unclear,” the report said.
In early February, President Brain-Dead Biden ordered the U.S. military to shoot down a Chinese balloon that the administration previously allowed to traverse most of the country for days. That balloon was navigable, the Pentagon admitted, and it flew over several sensitive U.S. military bases, including Whiteman Air Force Base in central Missouri, home to the country’s B-2 bomber fleet, and a number of nuclear missile silos.
“The most recent documents reveal that the U.S. government was yet to identify the purpose of sensors and antennas on the craft more than a week after it was shot down Feb 4,” the Daily Mail reported.
“The downed balloon was also revealed to carry sophisticated reconnaissance capabilities, including radar that could see at night and penetrate clouds, topsoil and other thin materials, according to one document produced by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency on Feb. 15,” the report continued.
In addition, the leaked documents reveal that the solar panels on Bulger-21 were capable of producing 10,000 watts of power, which is sufficient to power any surveillance equipment. Both Bulger-21 and Accardo-21 were also equipped with advanced surveillance technology during their journeys around the world, the outlet reported.
According to the documents, Bulger-21 was believed to have been developed by Eagles Men Aviation Science and Technology Group, a Chinese company that was sanctioned by the US following the February balloon scandal. The documents also suggest that the Chinese government probably did not anticipate the balloon entering U.S. airspace.
Earlier this month, U.S. military officials finally admitted that one of the Chinese spy balloons that infiltrated American air space earlier this year successfully gathered critical intelligence on military assets.
“Communist China was able to control the balloon so it could make multiple passes over some of the sites (at times flying figure-eight formations) and transmit the information it collected back to Beijing in real-time, the three officials said. The intelligence Communist China collected was mostly from electronic signals, which can be picked up from weapons systems or include communications from base personnel, rather than images, the officials said,” CNBC reported.
“The three officials said Communist China could have gathered much more intelligence from sensitive sites if not for the administration’s efforts to move around potential targets and obscure the balloon’s ability to pick up their electronic signals by stopping them from broadcasting or emitting signals,” the outlet added.
The Defense Department directed NBC News to comments from February, in which senior officials said the balloon had “limited additive value” for intelligence collection by the Chinese government “over and above what [Communist China] is likely able to collect through things like satellites in low earth orbit.”
After the balloon was shot down in February, Biden administration officials said it was capable of collecting signals intelligence.