The Washington Post has unveiled a new document that it claims to have obtained from the recently-leaked internal Pentagon documents which indicates that the US government believes it was spied on by at least four more alleged Chinese balloons.
"The Chinese spy balloon that flew over the United States this year… carried a raft of sensors and antennas [that] the US government still had not identified more than a week after shooting it down, according to a document allegedly leaked to a Discord chatroom by Jack Teixeira," according to the Post.
The notoriously pro-establishment outlet, which admits it informed the US military in advance that it wanted to publish the material in question, described a document "produced by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and dated Feb. 15 — 10 days after the Air Force shot down the balloon that flew over the United States," which it says "contains the most detailed government assessment to date of Killeen-23 and two balloons from previous years, labeled Bulger-21 and Accardo-21."
"It appears that the balloons are named after notorious criminals, including Tony Accardo, James ‘Whitey’ Bulger, and Donald Killeen," the Post explained.
The document also indicated that "the balloon that overflew the continental US in February had sophisticated reconnaissance capabilities, including ‘synthetic aperture radar,’" a technology which the outlet says can enable its user to "see at night and penetrate clouds, topsoil, and thin materials."
Citing "what appear to be detailed photos of the balloon that flew over the United States," which the Post claims were "presumably taken from a U-2 spy plane," the document insists that a solar panel assembly attached to the balloon "could generate… more than enough power to operate any [Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance] capabilities."
In February, the F-22 Raptor finally recorded its first ‘air-to-air kill’ when the US military shot down a balloon that originated in China off the coast of South Carolina after it made its way over a large swath of North America.