Why Congress is waiting for answers about spy balloons.

The administration has been slow to respond in part because officials are still reviewing historical data on unidentified aerial incidents, also known as UAPS, and trying to re-determine whether past sightings were spy equipment or other things like academic weather. Balloons, according to the official. The information authorities are using for their analysis is outdated and incomplete.

The administration’s delay in disclosing the Chinese balloon shot down last month and other information raises questions about how much the United States understands what foreign governments are collecting without Washington’s knowledge.

“What is our ability to see what’s in our airspace? There are holes in it. “We need to understand what we can and can’t see and what we can do to fill the gaps,” said Tim Gallaudet, former administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “The balloon surprised us – it was a big wake-up call.”

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

“With the information that we have — the photos or the video or the radar that we have — we cannot tell whether it is a drone or a balloon, an airplane,” he said. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) Difficulty identifying some previously discovered unknown aerial objects. Gillibrand wrote legislation to support better investigations for these things.

The National Security Council and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment. A second senior U.S. official offered the administration’s position that it has a good understanding of how foreign governments spy from the air, but that it is still trying to determine whether hundreds of UAPs are spy tools or improvised devices. The administration has shared a policy plan with Congress in recent weeks that will guide how it will respond to future air strikes, the official said.

When a Chinese balloon surfaced over the U.S. in late January, officials described it as a spy weapon and said it lingered over sensitive military sites, prompting the administration to shoot it down a week later. Officials also said Chinese spy balloons had been transferred to the U.S. at least three times during the Trump administration.

In the following days, three other aerial objects were spotted in North America and the administration shot those down as well, despite claims that they posed no security threat.

Lawmakers said the administration has not made clear to Congress why it decided to begin rolling out UAPs.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) said he was not surprised that China used balloons to spy on the US. What’s frustrating, he said, is that when it comes to the Chinese spy balloon, “we didn’t seem to have a clear policy of what to do at that time.”

Journalists and lawmakers pressed the administration for a response: Why does this particular Chinese balloon require a public response? And if the United States is worried about this one balloon, how many others have gotten pictures of US military installations and other sensitive details?

North American Aerospace Defense Command officials said it was “one” that shot down the Chinese spy balloon.Domain awareness gap” regarding the office’s access to balloons during the Trump administration and the early days of the Biden administration.

and by Congressional hearing on March 8NORAD commander General Glenn Van Herk said the three objects, shot down in the days after the Chinese spy balloon surfaced, “clearly demonstrate the challenges associated with detecting and identifying unmanned objects in US airspace.”

“I can promise you that this incident has provided valuable lessons for my command and our mission partners,” he said.

But officials have yet to provide details on current U.S. inspection gaps. Lawmakers want to know, for example, whether U.S. radar and sensors allowed officials to see objects floating above commercial airspace before the Chinese spy balloon was shot down.

Susan Gow, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office — the group that investigates unidentified flying objects and other airborne phenomena — said the office is “reviewing all relevant information from past cases within a newly developed analytical framework.” He said. Gough declined to give specifics about the framework, but said AARO is working to “fill in the gaps.”

“UAP are objects that are not immediately recognizable and may exhibit unusual behavior. Unusual behavior means that DoD operators or sensors cannot immediately understand collected data, actions or movements,” Gough said.

An unclassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence last year found there were at least 171 “unidentified and unexplained UAP reports.”

Many of the UAP reports came from Navy and Air Force pilots who observed aerial objects while in flight, the report said. The US also uses radar to detect objects, but this often does not provide enough detail to clearly identify what kind of object it is.

It is not clear that the problem lies in the limitations of technology or how the Pentagon and other agencies decide to prioritize and predict information.

Gillibrand said there is a push among some officials and lawmakers to have a “long-term and continuous understanding” of the environment above commercial airspace to better monitor drone and balloon technology.

But the administration has yet to decide whether and how to improve its approach to tracking and shooting down objects, including whether it wants to set new limits on its systems to allow for easier access to large numbers of UAPs. Time is given. Those discussions were considered internally to slow down the analysis of historical UAP data, the official said.

Lawmakers are actively pushing for more information from the administration. The Senate plans to hold a public hearing on the topic in April.

It’s unclear how transparent the administration will be in its discussions with Congress about the investigation. John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, told reporters on March 7 that the administration could reveal “very little at all” about Chinese balloon debris collection efforts. “I didn’t anticipate that there would be a huge public release of what we learned,” he said.