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Comment by jpalomaki | Hacker News Reader

Based on quick search, these have been happening also before.

"an official revealed during a briefing on Saturday that the U.S. was aware of three other instances during the prior administration and one instance earlier in the Biden administration that such an apparatus “transited” the country."

[1] https://thehill.com/policy/defense/3844511-chinese-balloons-...

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Yeah, but if you read, they didn't know about the incidents until well after they happened; also, they never shared if they were over US coastal waters or over actual US soil.

Also the source was anonymous "a senior U.S. defense official" while ranking members of the previous administration publicly denied that any such incident occurred.

It wasn't anonymous, it was confirmed by committee members that deal with this topic. The White House/DoD has also offered to brief the previous administration members on the topic. The entire premise is that the previous administration just didn't know about it because they only just discovered this occurred (I assume by putting together multiple pieces of evidence from the various intelligence apparatus.) Keep in mind there are various new programs dealing with this exact topic to monitor unknown arial crafts over US assets. So of course, the previous administration could confidently deny they were briefed on it, because no one has even claimed the previous administration was ever briefed on it.

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