The “Fakhr El-Din” play by the Rahbani brothers begins with the scene of actor Roger Assaf sitting in a public place trying to listen to what is happening around him. A passer-by suspiciously asks him: “What are you doing here?” With his apparent naivety, he replies: “I am spying.”
At a time when aerial espionage techniques have reached levels and tools beyond imagination, the Chinese have returned to the balloons, which they send into the American skies to take photos of the beaches and coasts.
While the Pentagon insisted that the balloon was flying over “sensitive cities” in the western United States, the innocent of China asserted that the balloon, which is equal to the size of three buses, was checking the weather conditions, but it got lost in the Seven Falls and carried away by the winds towards the American airspace.
Thank you for the clarification. But, my dear Mr. Chu Wang-chi, we thought that the weather forecast could be obtained from any morning or evening newscast. So we took it as an amusing Chinese joke.
However, the matter seemed dangerous when the Americans shot down a huge unidentified “object” in Chicago, and then a conical-shaped object over Alaska.
Thus, the issue is more serious than balloons that have lost their way. Imagination and evidence took us back to the stories of aliens, whose news filled the earth for years, without the men being able to find a trace of them. It was later said that it was part of a war of nerves with the Russians.
Nonetheless, talk about recent aerial sightings is official, and it was reported by the Ministry of Defense. It does not rule out that flying objects are sent by unknown creatures. While three of them have been dropped, a search is ongoing for the remains of another.
A state of emergency was declared in the entire US airspace. Mr. Biden was accused of negligence because he hesitated to give orders to drop the objects. As for the White House, it justified the delay by saying that the decision was taken to shoot down the balloon over the sea, for fear that it would carry radioactive materials that would harm the population.
In any case, it’s a funny story that we had never heard of since the invention of the hot air balloon in the mid-nineteenth century. From the very beginning, the balloon was associated with romantic tales, the most famous of which is entitled, “Around the World in Eighty Days”, by French writer Jules Verne (1876). The Frenchman was one of the pioneers of the science fiction novel above land and under the sea.
