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A police officer has been left embarrassed after a 'spy balloon' he was monitoring turned out to be a gift from a bird.
The threat of high altitude spy balloons became a sudden worldwide threat in 2023, with sightings from Canada to China.
Which goes some way to explaining an hilarious mistake made by Hicham Argani, a police officer in Boxtel, North Brabant, Netherlands.
READ MORE: 'Balloon rides' heading to edge of space in terrifyingly tiny helium 'hamster ball'
He shared a photo on Instagram that showed an unidentified object in the sky that had captured his attention while he was on patrol.
“During my surveillance rounds, my eyes fell on a suspected ‘spy balloon’ above my neighbourhood,” Hicham wrote on Instagram.
After following the mystery object for a while, he said, “it soon became clear that the balloon was hanging over the Selissen district”.
Hicham decided to pull over so that he could get out his patrol car and get a clear look at the object.
It was only then that he realised what he had been chasing.
He noticed a good-sized dollop of bird poo smeared across his windscreen that was the exact shape of the “ UFO ” .
Once Hicham found a tissue and cleaned the bird droppings off his windshield, the suspected spy balloon was no longer visible. “Boxtel is safe!” he joked.
US military shoots down another high-altitude 'unidentified object'
It’s not such as silly mistake as all that. After the massive Chinese airship was shot down on February 4, the US military tightened up its radar coverage – suddenly revealing a wave of previously undetected spy drones and other mysterious objects in the skies above the US.
Other military radar stations around the world have had similar results. There’s clearly a lot of these things around.
While balloons might seem a primitive technology in the age of stealth jets and satellites, their ability to linger over a target area for extended periods gives them a significant advantage.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences has set up a dedicated “Research and Development Centre for Aerostat Systems” for development of what it calls “near space” craft.
One of the advanced airships China has developed is the “Cloud Chaser”, which made a round-the-world flight at an altitude of over 65,000 feet in 2019.
But all the effort they put into research may have been wasted. It seems all you need to start a good-sized panic in the West is a reasonable amount of pigeon poo.
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- UFO
- Police
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