Chi chinese in particular but russia, north korea and iran from buying farmland in this country. look, that s something that people know about, that farmers know about that are on the ground in montana. and we need to stop that from happening because it puts our national security and our food security at risk. they re both very much connected. yeah, senator tester, i appreciate your time tonight. thank you. you bet, thank you, anderson. joining us now cnn political commentator adam kinzinger who has been a recon sans pilot. u.s. command are coordinating with nasa to determine the de debris field if the balloon floating around the u.s. were to be shot down. do you think it should be? i think the first thing is to make sure it doesn t get out of this country. i think it has to be brought down under control, if at all possible, that the united states has to gather the information on that balloon, the equipment that
Like crazy, i m like, no, look up. there s, you know, a chinese balloon everyone s talking about. sure enough it s flying over. there was a lot of other reports in warrensburg, whiteman air force base that also saw it as well. it s just it s really fascinating. matthew smith, i appreciate it. thank you so much. perfect, thank you so much. our next guest montana democratic senator jon tester, chairs the defense appropriations subcommittee, which will be holding hearings shortly on the matter. i appreciate you joining us. you ve been raising warnings act china and spying and the threat china poses to the united states. do you think the u.s. should shut down should shoot this thing down? so look, anderson, first of all it s great to be on your show. secondly, montanans and i think all americans appreciate our freedom and privacy. and to have a chinese surveillance balloon flying over a state like montana which has
Information out of it before we destroy it. we didn t know, for example, could it have contained something within the balloon other than helium that could have posed a threat to us? do we know if it has any kind of biological component to it. you want to ask those questions and just completely correct about this in terms of what the chinese may or may not do in the future, but we need to find out as much information from this particular balloon as we can to make sure we put the chinese on notice come again another time and we re not going to be asking questions. we know what to do. right here i think it was important to find out what kind of information were they gathering. were we able to intercept it, and i know that we can take it down, and i think we can take it down in a fairly responsible fashion, so it just doesn t come crashing down. we have the capability to help move it down. if the chinese can move it from china, we can move it from here, and i m confident we can take it down. congressman kinzinger, how
My planned visit is detrimental to the substantive discussions we were prepared to have. and anderson, biden s white house press secretary is saying that they back up lincoln s decision to postpone the trip. they also say that despite china saying they regret what happened and that this is a civilian aircraft, of course, that is something that they do not believe. now, biden we you said got his first briefing on tuesday. that s three days ago, and during that meeting he asked for military options. but we know now he has been counseled by his top military advisers to not shoot down this balloon. why is that? why not just shoot it down? they believe it s simply too dangerous. for right now the they re not ruling out but they are saying it s too dangerous for people on the ground, and in the sky it does not pose any dangers. it is 60,000 feet in the air. it s the size of three buses. it has surveillance equipment on bo board. gets shot down from that height
Which is a refill plane. there have been planes trying to track it down in southeast missouri. when you took these photos, how far was the balloon from do you have a sense of what altitude the balloon was at? well, of course you know being an photographer of planes and everything, you know, it was much higher than your standard airplanes. it had to be a good 50, 60,000 feet. even for the size of it, you could still barely make it out to the naked eye. at one point i think the military said it was 60,000 feet. so you could see it with the naked eye? correct, you could see the actual balloon, and then, you know, if the sun was shining just bright enough, you could catch a glimpse of the panels, solar panels, whatever it is that s actually flying on the bottom of this balloon glaring off of it. were other people around you were people asking you what are you looking at? oh, yeah.
Concerns. i had a brief conversation with the wing commander. we talked how interesting the timing was with what was going on with the corn mill here and that kind of coming to an end and two days later this balloon being spotted. now this balloon added to tense relations between the u.s. and china. just, again, speaks volumes to the situation with respect to china. they are our greatest geopolitical threat. they are a threat economically. they are a threat militarily, and we need to take it serious. that was jim sciutto reporting. we want to get some perspective from intelligence analyst john miller. a balloon is not the most high-tech thing. where does this balloon rank in terms of the range of ways that china is spying on the u.s.? not that high, both literally and figuratively. it s flying, you know, in the stratosphere but below where their satellites are. but it is a collection platform, you know, china the chinese
Could go out into the ocean. right. i mean, it s hard to say exactly where it will go because of all the things i just said, the changing of wind speeds, the changing directions, things like that. i think it would be hard for it to end up across the northeast if it s solely drifting by the i winds because the winds will be north to south. we have this extreme cold blast in the northeast right now, and that s sort of driving those up level winds from north to south. i think it would hold on to that trajectory as of right now. of course so many things to consider, and like you said super weird that i m talking to you about this. based on the weather knowledge we know, this is what we re thinking right now. thank you. joining us is matthew smith, a storm chaser who took still photos of it over warrensburg, missouri. matthew, appreciate you joining us. again, we are talking to a storm chaser now chasing a chai inesey
Good evening, we begin with breaking news. the pentagon now saying a second chinese spy balloon is currently crossing latin america. that s on top of the one now floating somewhere over this country. exact whereabouts unknown. something so unexpected to be what it is where it is that it left people asking questions like this. what planet is that? actually, that s a good question. it s not mars or venus. the balloon is the size of three buses equipped with solar panels for power, and surveillance equipment. spotted yesterday crossing montana including over icbm sites. it drifted across nebraska spotted across missouri floating at 60,000 feet following the prevailing wednesday. in a moment we ll take a look at where it could be headed next. today china said it was, quote, civilian air ship, a weather research vehicle gone astray, and secretary of state blinken postponed his upcoming trip to beijing. any country that has its air
China s list of bad behavior. what sort of questions would you like answered right away? i want to know what went into the process of whether they were going to shoot it down or any other procedure that might be out there to be able to capture that balloon. i want to know how many times has this happened in the past. i want to know how many times this has flown over montana. we are an icbm site, and there s just a lot more questions that need to be answered as far as what happened. now, i m not making any assertions of what the military decisions they ve made are the wrong ones. i just want to know the thought process behind them so we can be sure this country remains safe. i know you re also concerned about chinese government or associated with the government buying up farmland in the united states. you have pass act in congress. 100% correct, anderson. senator rounds and myself have a bill we re carrying to stop
Last thing i m very concerned about is that this isn t the fis first or this isn t the last time. if balloon is allowed to float fre fre free basically, when is the balloon that has the emp going to arrive? that s something we don t know. also, if china can do it, balloon technology is probably not that advanced, there s probably a lot of other countries that could do it as well. yeah, certainly there could be. we can do something like this as well, but the violation of the air space is a serious deal. it s one thing if a balloon would fly over international waters off the coast of the united states. it s a completely other thing to have it flying over missouri, and real, real concerns here. secretary cohen, if this was an iranian balloon or a north korean balloon, would we have ra reacted the same way? i think we would have because the first thing we need to do is, number one, is the balloon a military or security threat. but number two, can we get