When Chase Doak of Billings, Montana, decided in 2021 to give up his journalistic career and become a healthcare data analyst little did he know his biggest scoop still lay ahead.
“Yay! One of my photos is trending,” the former Billings Gazette photojournalist tweeted on February 2.
The 37-year-old soon tweeted again, as the enormity of the moment started to sink in.
“Not gonna lie. First, I thought this was a #ufo. Then I thought it was @elonmusk in a Wizard of Oz cosplay scenario. But it was just a run-of-the-mill Chinese spy balloon!”
Even this tweet, posted with Mr Doak’s video of the balloon high in the skies above Montana, has to date only garnered several hundred likes despite being viewed tens of thousands of times.
I followed Mr Doak on Twitter.
He followed me right back.
“Hello, I’m an Australian journalist. Can I call you to talk about your video?!” I wrote via direct message.
“Sure!” Chase replied, along with his phone number.
It was Thursday evening in Washington DC and the Pentagon was in the process of confirming that the strange white object spotted by residents of Billings — the reason their airport traffic had been grounded — was a “high-altitude surveillance balloon”, which US officials told reporters they were confident originated from China.
So began several days of high-stakes diplomatic drama as said balloon made its way across the continental United States before meeting its end on Saturday afternoon over the Atlantic Ocean.
The balloon was shot down off the coast of South Carolina by an F-22 fighter jet deployed from Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, following calls for action by some Republicans.
How the suspected spy balloon caused a national security rift in the US
“SHOOT DOWN THE BALLOON”, former president Trump roared on his social media platform, Truth Social.
“POP THIS BALLOON!” echoed the front page of the Murdoch-owned New York Post.
Former Congressman Adam Kinzinger, who is an ex-US Air Force pilot, argued the US couldn’t shoot it down, because it was too high in the sky.
He later had to retract that statement.
“Turns out it’s missile-able … when lower!” he tweeted.
The Pentagon had initially declared the “option” too risky because of the threat to property and people posed by the debris, which would rain down from 60,000 feet.
Over several days, the balloon, which Beijing claimed was a wayward weather research “airship”, meandered across sensitive military sites including the nuclear missile silos in Montana, into Missouri, and over to the Carolinas.
“What we’re not going to do is get into an hour-by-hour location of the balloon,” Pentagon spokesman Brigadier General Pat Ryder told reporters on Friday, before going slightly off script to say “the public certainly has the ability to look up in the sky and see where the balloon is.”
And they did.
Balloon spotting briefly became a national pastime with an almost nostalgic quality.
It felt like a throwback to the Cold War era, when the US and the Soviet Union used balloons for intelligence gathering.
The balloon saga felt harmless compared with the grinding, bloody war of attrition in Ukraine being waged by Russia’s president, a former KGB officer, Vladimir Putin.
The blurry moon-like mass may well have been a sophisticated spy machine.
Certainly, its intrusion in US airspace has heightened tension between the world’s two biggest superpowers and caused America’s top diplomat, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, to suddenly call off a high-profile visit to Beijing.
But US officials have also said the balloon, roughly three buses in size, likely had no greater intelligence-gathering capacity than other known Chinese spying equipment.
So, what harm could a bit of sky-gazing do?
The international fallout from the balloon goes beyond the US
Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, who also heads up the defence portfolio, arrived in Washington last week with a spring in his step following high-level diplomatic meetings in Paris and London.
Addressing Australian media in the US capital, he was keen to talk about nuclear-powered submarines to be secured through the AUKUS alliance to offset Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific region.
But the first question he faced from attending reporters was about the balloon.
And as social media lit up with sightings of the balloon, speculation about whether it was a deliberate provocation by Beijing began to swirl online.
President Joe Biden faced a barrage of criticism from those who accused him of appearing weak in the face of perceived Chinese aggression.
“It would be great if an average Joe shot it down because China Joe won’t,” taunted Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.
President Biden didn’t comment publicly at first but emerged from Air Force One on Saturday morning, in his signature aviator sunglasses, to reassure reporters, “we’ll take care of it.”
A few hours later, residents of coastal Carolinas communities who gazed up at the clear blue sky would witness a truly cinematic moment as the F-22 fired its single missile into the Chinese balloon.
Resembling a discarded wet tissue, or perhaps a used condom, this object of intense speculation and, let’s face it, some joyous spectacle, fell towards the sea amid cries of “holy crap”.
While viewers at Surfside Beach in South Carolina may have been awed, they weren’t naive.
“They should have shot it down when it first been seen in California,” one woman said, likely meaning Montana.
“That was just stupid in my opinion.”
“Why would it be here, why are they worried about our weather and not theirs?” a man asked.
Few in the US appear to buy China’s weather balloon claim.
The Pentagon has said because the balloon remnants landed in relatively shallow waters, around 15 metres deep, the operation currently underway to recover the debris should be “fairly easy”.
If it’s successful, defence officials will then have to decide how much information to share publicly about what they find, balancing national security interests and the need to prove to the public that the F-22 didn’t notch up its first known air-to-air kill by taking out a weather balloon.
In the meantime, the tone from China has become decidedly frostier.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry is now reserving the right to respond to what it has declared an “obvious overreaction”.
Far from being a bold and deliberate provocation by Beijing on the eve of a high-level visit, many experts now say the timing was likely a blunder.
David Schullman, the senior director of the Global China Hub at the Atlantic Council, put it down to a sort of timetabling error.
Speaking to NPR, he argued Chinese authorities likely wanted the Blinken visit to proceed, “particularly as they’re dealing with significant domestic problems around the rapid pulling back from their zero-Covid policies”.
“I think this was something that was routinised with the PLA, the Chinese military, you know expecting to send this over as part of something that was pre-scheduled … and of course now I think there’s probably some discussions internally about the wisdom of continuing to send that balloon across right ahead of Secretary Blinken’s proposed visit,” he said.
A setback for US-China relations — and Biden
The balloon fiasco has occurred at a particularly sensitive time in diplomatic relations between the United States and China.
From trade to Taiwan and human rights — the relationship is fragile at best and will likely now take further patching up.
China’s vice-foreign minister, Xie Feng, said he lodged a formal complaint with the US Embassy on Sunday over the “US attack on a Chinese civilian unmanned airship by military force.”
There’s also significant fallout domestically for President Biden, who’s still facing criticism for not acting sooner.
House intelligence committee chairman Mike Turner described bursting the balloon after it had left America’s shores as “like tackling the quarterback after the game is over.”
As the president prepares for his State of the Union address this week, the balloon is still hovering in national media coverage.
Many questions remain unanswered and the “Gang of Eight”, congressional leaders led by Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy, has demanded a briefing from the President.
Other questions remain.
General Glen VanHerck, head of North American Aerospace Defense Command, recently admitted previous surveillance balloons had gone undetected at least three times during the Trump administration and once since President Biden took office.
“We did not detect those threats and that’s a domain awareness gap that we have to figure out,” he said.
Exactly how many previous spy balloon incidents have there been?
And what happens next time a billowing white mass is spotted in the skies over Montana, or elsewhere?
The Columbia Journalism Review noted the suspected Chinese spy balloon had gained such renown it “picked up a definite article and shed associated adjectives, becoming simply ‘The Balloon’.”
The story of The Balloon still has a long way to run.
As for Chase Doak, who tipped off his old workmate Larry Mayer, a photographer Larry Mayer at the Billings Gazette, about the mysterious white object in the sky, life has pretty much returned to normal.
Although his Twitter bio now reads:
“Former journalist. Beer connoisseur. Collector of cheap synthesisers. Amateur Chinese spy balloon photographer.”