AMHERST, N.Y. — We've seen all the focus and concern over those objects floating over the US in recent weeks with several of them being shot down.
2 On Your Side got some insight from a UB aerospace engineering professor with a look back at previous concerns with air defense here in Western New York.
Since what the Pentagon described as a Chinese spy balloon crossed the country and was shot down off the coast of South Carolina, everybody's been looking up. And then of course we heard about three other objects. One each was shot down over Alaska and Canada by Air Force jets. Then one on Sunday was brought down over Lake Huron near Michigan which was closer to us here in WNY.
UB Professor John Crassidis, who actually has students building satellites and has a U.S. Air Force grant to track space debris in orbit says it's not yet clear what they were.
But at least now NORAD or North American Air Defense Command, which also has its Eastern Defense Sector in Rome, New York near Utica, is able to better detect and track them with apparent tweaks to radar.
"If they have any kind of radio signal we can track them and figure out pretty easily where that's emanating from. These balloons are kind of us giving us a new direction in domain awareness because a lot of these balloons we didn't even know about. Satellites we can track very easily for the most part. Now with these balloons coming up - that's probably gonna send up a whole bunch of things that we do - how are we gonna do our defense for our airspace."
He also points out there are many balloon launches and the National Weather Service actually launches twice a day at its station at Buffalo Niagara International Airport. Crassidis says UB has put some up as high as 120,000 thousand feet. That is twice the height of that original Chinese balloon.
"The rule is if it's under four pounds you don't have to get any permission from FAA. We do call the airport and say hey we're launching this stuff but who knows where it goes after that. Every balloon at least for what we do in terms of research balloons we send up - we have to put a device so its picked up by radar so even though we don't necessarily have to report it they're picked up by radar so obviously you don't want to have a collision with an aircraft."
The professor does add though, "I'm a little surprised that nobody has claimed it so that adds a lot of mystery to it."
And remember in the 1960's we actually had Nike Missile bases here in the Buffalo area to shoot down Russian bombers with concerns they could come through Canada. They were closed down as that threat subsided. The old structures of those bases still exist in our area.
Crassidis says he just won't discuss the alien source conspiracy because "I'm not going there.
However the military itself now once again investigates unidentified aerial phenomena spotted by pilots and others which used to be just UFOs.