China Confirms Second Balloon Over Latin America, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 6, 2023.

By Brian Spegele

Beijing filed a formal complaint with the U.S. Embassy over military takedown of previous balloon, calling it an overreaction

BEI­JING—China con­firmed that it was the source of a bal­loon de­tected fly­ing over Latin Amer­ica, de­scrib­ing it in sim­i­lar terms to the sus­pected sur­veillance bal­loon that the U.S. shot down over the week­end.

Pen­tagon of­fi­cials over the week­end said the sec­ond bal­loon was seen tran­sit­ing across Cen­tral and South Amer­ica, and char­ac­ter-ized it as a fleet of sur­veillance bal­loons op­er­ated by China. That an­nounce­ment fol­lowed the de­ci­sion to shoot down an­other such bal­loon that had been fly­ing over the U.S. on Sat­ur­day, which drew crit­i­cism from China.

Chi­nese For­eign Min­istry spokes­woman Mao Ning on Mon­day de­scribed the bal­loon over Latin Amer­ica as an un­manned air­ship for re­search pur­poses that had been blown off course by bad weather—an ex­pla­na­tion vir­tu­ally iden­ti­cal to the one China gave for the bal­loon that flew over the U.S. Bei­jing has pledged to pro­tect the rights of a Chi­nese com­pany in­volved in the U.S. in­ci­dent, al­though it hasn’t iden­ti­fied that com­pany.

(To be continued…)

China Confirms Second Balloon Over Latin America