Our editorial today is excellent on the issue of the Chinese spy balloon and the report that says it was able to transmit intelligence back to China.

But let’s recall that the U.S. shot down four flying objects in the month of February. What were the other three?

We still don’t know for sure. The move portrayed weakness and confusion on the part of the U.S. As Noah wrote yesterday:

In the days that followed the balloon’s big adventure, U.S. F-16s and F-22s shot multiple unknown objects out of American airspace at a pace that betrayed the frenetic nature of it all. When the president finally deigned to update the American people about the circumstances that convinced him to light up North America’s skies, he admitted that the Air Force’s targets were likely commercial or scientific in nature. Indeed, he had no “evidence that there has been a sudden increase in the number of objects in the sky.” Merely that radar systems had opened their aperture and were picking up signals that Defense officials previously overlooked (for good reason).

So, what inspired this panicky response? Was it related to specific intelligence? Did the administration overreact in the face of the political criticisms he received as a result of his lethargic response to China’s incursion? Did we just tighten up the aperture on those radar systems? If so, are we no longer seeing the vehicles that U.S. officials realized only in retrospect were foreign objects?

All good questions. To which I’d add: Shouldn’t someone be missing the other three objects?

If these were being used for commercial or scientific purposes, shouldn’t some companies or scientists be at least a little miffed that their technology was blown out of the sky for no good reason by the United States Air Force?

Maybe these were discarded devices that had stopped being used and therefore nobody is missing them. If so, that raises the question of why the U.S. decided, seemingly only in the month of February, to shoot down random bits of atmospheric trash willy-nilly. If not, the companies or scientists whose property was destroyed deserve an apology, and the federal government should compensate them for their lost technology.

Either way, the American people deserve a fuller explanation of how their military was used in February against flying objects.