The US Pentagon admitted on Monday that at least three Chinese spy balloons flew over the US mainland during Donald Trump’s 2017-2021 administration due to a gap in its reports, CNN reported. The discovery came just days after another hot air balloon was shot down over South Carolina, which China admitted was its own.

The information gap mentioned by General Glenn VanHerke is related to the tracking of objects in flight at the time.

There is a related Pentagon report from April 2022 that talks about a spy balloon from China that circled the entire planet at 65,000 feet in 2019, descending both over Hawaii and along Florida before rising again.

The US Air Force intelligence report is the first evidence that the US military knew about Chinese spy balloons long before the latest incident.

However, it is not clear from the documents when US officials were first briefed on the Chinese flights or how they assessed their purpose.

China has “developed several high-altitude balloons that can operate at 65,000 feet or even 328,000 feet for months,” the US Air Force estimate adds.

The news comes as Trump administration officials questioned in recent days how Chinese spy balloons could have crossed US soil in the same way without the knowledge of the Americans, according to the Biden administration and senior Defense Department officials.

US officials acknowledged that in the early days of the Biden administration, a Chinese spy balloon briefly crossed the continental United States.

Source: CNN, Politico.