Silent Surveillance: Mystery Balloons Return to American Skies

White objects drift silently at 60,000 feet over multiple states, and nobody seems to know who’s watching.

Something is floating above America again, and the answers are just as unsettling as the questions.

Objects in the Sky

White spherical objects have been spotted drifting at extreme altitudes over Colorado, Arizona, and Alabama throughout 2025. These sightings have rekindled memories of February 2023, when a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon crossed the entire continental United States before an F-22 fighter jet shot it down off the coast of South Carolina.

Locals flooded social media with photos and videos, many pleading for help identifying the mysterious objects. The balloons hover far above commercial airliners, which typically cruise at 35,000 feet. These objects operate at around 59,200 feet, making them barely visible from the ground as small white dots against the sky.

Arizona Activity

Arizona has become a particular hotspot for balloon activity, with multiple high-altitude surveillance balloons operated by the U.S. Army and a private company flying over the Tucson area. Multiple sightings have been reported throughout the year, with one prompting speculation that it was a spy camera platform from China transmitting military secrets in fast bursts.

Later reports determined that at least one of the Tucson objects was part of a U.S. military test. The Thunderhead balloons fly between 60,000 to 100,000 feet, twice the height of a commercial airliner, and can carry much larger payloads than a conventional drone or other small high-altitude spy planes.

Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, raised concerns about the technology. Stanley stated that it is a technology that should not and constitutionally cannot be applied to the American people, and that even testing for eventual overseas use in legitimate combat theaters raises questions about what kind of data is being collected.

The Thunderhead system boasts the ability to stay afloat for up to 30 days. The most recent incident in Arizona was reported about two weeks before mid-October 2025, when a balloon was spotted drifting over Lemmon. Social media users attempted to track it on flight monitoring apps but failed. One person noted it wasn’t showing on Flightradar24, while another commented that the balloons usually fly at 60,000 feet and must be huge to be visible from the ground.

Sightings in June prompted concern when multiple high-altitude balloons lingered over the Tucson and Sierra Vista areas for more than a week.

Colorado and Alabama

In Boulder, Colorado, locals reported seeing what was later identified as an Aerostar Thunderhead steerable balloon. One observer explained that it’s not just a weather balloon, noting it can also carry signal-gathering equipment, communications equipment, or other sensors.

In Alabama, meteorologist James Spann posted on social media about receiving numerous reports of a high-altitude object over North Alabama, identifying it as a balloon with the designation HBAL787 that had been drifting south over northeast Alabama. The balloon eventually moved into Tennessee, hovering at an altitude of 59,200 feet.

The Company Behind the Balloons

Aerostar, a company that develops balloons for scientific research, telecommunications and military applications, has confirmed ownership of several of the objects spotted across the country. The company is headquartered in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and has nearly 70 years of lighter-than-air innovation and expertise with two million flight hours in the stratosphere.

Aerostar achieved a world record in March 2025 when their HBAL684 flight concluded after 336 days, marking the longest continuous flight in the stratosphere by a controllable flight vehicle. The Thunderhead operates semi-autonomously using rechargeable solar power, providing services such as wildfire detection, maritime traffic monitoring, direct-to-handset cellular, or resilient tactical data links.

Anastasia Quanbeck, the culture and communications director at Aerostar, explained that their balloons have a range of capabilities including extending communications across wide distances, conducting environmental monitoring, earth observation, and scientific research. Aerostar launches hundreds of flights every year in full contact with the FAA and regional authorities.

Mistaken Identity

When an Aerostar Thunderhead balloon passed over Hawaii in April 2025, people mistook it for some kind of foreign matter, perhaps something extraterrestrial or a strange kind of weather pattern. In August 2025, a mysterious object seen floating miles over Anchorage, Alaska was later determined to be a domestic Aerostar Thunderhead High-Altitude balloon launched from the Malemute Drop Zone near Eagle River by Aerostar, as part of Arctic Edge 2025 military exercises.

The balloons are trackable on FlightRadar24, though not all sightings have appeared on the system. The Thunderhead Balloon System is a steerable multipurpose platform developed for stratospheric missions of long duration, with navigational capabilities and the ability to perform persistent flight over areas of interest.

The 2023 Chinese Balloon

The current sightings carry extra weight because of what happened in 2023. A suspected Chinese spy balloon made a cross-country trip over the U.S., passing over sensitive nuclear sites in Montana before gradually flying southeastward. President Biden gave his authorization on Wednesday to take down the surveillance balloon as soon as the mission could be accomplished without undue risk to American lives under the balloon’s path.

The surveillance equipment attached to the balloon was the size of two to three school buses. The balloon was successfully downed by a single missile at 2:39 p.m. on February 4, 2023, with debris scattered across seven nautical miles in water that gets up to about 47 feet deep.

Recovery operations concluded on February 16, 2023, after U.S. Navy assets successfully located and retrieved debris from the high-altitude surveillance balloon. The debris field was just about a square mile at depths of about 50 feet.

What Was Inside

A report released in February 2025 found that the Chinese balloon was secretly equipped with U.S.-made technology. Among the equipment recovered from the balloon were a satellite communication module from Iridium, sensors and other sophisticated surveillance equipment, some of which was housed in a foam cooler.

The five American companies whose parts were identified in the balloon were Iridium, Texas Instruments, Omega Engineering, Amphenol All Sensors Corp., and Onsemi, along with equipment from STMicroelectronics. A Chinese patent uncovered during the investigation showed that Beijing had already mapped out exactly how to use American satellite technology to control these spy balloons and harvest sensitive data.

The necessary equipment was reportedly easily available for purchase online. Jordan Hassim, Iridium’s executive director for communications, explained that there’s no way for the company to know what the use is of a specific module, noting it could be used for tracking whales, polar bears, or explorers hiking mountains.

Surveillance Concerns

After Chinese spy balloons made incursions into United States airspace in 2023, it was reported that the Army would begin pursuing a similar program to launch in 2025. Stanley from the ACLU suggested that systems like the ones Aerostar is developing could be used to deploy persistent surveillance systems, ultimately surveilling entire communities for days on end.

Wide-area persistent surveillance is a technique that got its start in early days of the Iraq war but later would find itself in the hands of police. The technology has evolved from being very heavy but is now light enough to fit onto blimps and balloons. Aerostar and the military have not elaborated on what systems are aboard the balloons over the Tucson area.

The objects continue to drift across American skies, operating at altitudes that make them difficult to see and harder to understand. Whether they’re conducting legitimate research, testing military capabilities, or serving purposes that remain classified, these silent sentinels remain a persistent presence overhead. The technology exists. The balloons are real. And they’re watching something down below.

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NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.