FBI lab will get to the ‘guts’ of Chinese balloon – White House

The US has finished work to recover sunken remnants of the Chinese balloon shot down off the coast of South Carolina and the debris reinforces that it was for spying, officials have said. The White House national security spokesman, John Kirby, said the wreckage included “electronics and optics” but declined to say what the US had learned from it so far.

“It’s a significant amount [of recovered material], including the payload structure as well as some of the electronics and the optics, and all that’s now at the FBI laboratory in Quantico,” Kirby said.

Kirby said the US had already learned a lot about the balloon by observing it as it flew over the United States. “We’re going to learn even more, we believe, by getting a look at the guts inside it and seeing how it worked and what it was capable of.” The US military announced the recovery operations ended on Thursday and the final pieces were on their way to an FBI lab in Virginia for analysis. Air and maritime restrictions off South Carolina were lifted.

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