To be clear, I think the Chinese spy balloon was a very serious situation. A belligerent communist nation run by a dictator was trying to gather information on US territory in a way they knew was indefensible and they got caught. I’m glad we were able to recover significant portions of that balloon, including the payload so that we’ll be able to determine just what the Chinese were doing.

But while that situation with the spy balloon and our delayed response to it is concerning, what has happened since may be more farce than tragedy. The Biden administration used F-22s to shoot down three more objects, one of which was described as a “small, metallic balloon with a tethered payload below it.” That balloon was shot down over Canada on Feb. 11 and so far no one has been able to find the remnants of it. But now there are some indications it may have been a private balloon launched by an American hobby club from Illinois.

A small, globe-trotting balloon declared “missing in action” by an Illinois-based hobbyist club on Feb. 15 has emerged as a candidate to explain one of the three mystery objects shot down by four heat-seeking missiles launched by U.S. Air Force fighters since Feb. 10.

The club—the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB)—is not pointing fingers yet.

But the circumstantial evidence is at least intriguing. The club’s silver-coated, party-style, “pico balloon” reported its last position on Feb. 10 at 38,910 ft. off the west coast of Alaska, and a popular forecasting tool—the HYSPLIT model provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—projected the cylindrically shaped object would be floating high over the central part of the Yukon Territory on Feb. 11. That is the same day a Lockheed Martin F-22 shot down an unidentified object of a similar description and altitude in the same general area.

I’ve never come across this particular hobby before but apparently it has become a thing over the past decade. Even some middle school science classes have launched these pico balloons in order to learn about weather patterns. The balloons themselves range from $12 up to $180 and you can buy a prebuilt payload with solar panels so the balloon will report back its location and altitude for under $100.

Scientific Balloon Solutions, which sells the balloons used by these hobbyists, has a page about a world record for this kind of flight, a small balloon which spent more than two years aloft and circled the globe 35 times. Ron Meadows, the owner of SBS, tried to contact the military and the FBI to let them know the small balloons they had been detecting recently were probably these hobbyist balloons that are no threat to anyone. He couldn’t get anyone to talk to him. “They’re going to look not too intelligent to be shooting them down,” Meadows said.

Again, the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade hasn’t blamed the feds yet, but the evidence that one of their balloons may have been the one shot down over Canada is compelling. The balloon last reported its location off the coast of an uninhabited island in Alaska and the forecast showed it heading over Canada.

At the Washington Post, Philip Bump says some hobbyists believe they know the type of balloon used (that’s it pictured up top).

The hobbyist site RTL-SDR.com notes that pico balloon K9YO — the one launched by NIBBB in October — was probably this 32-inch Mylar balloon. If it was the one downed by a U.S. fighter, it was struck by an AIM-9X Sidewinder missile, a projectile that has a 5-inch diameter.

It’s important to point out that this size may be smaller than has been indicated elsewhere for the object downed on Feb. 11. In a news conference this weekend, a government official suggested the three post-Chinese balloon objects were of a similar size, with one said to be the size of a “small car.” He also noted, though, that the slow speeds of the objects made them hard to describe accurately from moving aircraft.

So maybe this was the balloon that was shot down or maybe they shot down something a little bigger. In any case, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense to be shooting down a $100 hobby balloon with a $450,000 sidewinder missile. I’m all for shooting down spy balloons but let’s give the hobby guys, and the taxpayers, a break.