A senior US general responsible for bringing down a Chinese spy balloon said on Monday the military had not detected previous spy balloons before the one that appeared on Jan. 28 over the United States and called it an "awareness gap."
General Glen VanHerck, head of U.S. North American Aerospace Defense Command, said the balloon was 200 feet tall and the payload under it weighed a couple thousand pounds.
He did not rule out that there could have been explosives on the balloon.