Before President Joe Biden ordered the US military to shoot down a Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina earlier this month, the last time an errant balloon occupied such a dominant place in America’s public discourse was 8 July 1947, when officials at a US Army airfield in Roswell, New Mexico issued a press release claiming to have recovered a crashed “flying disc”.
Amid hysteria about a potential alien invasion, the Army quickly reversed course and said the craft they’d recovered was nothing more than a weather balloon.
