【2025 Archives】

Every once in a while025 Archives you get the perfect photo. Maybe the lighting is just right in a certain bathroom mirror. Or maybe you caught the sunset just so. Or maybe, it's just a good pic — I, for instance, really like one from my wedding.

Well, one pilot snapped a selfie that is going to be hard to top. It's a pretty perfect photo. They were able to get a selfie alongside the now-infamous Chinese spy balloon that dotted across the United States before being the first in a string of airborne objects shot down by the U.S. military.

I mean, just look at this amazing photo. I might suspect it of being a social media hoax if it hadn't been released by the Department of Defense.

What an incredible selfie — the way you can see the pilot's helmet, the stunning, near-space horizon and the balloon floating on by.

The Pentagon released the photo taken by the pilot of a U-2 spy plane, which is a glider-esque aircraft capable of operating at high altitudes. The Chinese spy balloon was apparently floating at about 60,000 feet when it was spotted. The photo was taken on Feb. 3 over the continental U.S., the Department of Defense said, just one day before it was shot down over the Atlantic Ocean.

• Bowen Yang is a delightfully cantankerous Chinese spy balloon in SNL's cold open
• Are Twitter's birthday balloons broken?
• NASA researchers developed a balloon for detecting earthquakes — Future Blink
• The Foreo UFO 2 isn't an alien ship — it's the sheet mask's smarter sibling
• NASA says it will spend nine months studying UFOs

The high-profile sighting of the spy balloon, in part, helped spark a rapid, sudden increase in UFOs being shot down in the U.S. The country was apparently expanded its parameters in the aircraft it was searching for, which meant they ended up shooting down four UFOs in just one month.

While we haven't gotten a good look at those other objects, we now have an incredible image of the balloon that started it all.