This audio, which was first reported by The Drive, was not on the civilian radio frequencies that commercial pilots use. The Air Force pilots were communicating on an unencrypted military frequency that the North American Aerospace Defense Command uses to conduct missions to secure the eastern US, under the control centre named Huntress.
Aviation enthusiasts with the right radios scan for Huntress missions and other military flights as a hobby, calling out exercises.
Ken Harrell, a 68-year-old retiree from Summerville, South Carolina, is one of those enthusiasts. On Saturday, he recorded the exchange of the balloon shoot-down.
NORAD confirmed the authenticity of the recording to The Associated Press in a statement.
When Harrell got started a few years ago, he said he “bought the right kind of scanner, put up, you know, a decent antenna and a lot of software to connect to the scanner and just started listening”. He said the scanner only cost about US$160 to get started.
On Saturday, he got a call from a fellow enthusiast who said Huntress was guiding F-22s in to hit what the Pentagon has said was a spy balloon and China has insisted was a civilian weather balloon.
“He says, get on the scanner, man! Huntress has been controlling the F-22 Raptors, you know for the balloon, they’re gonna do it,” Harrell said. “So I jump up, crank up everything, and started listening in.”
When Harrell heard the pilots’ and controller’s voices, “I was excited,” he said.
“I’ve listened to a lot of other stuff – fighters practising, intercept exercises, and that’s cool, but when I first turned the scanner on and it went to my local Huntress frequency, it was pretty apparent: This was a mission. Boom.”
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