Every objection you are raising is incredibly, almost boringly, explainable. They’ve been able to geolocate the survelliance balloon and the base and from that we know a few things:
- The object is at about 1800-2000 feet, its direction of travel, its approximate size, its approximate ground speed.
- We are viewing it through FLIR, from above.
- A second geolocated video shows a similar but different object miles away.
So on to the objections. Have you even viewed what balloons look like when being pushed by the wind at height? No, and neither have any of us. That said, they aren’t going to look like what we are used to seeing balloons look like from the ground. Especially in a very brief video. Looking down on an aircraft from above, a short snapshot, it’s very hard to tell what it is doing or whether it’s rising or flying level. Balloons are doing so even more slowly.
Balloons in Iraq? Least problematic element. Balloons can and do travel miles and miles and Iraq in 2018 was hardly a desolate war zone everywhere. Iraqis can and do release balloons at parties and weddings. The balloons do what they do everywhere, which is drift in the direction of the wind and rise until they either burst or equalize depending on weather and what they might have tied to them and how full they were inflated. And the military will not be able to get in the business of giving the public a firm answer of what they are based on a grainy FLIR image. Nor do they just gun down anything that they don’t recognize.
So yeah, you’re left with saying “is this thing that is balloon bunch size and drifting like balloons like balloons? Or extra planetary intelligence, or a top secret wild probe that’s been reverse engineered or whatever.
The extensive records of this are a bit of a sharpshooter fallacy; there’s a surprisingly lot of stuff floating and/or flying about that is extremely terrestrial in origin. The military has the best sensors and watches the sky more than anyone else. Sensitive spaces are especially well surveilled. It’s no surprise at all— the least surprising thing— that we see these phenomena most often in the areas we are watching; especially factoring in that they are the spaces our very terrestrial adversaries most want to see.
I don’t know what to tell you about ESP and remote viewing man. The CIA defunded that program and declassified it because it produced nothing of relevance. I don’t know how you retcon that into amazing success; and the two people you mention are two individuals who made a living by claiming they could do it. I thought we left Uri Gellar behind.