A witness who captured video of the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon being shot down said he happened to see it as he was enjoying a Saturday in Myrtle Beach.
“We were at lunch, and we were kind of, like, joking around. Like, ‘What if we see it? What if it’s right here?’” said Joey Lopes, a social studies teacher from the nearby coastal city of Georgetown, South Carolina.
Lopes told CNN’s Jim Acosta Saturday afternoon that he decided to pull his phone out and began recording the scene in the sky just before a missile took the balloon out.
“We saw the fighter jets circling around. There were about three or four of them,” said Lopes. “And then after that, we heard a bang, and the balloon was gone.”
Lopes added he was concerned about the possibility of debris falling if the balloon was shot over land, but was glad that the military waited until it was out to sea.
“I’ve seen a lot of crazy stuff in Myrtle Beach over the last three years. This is by far the craziest,” Lopes said.