For more than a week now, the media — and government officials — have been tracking the movements of what is believed to be a Chinese spy balloon all across America like NORAD tracking Santa. Exactly what it’s doing and/or what information it has collected — if any — is not yet known. But Seth Meyers is having trouble looking at this bulbous mass and feeling terrified, and couldn’t help poking fun at the mass hysteria surrounding it. As he explained on Monday night’s “A Closer Look” segment:
For two days, the nation was paralyzed by an existential crisis the likes of which this country has never seen. A crisis which is so dire, it threatened our institutions, our political systems, our very way of life. A waking nightmare that has left us frightened and confused. A watershed moment that has changed America forever: there was a balloon.
Meyers played an array of frantic media clips about the balloon — which is roughly the size of the Moon itself — which recounted the floating terror’s path of chaos across the U.S. Then suggested that we should maybe “stop calling it a ‘Chinese spy balloon’ when a far more accurate name is ‘sh*t Chinese spy balloon.’ The only way this balloon could have had a higher profile is if it had its own Instagram account.”
“There’s something about it being a ‘balloon’ that just makes it very hard to take seriously,” Meyers continued. “It would be one thing to send a fleet of fighter jets or a naval vessel — that would be scary. But a balloon? Are they trying to scare us or cheer us up at the hospital?”
You can watch the full segment above.