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VEN (WASHINGTON) — While the United States Marine Band played Thank Heaven for Little Girls, a demented, amyl nitrite-enhanced President Biden — adorned in titanium-framed Chinese aviator sun glasses, gifted to him by China President and Biden Benefactor Xi Jinping — explained to reporters Saturday, that China finally shot down their own surveillance balloon “after we gave it enough time to complete its assigned task of gathering critical information on America’s nuclear missile sites and our electrical grid from Montana to the Carolinas.”

Mr Biden went on to say that although he knew about the balloon “for several weeks,” Secretary of Defense “and the best damn diversity hire in my administration,” Lloyd Austin, told him that although math was not his best subject, he estimated that the balloon was approximately eleventy thousand bazillion quadrillion kilometers above the Earth and out of range of our surface-to-air (SAM) missiles, which — Mr Biden added — we don’t have any more anyway, because we gave them all to the Ukraine in exchange for three To Whom It May Concern IOUs and a shopping bag filled “all the way to the top” with 1×2.5 inch laminated glow-in-the-dark Ukrainian flag stickers.

“Look, these little Chinese guys might look dumb, but in reality, they’re actually pretty smart — I’m told they tossed out all their sandbags over Canada to put the balloon into the outer stratosphere, so we just had to wait for it to lose steam. And that’s what we did.”

Secretary of State and Mah Jong enthusiast Antony Blinken added that the Intelligence Community believes that the plan was to insert the surveillance balloon into the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, but for some as yet unknown reason they launched Lonrald Mrick Donrarld V1.0 prematurely, perhaps owing to the misalignment of the Gregorian and Chinese calendars.

Developing . . . .