A Chinese spy balloon prompted a team of grad students at MIIS to get to work.

A few weeks ago, when the Chinese balloon that flew into U.S. airspace made national headlines, a team of graduate students at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey was quietly working to answer a question: Where did the balloon launch from?

The story for them started when journalists at the Wall Street Journal reached out to Planet Labs, a satellite imagery company that students and teachers at MIIS work closely with, hoping to use its imagery to find where the balloon launched from, working off a tip that it was somewhere in northeastern China or Inner Mongolia.

Sam Lair, who’s working toward a master’s degree in nonproliferation and terrorism studies, took that tip and ran with it, and with a colleague, set about using the Planet Lab imagery to hunt it down. Lair ultimately succeeded in finding a launch site, and it got written up in the Journal.

Then, as a journalist with Rolling Stone was working with Lair and his colleagues on a follow-up story, the Washington Post broke the news that U.S. intelligence believed the balloon in question launched from Hainan Island, China, so the MIIS students started hustling to find a launch site there.

Lair says they all work independently, then reconvene to reach a consensus; in the case of Hainan Island, it was Lair’s colleague Michael Duitsman who first identified what the team would later agree was the likeliest launch site – a concrete pad 140 meters wide, in a facility encompassed by a security fence.

The whole purpose of the students’ work, Lair says, “is to replicate the functions of an intelligence agency for the purposes of civil society.” Lair isn’t yet sure what he’ll do with his degree when he graduates next spring, but he’s enjoying himself in the meantime.

“It was pretty cool,” he says. “It’s always fun chasing down mysteries with your friends.”