The White House on Monday denied Beijing's accusation that the United States has been sending balloons over China to conduct surveillance, as tensions about espionage rise between the two superpowers. ""It has repeatedly and wrongly claimed the surveillance balloon it sent over the United States was a weather balloon and to this day has failed to offer any credible explanations for its intrusion into our airspace and the airspace of others," a State Department spokesperson said in a statement. Washington's response marked the latest development in an increasingly tense saga that included the downing of an alleged Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina earlier this month, after it had traversed much of the United States