In the Midwest, close to the Canadian border, American fighter jets shot down a “unidentified object,” according to the Pentagon. This is the most recent incident since a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon put North American security forces on high alert.
According to a statement from Pentagon spokesman Patrick Ryder, the item was flying at a height of 6,100 meters (20,000 feet), and while it posed no military threat, it might have interfered with domestic aviation traffic.
According to the statement, it was shot down over Lake Huron near the US-Canada border at 2:42 p.m. local time (19:42 GMT).
It was the fourth aircraft to be downed in less than a week and the third to be shot down over North America in as many days.
When a white balloon suddenly emerged over the US in late January and lingered there for days, a flurry of defensive activity started. Fighter aircraft finally shot it down on February 4 off the coast of South Carolina after the US claimed it was a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon.
An officer told reporters that the most recent item seemed to be octagonal in shape, with strings dangling from it but no obvious cargo.
The Pentagon reported that it had been discovered over Montana close to important military facilities, which had forced the shutdown of US airspace.
General Glen VanHerck of the US Air Force, who oversees the defense of US airspace, told reporters that the military has not been able to determine the nature of the three most recent objects, how they maintain their altitude, or their origin.
VanHerck, commander of Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), said, “We’re calling them objects, not balloons, for a reason.
VanHerck stated that he wouldn’t exclude any possible explanation, including aliens.
I’ll leave that up to the intelligence and counterintelligence communities, he said.
Legislators have demanded additional details about the objects.
One of numerous Michigan lawmakers who supported the decision to shoot the object down, US congresswoman Debbie Dingell, said, “We need the facts about where they are originating from, what their mission is, and why their frequency is growing.”
The government needs to be more open about the most recent incursions, according to Heino Klinck, a former US deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia.
What the government is currently struggling with, according to Klinck, is deciding what information to make public without jeopardizing its sources and methodology. “We don’t want to reveal to our enemies our secrets about what we can and cannot detect or how we get certain kinds of information. However, it is imperative that the government speak up.
The most recent item was initially assumed to be an anomaly when it was seen on Saturday night over Montana. According to US officials who were aware of the incident and talked to The Associated Press news agency on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive activities, radar picked it up again on Sunday hanging over the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and traveling over Lake Huron.
Earlier in the day, partial airspace around the lake was closed by US and Canadian authorities as fighters raced to intercept and attempt to identify the item.
Authorities in Canada are currently searching for the remains of the item that was shot down on Saturday over the remote Yukon region of the country’s far northwest.
The object is being searched for and being analyzed by recovery teams, the prime minister Justin Trudeau told reporters on Sunday.
“The security of our citizens is our top priority,” he said, adding that it had posed a threat to civilian aircraft. “I made the decision to have that unidentified object shot down.”
The three most recent flying objects were significantly smaller, looked very different, and traveled at lower altitudes than the alleged spy balloon.
China claims the first balloon was a civilian weather monitoring station and disputes claims that it was being used for surveillance. It criticized the United States for shooting it down.
US authorities are concerned about what they believe to be a massive aerial surveillance operation run by Beijing and want to properly identify the other objects that have been shot down recently.
