On Sunday February 12th. the US shot down yet another unidentified flying object, this time over Lake Huron near the Canadian border, in what is the fourth such incident this month. It was downed by Air Force and National Guard pilots on Sunday, Michigan Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin said on Twitter.
On Saturday Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that a U.S. F-22 fighter jet shot down an unidentified cylindrical object over the northern Yukon territory, saying Canadian forces would recover and analyze the wreckage.
Canadian Defence Minister Anita Anand declined to speculate about the origin of the object, which she said was cylindrical in shape.
She stopped short of calling it a balloon but said it was smaller than the Chinese balloon shot down off South Carolina’s coast a week ago, though similar in appearance.
Aloft at 40,000 feet (12,200 m), it posed a risk to civilian air traffic and was shot down at 3:41 EST (2041 GMT), she added.
Earlier, a U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptor shot down a relatively high-flying “object” over U.S. territorial waters off the coast of Alaska.
National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby first disclosed the new shootdown, which occurred at approximately 1:45 PM EST, at a press conference on Friday. Pentagon Press Secretary U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder gave additional information at a subsequent press conference that wrapped just moments ago. Neither could provide specific details about the object, but said it was flying at approximately 40,000 feet and presented a potential hazard to civilian flight traffic.
The U.S.-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) first detected the object on February 9 and tracked it using a ground radar. Fighter aircraft were subsequently sent to intercept and attempt to identify it. NSC spokesperson Kirby said the relatively small size and slow speed of the object, together with the initial intercept taking place in darkness, limited what information could be quickly gleaned.
Where exactly the object was shot down and where the wreckage fell is not immediately clear. Kirby said that the incident had taken place somewhere in the northeastern corner of Alaska near the border with Canada. Significant debris is now reportedly sitting atop of sea ice and efforts are now being made to recover if for analysis.
Officials have not publicly identified the suspected origin of these objects. Both the US and Canada are working to recover the remnants, but the searches in Alaska has been hampered by Arctic conditions.
“These objects did not closely resemble, and were much smaller than, the [4 February] balloon and we will not definitively characterise them until we can recover the debris,”
a White House National Security spokesperson said.
Unidentified flying objects – timeline
4 February: US military shoots down suspected surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina. It had drifted for days over the US, and officials said it came from China and had been monitoring sensitive sites
10 February: US downs another object off northern Alaska which officials said lacked any system of propulsion or control
11 February: An American fighter jet shoots down a “high-altitude airborne object” over Canada’s Yukon territory, about 100 miles (160 km) from the US border. It was described as cylindrical and smaller than the first balloon
12 February: US jets shoot down a fourth high-altitude object near Lake Huron “out of an abundance of caution”
One senior official told ABC News that the three most recent objects to be shot down were likely weather devices and not surveillance balloons.
But this was seemingly contradicted by the top Democrat in Congress, who earlier told the broadcaster that intelligence officials believed the objects were in fact surveillance balloons.
“They believe they were [balloons], yes,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said, adding that they were “much smaller” than the first one shot down off the South Carolina coast.
“The bottom line is, until a few months ago, we didn’t know of these balloons,” he said. “We’re going to probably be able to piece together this whole surveillance balloon and know exactly what’s going on,” Mr Schumer added.