White House says flying objects shot down could be ‘tied to some commercial or benign purpose’

Sailors assigned to Assault Craft Unit 4 prepare material recovered in the Atlantic Ocean from a high-altitude balloon for transport to federal agents at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek on Feb. 10.Handout/Getty Images

The unidentified flying objects shot down this past weekend over the U.S. and Canada were likely innocuous research balloons, the White House is now saying, in a bid to cool rampant speculation over the origins of the mysterious aircraft.

John Kirby, spokesman for the National Security Council, said Tuesday that there is so far no evidence the three aircraft downed over the Arctic Ocean, Yukon’s boreal forest and Lake Huron were connected to international espionage, unlike the Chinese spy balloon felled earlier in the month.

“The intelligence community is considering as a leading explanation that these could just be balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose,” he told reporters on a conference call.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, admitted that fighter jets chasing the Lake Huron object missed on a first attempt to take it down, sending a missile crashing into the water.

The United States also announced that national security adviser Jake Sullivan will convene a task force to write new guidelines for dealing with such objects in the future.

These developments – amid continued difficulty locating debris from the downed craft – highlight the uncertainty over the reason for the sudden spate of shoot-downs and difficulty in deciding how to handle them in future. In NORAD’s 65-year history, the U.S-Canada joint air defence system had never felled an aircraft over North America until this month.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who ordered the shooting of the Yukon UFO, said whatever the objects turn out to be, they still had to be blasted out of the sky because they posed a hazard to planes. “What is very clear is they were a threat to civilian travel, to commercial airliners. That’s why the decision was taken,” he said.

Officials have previously said the three UFOs were significantly smaller than the Chinese spy balloon the U.S. shot down Feb. 4 off the coast of North Carolina. The UFOs also flew at a lower altitude and did not appear to have communications, manoeuvring or propulsion abilities, which the Chinese balloon did.

Both governments have been careful about saying anything definitive about the UFOs, including whether they were balloons, even though U.S. and Canadian pilots appear to have observed them during NORAD’s tracking.

The Washington Post on Tuesday reported that the U.S. tracked the Chinese spy balloon from its lift-off on Hainan through a potentially accidental course change that took it away from American military bases in the Pacific and over the U.S. mainland.

Fisheries Minister Joyce Murray said Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Samuel Risley will be joining the search in Lake Huron where icebreaker Griffon has been operating since Monday. Samuel Risley has underwater equipment that can help with retrieval once debris is found. Two Coast Guard helicopters had conducted three flyovers as of Tuesday afternoon. The search area is roughly 10,000 square kilometres west of the Bruce Peninsula.

Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino cautioned that winter conditions both on Lake Huron and Yukon’s remote wilderness make searching hard. “This is going to take some time,” he said.

The third UFO is sitting on sea ice north of Alaska.

U.S. says it only recently discovered that China has been using spy balloons

General Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. joint chiefs of staff, confirmed that one of the missiles fired over Lake Huron missed its target and dropped in the drink. He said the Air Force had been sure to clear other planes out of the way before firing and that they shot in such a way to make sure any errant explosives would not hit civilians.

“We’re very, very careful to make sure that those shots are in fact safe,” he said.

Still, the admission – after Fox News first reported the miss – highlighted the difficulty in ordering such takedowns, particularly if it turns out all of the aircraft were benign.

Amid the dearth of concrete information, several theories have predominated. One, favoured by the Pentagon, is that these objects have been flying around for a while but the U.S. and Canadian militaries didn’t previously detect them because they weren’t really looking until they found the Chinese spy balloon.

Another possibility is that the craft may be part of a new, stepped-up espionage effort by China, Russia or another U.S. adversary. The U.S. government said this week the balloon downed off South Carolina was part of a larger program run by Beijing for several years.

Ou Si-fu, a Taiwanese military expert, said China has deployed the craft over Taiwan, Japan and India “to monitor the assets of nearby rivals,” gather intelligence and as a form of bullying. He described the balloons as a form of grey zone warfare: coercive actions that fall short of conventional military conflict, and create a dilemma for Taiwan.

“If you take down the balloons, Beijing will accuse Taiwan of provocation and escalating the tensions across the Taiwan Strait,” said Mr. Ou, a director at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research. “If you don’t, the Chinese military accomplishes its mission without any punishment.”

The episodes have thrust into the spotlight a two-year-old U.S. government effort to compile information on UFO encounters. In its most recent report, issued last year, the U.S. National Intelligence Office listed 510 instances of “unidentified aerial phenomena.”

U.S. intelligence officials briefed the Royal Canadian Air Force last year on the subject. But on Tuesday, the Canadian Forces Intelligence Command refused to say what the Americans told them.

In answer to an order paper question from Conservative MP Larry Maguire, the Department of National Defence recently disclosed that the RCAF received the briefing on Feb. 22, 2022, from a unit within the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Major David Bowen, a spokesman for the Canadian Forces Intelligence Command, said it was a “classified” discussion. “This was the only meeting to have taken place on this subject to date between the CAF and our ally.”

China said on Feb. 13 that U.S. high altitude balloons had flown over its airspace without permission more than 10 times since the beginning of 2022, drawing a swift denial from Washington.

Reuters

Follow related authors and topics

Interact with The Globe

Latest in

Follow related authors and topics

Interact with The Globe