A massive surveillance balloon that drifted across the US before it was shot down by an American fighter jet is believed to be part of a Chinese military fleet of similar intelligence-gathering aircrafts.
But military and White House officials say there is no indication that three smaller unidentified “objects” that were shot down above North American airspace in as many days are part of the same program, and may not have come from China at all.
The balloon’s intrusion into North American airspace was likely one of several from similar aircrafts in recent years, including three sightings during President Donald Trump’s administration, a revelation that has prompted the military to begin filtering in all kinds of other aerial objects on its radars.
The US military has reportedly widened its range of radar data as it monitors North American airspace for objects that might have otherwise been filtered out, with officials comparing their expanded radar search to search filters a prospective car buyer would use to broaden the parameters to find what they’re looking for.
While the White House tries to tamp down on baseless speculation and conspiracy theories, other US officials and members of Congress, who have received several classified briefings and testimony about the intrusion, continue to suggest that the other objects came from China.
The three unidentified objects recently shot down over North American airspace are much smaller and move differently than other kinds of aircraft and missiles that the Pentagon has monitored on its radars.
“What makes them really hard to detect and track is their size and potentially the shape,” according to General Glen VanHerck, commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD.
He told reporters on Monday that they are “very, very small objects that produce a very, very low radar cross-section.”
One official told The Washington Post that the military “basically opened the filters,” bringing in all kinds of newer raw data that would have otherwise been filtered out as clutter in the past.
CBS News national security correspondent David Martin – describing the two unidentified objects shot down over Alaska and Canada as “balloon-like” – told CBS Face the Nation on 12 February that he would not consider China as a prime suspect for their origin.
“The prevailing wind brings everything that way, from east, west, across northern Alaska and northern Canada. And there is a lot of what officials call sky trash up there,” he said.
That “sky trash” includes “balloons that are put up by governments, that are put up by corporations, put up by research institutes, and probably just by private individuals, and not for nefarious purposes but to just collect scientific data,” he said.
In the past, the US didn’t pay as much attention to such crafts, he said, but the much-larger Chinese surveillance balloon was a “game changer” that put the US military and President Joe Biden’s administration on high alert, Mr Martin said.
“There are a lot of these things that are up in the air from time to time, some commercial, some government and maybe there’s some things we don’t know,” according to Republican Senator Mitt Romney, speaking to reporters on Monday.
Another much older programme – the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, under direction of the Pentagon and US intelligence agencies – is used to “detect, identify and attribute objects of interest in Special Use Airspace and to assess and mitigate any associated threats to safety of flight and national security.”
That group – used to identify Unexplained Anomalous Phenomena, or the federal government’s term for UFOs – appears to be one of the ways in which the US was able to identify China’s surveillance balloon programme.
A review from the Director of National Intelligence that was released in January found terrestrial explanations for more than half of the 366 new reported incidents since the first unclassified report released in the summer of 2021, according to a review by ABC News.
Balloons or balloon-like entities were found to be the reason for the vast majority of those incidents.
White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters on 13 February that the US has not yet seen “any indication or anything that points specifically to the idea that these three objects were part of [China’s] spy balloon program, or that they were definitively involved in external intelligence collection efforts.”
He also has ruled out that they were “US government objects.”
But he did not rule out possible links to commercial or research crafts, though administration officials have said that no one has come forward to claim ownership.
“That very well could be or could emerge as a leading explanation here,” Mr Kirby said.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, however, said on Monday that there “is some sort of pattern in there — the fact we are seeing this in a significant degree over the past week is a cause for interest and close attention.”
The top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee also has alleged that China “almost certainly” launched the three objects shot down by American fighter jets, though the White House, Pentagon officials and intelligence analysts have not yet made any such definitive answers about their origin.
US Rep Adam Smith told USA Today that the objects are “almost certainly a case of the Chinese trying to come up with new or creative ways to spy on us.” But he stressed that global surveillance efforts between world powers are nothing new.
“It’s not like they’re learning some deep dark secret that makes us extra vulnerable here,” he added. “We definitely want to stop them from doing it, as we want to try and stop all efforts of surveillance on the US by China or anybody else for that matter. But, no, I don’t think it’s something that the American public needs to worry a great deal about.”
Democratic US Rep Jim Himes – a part of the so-called “Gang of Eight” leaders on congressional intelligence committees – told NBC’s Meet the Press on 12 February that he is troubled by “massive speculation about alien invasions and additional Chinese or Russian action” as he asked the Biden administration for more clarity on what exactly is “going on”.
“Part of the problem is that the second and the third objects were shot down in very remote areas. So my guess is that there’s just not a lot of information out there yet to share,” he said.
Officials in Beijing, meanwhile, have denied that China was responsible for the three shot-down objects and insist that the balloon was a civilian research craft that drifted off course.
