After firing random things out of the sky for days, the White House was compelled to pierce some circulating ideas as well. They informed the country that, sure, they were aware of your alien conjecture.
According to the New York Times, Pentagon and intelligence officials are attempting to make sense of three unidentified flying objects that were shot down with missiles by US military fighter planes over Alaska, Canada, and Michigan on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
What Are Those Unidentified Aerial Objects?
The newest item was discovered over Montana on Saturday, generating early speculation about its existence. Military personnel noticed a radar blip above Montana that day, which suddenly vanished, leading them to believe it was an anomaly.
Then, on Sunday, a blip emerged across Montana, followed by Wisconsin and Michigan. After receiving visual confirmation, military commanders ordered an F-16 to shoot it down over Lake Huron.
The episodes raise two major questions: What were those flying objects? Why is it that the United States appears to be seeing more suddenly and shooting down more?
The first of these objects was identified as a 200-foot-tall (60-meter) Chinese spy balloon floating approximately 60,000 feet (18,200 meters) over Alaska in late January, Live Science reported. The government tracked the balloon for several days as it floated southeast across the country, eventually shooting it down with a fighter jet off the coast of South Carolina on February 4.
The other three items, which included a car-sized cylinder fired down over Canada's icy Yukon area and a weird octagonal object launched into Lake Huron, have yet to be identified and were all destroyed between Feb. 9 and 12.
White House officials said on a news briefing on February 13 that these three items were less sophisticated than the surveillance balloon and drifted between heights of 20,000 and 40,000 feet (6,000 and 12,000 m). However, government officials said that the objects were flying in commercial aviation airspace, which increased the security concern.
For now, it is impossible to know for certain how many objects are in a given country's airspace at any given time. But government officials have been clear that after the Chinese surveillance balloon was discovered in late January, the military deliberately broadened its search for foreign objects at similar altitudes. That attempt appears to have been a success.
Is It A Big Deal?
Authorities said during the press briefing that they have been more closely scrutinizing the US airspace due to recent sightings of unidentified aerial objects at these altitudes. They learned the best way to detect similar objects that had previously gone unnoticed, Professor Jack Weinstein told Live Science. He added that the US military is just figuring out how to track these objects.
Although they have not identified any of the three objects that were subsequently shot down this month, the US and Canadian governments suggested a pattern between these objects and declined to rule out the possibility that it was part of the foreign spying effort.
Moreover, NPR reported that the possibility of an extraterrestrial moment is also not ruled out even though it is not on the table as of the moment. Officials are not offering much speculation on the origins of these objects until they could track the remains for analysis.
Mike Dumont, a retired vice admiral, told NPR that surveillance is a likely option though there are other more innocuous possibilities, including weather balloons or science experiments from a college.
The Chinese government has denied claims of espionage and claimed that the US has flown spy balloons into their airspace more than 10 times since January 2022. Likewise, the US denied such claims.
RELATED ARTICLE: Chinese Spy Balloon Suspected to Hold Bioweapons; US Shoots It Down
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