The three high-altitude objects that the US fired down in recent days as they floated over North America were not from here, according to a statement released on Monday.
Although keeping the door open for the possibility, the administration stated that it did not think the objects were surveillance planes.
At the White House, John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, told reporters that “they didn’t have propulsion.” “No manoeuvring was taking place. We could not rule out the possibility even though they did not have surveillance [capability].”
Here, Kirby acknowledged, “we’re kind of in new area.”
He said that pieces of all three items fell “in remote, difficult areas to reach”: the depths of Lake Huron on the U.S.-Canada border, the Yukon region in northwest Canada, and the ice off the coast of Alaska, a state in the far northwestern United States.
According to Lloyd Austin, the defence secretary, American forces have not yet recovered the three objects’ debris.
Austin told reporters on Monday in Brussels, where he is set to meet this week with NATO military ministers, that the weather is complicating recovery efforts in Alaska while the difficult terrain in Canada is hindering the search there.
“Debris recovery so that we can better understand what these objects are,” he stated as the Pentagon’s top goal.
Kirby didn’t refer to the three flying objects as balloons.
We don’t know who owns them, he said, in contrast to the Chinese spy balloon that the United States shot down on February 4 over the Atlantic Ocean just off the coast of the southern state of South Carolina after it crossed the U.S. continent for eight days. China’s explanation that the balloon was a misbehaving weather-monitoring aircraft that got out of bounds is still standing. According to US officials, the balloon was on a surveillance mission, and bits of it have been discovered on the ocean floor.
Kirby says that President Joe Biden has made it a top priority to find out who owns and where the three objects that were shot down by American fighter pilots came from, either on his own or with the help of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the case of the one that landed in the Yukon.
The three objects, which were over the Yukon Territory, near Alaska, and over Lake Huron, were shot down because they posed a “very real” threat to civilian aviation, according to the spokesperson. The objects over Alaska and the Yukon Territory were drifting at a height of about 12,000 metres (40,000 feet), while the object over Lake Huron was at half that altitude.
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U.S. radar has been recalibrated to seek for new objects after the Chinese balloon was found, according to Kirby.
He claimed that one of the causes of our increased sightings was our increased search for more.
Earlier, Kirby strongly denied Beijing’s claim that the U.S. had flown more than ten high-altitude balloons over China on Monday. The two countries were still fighting over the U.S. shooting down the Chinese balloon off the east coast of the U.S.
At a daily press conference, Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, argued: “Another frequent occurrence is American balloons violating international airspace.” “More than ten times without the permission of Chinese officials, American high-altitude balloons have flown above Chinese territory since last year.”
In his words, rather than defaming and stirring up conflict, the U.S. should “first reflect on itself and alter course.”
“Not true,” Kirby told MSNBC.rejecting it. simply untrue in any way. Over China, we are not launching balloons.
Both nations have spy satellites, but after Wang accused the U.S. of flying balloons over China, he made no mention of how those satellites had been handled or whether they had any apparent connections to the U.S. government.
The United States reported on Monday that Chinese balloons were seen soaring through the Middle East.In contrast, though, U.S. Air Forces Central commander Lieutenant General Alexus Grynkewich stated: “No danger has come from them.” They have flown past a few times since I took leadership, but nothing that would cause me any kind of alarm.
China claims that the U.S. overreacted when it shot down the balloon, which had travelled across the U.S. mainland before heading over open water.
Speaking on behalf of the National Security Council, Adrienne Watson stated that China was responsible for the People’s Liberation Army’s high-altitude observation balloon programme that was used to breach the sovereignty of the United States and more than 40 other nations on five continents.
According to her, this is only the most recent instance of China trying to minimise the damage. It has incorrectly and repeatedly claimed that the surveillance balloon it launched over the United States was a weather balloon, and it still hasn’t provided any convincing justifications for its unauthoritative entry into our airspace and the airspace of others.
After the balloon incident, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken put off a trip to Beijing that could have helped improve relations between the two countries and solved problems with Taiwan, trade, human rights, and maybe even threatening Chinese moves in the disputed South China Sea.
VOA national security correspondent Jeff Seldin and Pentagon correspondent Carla Babb contributed to this report.
