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US and Canadian military are continuing to search by sea and land amid hostile weather conditions in a scramble to recover portions of three flying objects shot down over North American airspace in the past week.
The Democratic majority leader of the US Senate, Chuck Schumer, told ABC’s This Week on Sunday that officials were now convinced that all three of the flying objects brought down by air-to-air missiles this week were balloons. He put the finger of blame firmly on China.
“The Chinese were humiliated – I think the Chinese were caught lying,” he said. “It’s a real setback for them.”
Schumer said that US military and intelligence agencies were “focused like a laser” on gathering information on the flying objects and then analysing what steps needed to be taken to protect American interests in future. He called it “wild” that the US government had no idea about the balloon spying program until just “a few months ago”.
US and Canadian personnel are now scrambling to retrieve elements of the balloons from all three crash sites. In the most recent case, an unidentified flying object was taken down within Canadian airspace on Saturday by F-22 fighter planes with the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad.
Canadian military on Sunday were attempting to reach pieces of the vessel in a remote, rugged area of Yukon. The object, described as cylindrical, had been flying at 40,000ft in Canadian territory and was considered a risk to civilian air traffic.
Searches by US military are also continuing in difficult circumstances off the coasts of South Carolina and Alaska in the wake of the two previous interceptions. Some debris from the first balloon to be destroyed, the largest of the three objects, was shot down on 4 February about six miles off the South Carolina coast.
Underwater survey and recovery teams have already retrieved pieces from the ocean floor 50ft down. The fragments are now being taken to military laboratories for analysis.
