Officials briefly shut down air traffic over Lake Michigan but reopened it after an hour. Concerns are high in Washington about a large-scale Chinese aerial surveillance program.
President Joe Biden on Sunday ordered an “unidentified object” shot down with a missile by U.S. fighter jets Sunday over Lake Huron, and it was believed to be the same one tracked over Montana and monitored by the government beginning the night before, U.S. officials said.
The downing came after earlier objects over Alaska and Canada were shot out of the sky because they were flying at altitudes that posed a threat to commercial aviation, according to the officials, who had knowledge of the downings and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive operations.
It was extraordinary that four objects were shot out of the sky by U.S. fighter jets in eight days. Pentagon officials have said they don’t know when the last shootdown of an unknown or unauthorized object over U.S. territory occurred.
The latest object that was brought down was first detected Saturday evening over Montana, but it was initially thought to be an anomaly. Radar picked it up again Sunday hovering over the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and it was over Lake Huron.
U.S. and Canadian authorities had restricted some airspace over the lake earlier Sunday as planes were scrambled to intercept and try to identify the object. The latest object was octagonal, with strings hanging off it, but had no obvious payload. It was flying low, at about 20,000 feet, according to one senior U.S. official.
U.S. officials were still trying to precisely identify the other two objects blown from the sky by F-22 fighter jets over the last two days. They also were working to determine whether China was responsible as concerns escalated about what Washington said was Beijing’s large-scale aerial surveillance program.
The object shot down Saturday over Canada’s Yukon was described by U.S. officials as a balloon significantly smaller than the balloon — the size of three school buses — hit by a missile Feb. 4 while drifting off the South Carolina coast after flying across the country.
