It’s not clear if the object was another balloon. More details continue to emerge about China’s high-altitude surveillance operation around the globe, according to now-declassified U.S. intelligence released by the State Department.
The Pentagon reportedly shot down an unidentified object over Alaska on Thursday night; it’s not clear if the object was another balloon of some kind. In the aftermath of the shooting down of the alleged Chinese spy balloon that traveled across the country last week, the U.S. continues to reveal more intel about the balloon, which it claims was part of a global high-altitude surveillance program run by China’s military. Below is an overview of those disclosures and the latest reporting on the spy balloons and ongoing fallout. The most recent updates appear first.
The U.S. downed an unidentified aerial object on Thursday night, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby announced Friday. It’s not clear whether or not the object was another spy balloon, as the New York Times reports:
The U.S. official said it was not confirmed if the object was a balloon, but it was traveling at an altitude that made it a potential threat to civilian aircraft. Mr. Biden ordered the unidentified object downed “out of an abundance of caution,” the official said. … It is not clear if the object was from an adversarial power, or a commercial or research operation that has gone astray, the official said.
Bloomberg reports that the Biden administration told U.S. lawmakers this week in a closed-door briefing that some components of the downed balloon had English-language writing on them — suggesting they were manufactured in the West:
The presence of the components was described by several of the people, who declined to elaborate further on exactly which ones were Western-made.
