Spying. “An unidentified object” shot down over Canada.

A US fighter jet shot down an unidentified object over Canada on Saturday, on the orders of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. This is a new incident in the North American sky since the destruction of a Chinese balloon last week.

The “unidentified object” was shot down while flying over the northwest of the country, a day after the United States destroyed a flying object over Alaska, Mr. Trudeau announced. I ordered an unidentified object that violated Canadian airspace to be brought down,” he tweeted.

“Planes from Canada and the United States were dispatched to the scene and the firing” of an AIM 9X missile from an American F-22 “hit” its target. US President Joe Biden had authorized the aircraft, one of the aircraft of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), to “work with Canada”, said Pentagon spokesman Pat. Ryder.

Canadian forces “will now recover and analyze the debris of the object,” added the Canadian Prime Minister.

“cylindrical device”

The machine was flying at an altitude of 12,200 meters, detailed the Canadian Minister of Defense, Anita Anand, during a press conference on Saturday evening. He was shot about 160 km from the Canada-US border around 9:40 p.m. (Swiss time).

It was a “cylindrical device” smaller than the balloon destroyed in North Carolina last week, said the Canadian minister. “At this time, we are continuing to analyze the object, so it would not be prudent for me to speculate on its origin,” she added.

Earlier in the afternoon, the Canadian Minister of Defense, had affirmed on Twitter to have exchanged with his American counterpart, the Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, reaffirming that “we will always defend our sovereignty together”.

Also on Saturday night, a fighter jet was dispatched to investigate a “radar anomaly” over the US state of Montana, the US military said. “This plane did not identify any object [permettant] to correlate the radar echoes”, indicated NORAD and the American command of the North, adding to continue “monitoring the situation”.

The airspace of this territory in the northwest of the United States had been temporarily closed “to support the operations of the Department of Defense. The airspace has been reopened,” the American civil aviation regulator (FAA) said on Saturday evening.

Two objects in 24 hours

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke with US President Joe Biden about the downed target over the Yukon Territory in northwestern Canada bordering Alaska where US forces destroyed another flying object Friday, the size of a small car. It posed “a threat to air traffic security,” said John Kirby, spokesman for the White House National Security Council.

It is therefore the second flying object shot down by the United States in about 24 hours.

Search and recovery operations for the remains of the object destroyed on Friday continued on Saturday, but were hampered by “cooling Arctic air, snow and limited daylight”, the official said. North American Command. The Pentagon cannot provide ‘any further details […] on the object, including its capabilities, purpose or origin,” he added.

These incidents come a week after Washington destroyed a Chinese balloon off its Atlantic coast, which had flown over sensitive military sites. It had been described by Beijing as a “civilian aircraft used for research purposes, mainly meteorological”.

Images captured by US military aircraft show that the Chinese balloon that flew over the United States last week was well equipped with spy tools and not intended for meteorology. This diplomatic clash had led the head of American diplomacy Antony Blinken to postpone a rare visit to China.

The American authorities are still busy collecting the debris from the balloon in the Atlantic Ocean, near the coast of South Carolina.

ATS