image source, Getty Images
A US Air Force F-22, like the one in this file photo, shot down another object on Saturday.
The United States shot down another unidentified object over its territory in the fourth such military operation this month.
US President Joe Biden ordered it shot down near Lake Huron, near the Canadian border, on Sunday afternoon.
The object could have interfered with commercial air traffic while traveling at an altitude of 6,100 meters, the Pentagon said in a statement.
The artifact was first detected over sensitive locations in Montana on Saturday, it added.
Defense officials described the object as unmanned, octagonal in shape and not as a military threat. It was shot down by an F-16 fighter jet at 2:42 p.m. local time on Sunday.
unknowns about high altitude objects
The incident raised more questions about the spate of high-altitude objects that have been shot down over North America this month.
A suspected Chinese spy balloon was shot down off the coast of South Carolina on February 4 after hovering over the United States for days. Authorities later said it originated in China and had been used for surveillance.
However, China denied the object was used for spying, saying it was a weather monitoring device that it had been lost. The incident, and the tense exchanges that followed, heightened tensions between Washington and Beijing.
image source, Reuters
Since that first incident, US warplanes have shot down three other high-altitude objects.
On Friday, Biden ordered an object shot down over Alaska. And on Saturday, a similar object was shot down over the Yukon, in northwestern Canada.
Officials have not publicly identified the origin or purpose of these objects. Both the United States and Canada continue to work to recover the remains, but the search in Alaska has been hampered by arctic conditions.
“These objects did not look much alike and were much smaller than the globe [del 4 de febrero] and we won’t characterize them definitively until we can recover the debris,” a White House Homeland Security spokesman said.
Earlier the leader of the Senate Democrats, Chuck Schumer, said that intelligence officials believed that the devices shot down on Friday and Saturday were surveillance balloons.
“They think they were [globos]yes,” he told ABC News, adding that they were “much smaller” than the first one shot down off the South Carolina coast.
“The conclusion is that until a few months ago we did not know about these balloons“, said.
“We’ll probably be able to put together this surveillance balloon and know exactly what’s going on,” Schumer added.
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