- CCO
VIVA – In two weeks in February 2023, the United States military pilots shot down four mysterious objects spotted over the country and Canada. The military identified the first of these objects as a 200-foot-tall (60 meters) Chinese spy balloon, floating approximately 60,000 feet (18,200 meters) over Alaska in late January.
The government tracked the balloon for several days as it floated southeast across the country, eventually shooting it down off the South Carolina coast with a fighter jet on February 4.
The other three objects which include a car-size cylinder shot down over Canada's frigid Yukon territory and a strange octagonal object shot into the waters of Lake Huron — remain unidentified and were all destroyed between February 9 and 12.
After that, these three objects were less sophisticated than the spy balloon and floated between altitudes of 20,000 and 40,000 feet (6,000 and 12,000 m). However, they were flying in airspace used by commercial airplanes, which added to the security risk, government officials said.
These rapid-fire incidents have left many wondering why the government is suddenly detecting and destroying so many unidentified objects in US. and Canadian airspace. Are there more objects up there than usual, or is the military simply getting better at tracking them?
While it's impossible to know for sure how many objects are in a given country's airspace at any time, government officials have been clear on one point: Following the detection of the Chinese surveillance balloon in late January, the military deliberately broadened its search for foreign objects at similar altitudes. That effort has been a success.
Jet tempur AS menembak jatuh balon mata-mata China di perairan Carolina, AS
- Chad Fish via AP
"We have been more closely scrutinizing our airspace at these altitudes, including enhancing our radar, which may at least partly explain the increase in objects that we've detected over the past week," Melissa Dalton, the assistant secretary of defense for Homeland Defense and Hemispheric Affairs, said at a news briefing on February 12.
In other words: After the military successfully tracked the spy balloon across the country for several days, they learned the best way to detect similar objects at similar altitudes that had previously gone unnoticed, Jack Weinstein, a professor of international security at Boston University and retired lieutenant general with the U.S. Air Force.
"I think it all stems from the balloon, it appears to me that the military is just now figuring out how to track those items," Weinstein said.
While the military has not yet identified any of the three objects subsequently shot down in February, both the U.S. and Canadian governments have suggested a "pattern" between these objects and the downed spy balloon and declined to rule out the possibility that they are all part of a foreign spying effort.
Furthermore, John Kirby a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council added in the February 13 press briefing that China has been surveilling the United Stateswith high-altitude spy balloons for several years but that those objects had never been detected before now.
Meanwhile, China has claimed that the U.S. has flown spy balloons into its airspace more than 10 times since January 2022, National Public Radio reported.
