White House Defends Shooting Down Three Aerial Objects

Published: 2023-02-15
Views: 315
Author: Editorial
Published in: Politics

The White House has defended President Joe Biden’s decision to shoot down three low-flying, aerial objects over U.S. and Canadian airspace.

According to CNBC, John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said at a White House briefing said there have not yet been able to definitively assess what the recent objects are

There is no specific reasons to suspect that they were conducting surveillance of any kind, we couldn’t rule that out,” Kirby added.

Each of the three crafts was the size of a small car and was floating on prevailing winds.

The first of the three crafts were destroyed in U.S. airspace over Alaskan waters. It was cylindrical and had been floating at around 40,000 feet in altitude, Kirby said, posing a threat to civilian aircraft.

The U.S. and Canada coordinated the use of American military jets to shoot down a second object, this time overland in the remote Canadian Yukon.

The third object was octagonal and was flying lower, at approximately 20,000 feet. That object was shot down Sunday over Lake Huron on the U.S.-Canadian border.

Kirby said the sharp increase in the number of objects shot down in recent days was partly a result of heightened radar sensitivity implemented in the wake of the discovery of a massive Chinese spy balloon in late January.

The balloon was 200 feet high and carried a payload of surveillance equipment. Defense officials opted to let it float over the continental U.S. for a week before shooting it down on February 4 above the waters off South Carolina.

The effort to salvage debris from the latest incidents has been hindered so far by remote terrain and freezing temperatures, both on land and in the deep waters of Lake Huron and the Arctic Ocean.