The US has not ruled out the possibility that an “object” it shot down on Sunday was an unidentified flying object (UFO).
In a statement, the Department of Defense said the “object” was shot down over concerns about its “potential surveillance capabilities”. The Pentagon, however, said it has yet to find out where it came from.
The military had downed the “object”, shaped like an octagon and flying at an altitude of 20,000ft over Lake Huron in Michigan, on Sunday afternoon by a missile launched from an F-16 fighter jet at the direction of president Joe Biden, based on the military’s recommendations.
“We are calling them objects, not balloons, for a reason,” US Air Force General Glen VanHerck told reporters.
“I’ll let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out,” he said, on being asked about the possibility of the object being a UFO.
“I am not able to categorise how they stay aloft. It could be a gaseous type of balloon inside a structure or it could be some type of propulsion system. But clearly, they’re able to stay aloft.”
Sunday’s incident is the latest in a line of similar military actions taken after a Chinese balloon, that the US says was used for surveillance, was spotted flying over the continental US.
Two other objects were earlier shot down over the weekend, taking the total number of suspecious “objects” shot down by the US military to three. One of the objects was downed off the coast of Alaska while another was shot down over the Yukon.
“These objects did not closely resemble and were much smaller than the PRC balloon and we will not definitively characterise them until we can recover the debris, which we are working on,” a spokesperson for the National Security Council said on Sunday.
The object “presented as an octagonal structure with strings hanging off but no discernible payload,” said one US official quoted by the Associated Press.
The US military had not seen any evidence of…
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