US fighters have now shot down four flying objects in less than 10 days.
The latest instance, involving what US officials have described as an “unidentified” object, it was shot down near the US-Canada border on Sunday under the orders of President Joe Biden.
It comes after the military shot down the first flying object, a suspect Chinese “spy” balloon, off the Carolina coast on 4 February.
There were also two other items shot down, 11 and 12 February.
Although Beijing has confirmed that the former came from China, US officials have yet to provide further details on the nature of these last three objects, which so far remain unidentified.
Here, Sky News takes a look at when and where the four objects were shot down and what we know so far.
February 4th
The first object, described by US officials as a suspected Chinese “spy” balloon, was first spotted by US air defense systems flying towards Alaska from the Bering Sea.
A high-flying balloon over Billings in Montana
The balloon crossed Canada before returning to the United States and off the coast of South Carolina, where it was shot down with a missile fired from an F-22 fighter plane. approximately six nautical miles off shore near Myrtle Beach.
A US defense official said the plane was a spy balloon and that China planned to use it on sensitive military sites.
However, China insisted the balloon was being used for meteorological and other scientific research and had been blown off course.
The object sparked a diplomatic row between the United States and China, with US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has postponed his planned trip to Beijing on short notice.
In a statement, China’s foreign ministry called the shooting down of the balloon an “obvious overreaction” that “grossly violated international conventions”.
February 10th
A second object, described as “the size of a small car”, was sighted by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) near Alaska and shot down on February 10.
According to Pentagon press secretary Brigadier General Patrick Ryder, the object, hovering at an altitude of about 40,000 feet, “was not similar in size or shape” to the balloon downed off South Carolina.
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Unknown object shot down by US was ‘the size of a small car’
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Two US F-22 warplanes were scrambled from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson near Anchorage, Alaska, and the object was shot down on sea ice near Deadhorse.
US officials said a search team had been sent to recover debris from the object in order to identify what it was and where it came from.
February 11th
A third object, again unidentified but described by US officials as “much smaller” than the suspected spy balloon, was tracked entering US airspace over Alaska before drifting over Canada.
Canadian officials described the object, which was flying at an altitude of about 40,000 feet, as “small” and “cylindrical” and that it “posed a reasonable threat.”
Once again, US F-22 jets followed the object, while Canadian CF-18 fighter jets and the CP-140 maritime patrol vessel also joined the operation.
The object was shot down by a US F-22 over a central area of the Canadian territory of Yukon, on the orders of the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau.
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The object was shot down by a US F-22 fighter.
“To our knowledge, this is the first instance of NORAD shooting down an object in Canadian airspace, and the importance of this moment should not be underestimated,” said Canadian Defense Minister Anita Anand.
February 12th
On Sunday, US officials confirmed that another unidentified object had been shot down by fighter jets over Lake Huron, on the US-Canadian border, near Michigan.
This time the object was flying at a significantly lower altitude, about 20,000 feet.
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It was shot down by an F-16 jet, on orders from Biden, due to fears that its altitude and flight path could endanger civilian aircraft.
A senior US official, speaking anonymously, described the latest object as having “an octagonal structure with hanging wires but no discernible payload”.
In a statement, the Pentagon said, “Based on its flight path and data, we can reasonably link this object to the radar signal collected over Montana, which flew in close proximity to the sensitive DOD [Department of Defense] sites.
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“We did not evaluate it to be a kinetic military threat to anything on the ground, but we evaluated it to be a flight safety hazard and a threat due to its potential surveillance capabilities.”
US Air Force General Glen VanHerck admitted he didn’t know what the last three objects shot down were or how they stayed aloft.
However, he told reporters that they were not the same as the Chinese “spy” balloon.
“We call them objects, not balloons, for a reason,” he said, also refusing to rule out any explanation when asked if they might be extraterrestrials.
