The U.S. intelligence community believes the three unidentified airborne objects shot down by the U.S. in recent days were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions, President Joe Biden said Thursday.
“We don’t yet know exactly what these three objects were but nothing right now suggests they were related to Chinas’s spy balloon program or that they were surveillance vehicles from any other country,” Biden said during a short speech addressing the incidents.
He went on to say there is no evidence that there has been a sudden increase in the number of objects in the sky, but rather that the U.S. is now detecting more of them at least in part because it has narrowed the focus of its radars. He said he has directed his team to draft “sharper rules” on how to deal with unidentified objects moving forward, including “distinguishing between those that are likely to pose safety and security risks that necessitate action and those that do not.”
Biden ordered the downing of an object near Lake Huron on Sunday, one day after a a U.S. F-22 fighter jet shot down a separate unidentified cylindrical object over the Yukon Territory in Canada. Also on Saturday, a part of Montana’s airspace was temporarily closed due to a “radar anomaly,” then later reopened. North American air defense could not find an object correlated with the anomaly.
On Friday, the White House announced that a “high-altitude airborne object” was shot down off the northern coast of Alaska.
The incidents came about a week after the U.S. military shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon off the Carolina coast.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby on Monday said there was a “big difference” between the Chinese spy balloon and the other unidentified objects. The Chinese spy balloon was much larger and was flying at or above 60,000 feet, well outside of air traffic concerns, while the other three objects were “right on the border” and appeared to be driven by the wind and therefore posed a danger to air traffic.
Kirby also said the American people don’t “need to worry about aliens with respect to these craft.”