By Caitlin Doornbos and Emily Crane
The US shot down another high-altitude “object” over the waters off Alaska on Friday afternoon – six days after a fighter jet took out a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina – an operation President Biden deemed “a success.”
The latest object, which was detected within the past 24 hours, was downed on Biden’s orders at 1:45 p.m., Pentagon spokesman Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said.
The US has not yet determined the object’s “capabilities, purpose or origin,” Ryder said. Officials hope to answer those questions after they recover and analyze it.
The object was first picked up on ground radar Thursday, prompting the military to scramble fighter jets to observe it from the air, Ryder said. Pilots determined the object was unmanned, and later used an F-22 to shoot it down after the president gave the go-ahead.
The object, officials said according to the New York Times, had traveled over land in Alaska and was heading toward the North Pole over frozen water at a speed of 20 to 40 miles per hour before it was struck by the Sidewinder air-to-air missile fired by the F-22 fighter jet.
At 40,000 feet, the object “posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters during a White House briefing. Unlike the first device, the object intercepted Friday didn’t appear to have the same “maneuverable capability” and was moving “virtually at the whim of the wind.”
“It was much, much smaller than the spy balloon that we took down last Saturday,” he said. “The way it was described to me was roughly the size of a small car, as opposed to a payload that was like two or three buses sized … no significant payload, if you will.”
It isn’t clear yet if the object had surveillance capabilities, Kirby said. Though the surveillance balloon last week came from China, the US has not contacted Beijing to ask if the new object was theirs.
“We’re calling this an object, because that’s the best description we have right now. We do not know who owns it,” the NSC spokesman said. “… We do expect to be able to recover the debris since it fell not only within our territorial space but on what we believe is frozen water.”
However, Ryder declined to rule out that the object could be a balloon, saying he did not want to “characterize” it until it is recovered and analyzed.
Several US officials told the New York Times Friday that they believed the object was a balloon, but a Defense Department official said it broke into pieces when it slammed into the frozen sea, raising doubts.
US officials told ABC News that when fighters were scrambled, pilots saw no sign the object had propulsion. It was described as “cylindrical and silver-ish gray” and appeared to be floating, a US official told the outlet.
While it took a full week for the first spy balloon to be identified, publicized and taken down, officials took less than a day to shoot the new object out of the sky.
The second shootdown comes after Congress skewered defense officials Thursday over their decision to allow the Chinese spy device to meander over Alaska, through Canadian airspace and across the continental US before shooting it down off Myrtle Beach on Feb. 4.
NORAD said it did not believe the earlier spy balloon posed a military threat when first identified, and talks with President Biden about whether to shoot down the craft did not begin until it was spotted hovering over Montana on Feb. 1.
At an Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense hearing Thursday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) raged against the call not to take down the spy balloon when it was first spotted approaching her home state on Jan. 28.
“As an Alaskan, I am so angry. I want to use other words, but I’m not going to,” she said. “If you’re going to have Russia coming at you, if you’re going to have China coming at you, we know exactly how they come: They come up and they go over Alaska.”
Ryder denied that congressional criticism influenced the swift decision regarding the latest object, instead reiterating that its lower altitude posed a greater risk to air traffic than the spy balloon, which flew at about 60,000 feet – roughly double that of the average jetliner.
Military activity over Alaska related to Friday’s shootdown led to at least one flight being diverted.
A plane operated by ConocoPhillips carrying workers from Anchorage to an oil field on Alaska’s North Slope had to turn back after receiving a restricted airspace warning from the Federal Aviation Administration, according to CNN.
“There is no threat to our North Slope operations and our flights have resumed. The ConocoPhillips-operated Q400 (aircraft) left Anchorage on a scheduled flight at 7:19 a.m. ConocoPhillips received notification through the [FAA] of the restricted airspace and returned to Anchorage at 8:17 am arriving at 9:17 am. We resumed this flight today and departed at 12:09 from Anchorage to Alpine,” ConocoPhillips spokesman Dennis Nuss told CNN.
Canadian Defense Minister Anita Anand said Friday that the US’s northern neighbor was in favor of downing the mysterious craft and participated in the decision-making process.
“Today at the Pentagon, United States Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and I participated in a call with NORAD Commander, General Glen VanHerck regarding a high-altitude object detected over Alaska. The object did not fly into Canadian airspace,” Anand said in a statement.
“During this conversation, I conveyed Canada’s support for taking action to take down this object,” she added.
https://nypost.com/2023/02/10/us-shoots-down-another-high-altitude-object-over-alaska-pentagon/
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