It’s been a busy weekend for US fighter jets.
The US military shot down another high altitude object over Lake Huron on Sunday afternoon, the Pentagon said.
Another unidentified object was shot down over northern Canada on Saturday, marking the third time in a week that US fighter jets have taken down objects in North American airspace.
On Friday, an unidentified object was shot down in Alaska airspace by a US F-22.
And last weekend, a Chinese surveillance balloon was taken down by F-22s off the coast of South Carolina.
That marks the beginning and the end of what we know definitively. Here’s everything we still don’t know, and some of the things we do.
There’s no indication at this point whether the unidentified objects have any connection to China’s surveillance balloon.
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Hemispheric Affairs, Melissa Dalton told reporters on Sunday they were taken down out of an “abundance of caution.”
Dalton said that high-altitude objects can be used by a range of companies, countries, and research organizations for “purposes that are not nefarious, including legitimate research.”
“The spy balloon from the PRC was of course different in that we knew precisely what was,” she said. “These most recent objects do not pose a kinetic military threat, but their path in proximity to sensitive DoD sites, and the altitude that they were flying could be a hazard to civilian aviation and thus raised concerns.”
A US official told CNN’s Haley Britzky there has been caution inside the Biden administration on the pilot descriptions of the unidentified objects shot down over Alaska and Canada due to the circumstances in which the objects were viewed.
But at least two high-ranking officials have made reference to balloons.
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