NO SIGN OF RED BALLOONS
China theory shot down for 3 mystery crafts
WASHINGTON — US intelligence officials do not believe the three UFOs shot down over the weekend were tied to China’s spy balloon program, a National Security Council spokesman told reporters Tuesday.
“Our initial assessments here, based on talking to civil authorities in the intelligence community, is that we don’t see anything that points right now to these being part of the PRC spying program or, in fact, intelligence collection against the United States of any kind,” John Kirby said, using the acronym for the People’s Republic of China.
The US Air Force downed airborne objects over Alaska on Friday, northwestern Canada on Saturday and Lake Huron on Sunday. None of the three has been tied to China or any other country, but Kirby said more information on their origin and use will be gleaned once their remnants are retrieved.
“It will certainly help us home in on if and when we can get the debris, but that’s where we are now,” he said. “We’re still doing the best we can with the observations that were made by the pilots with the flight profile data that we have tried to collect.”
While intelligence officials don’t yet know what the mystery objects were, Kirby said they are confident they did not belong to the American government.
“In checking with the FAA, they do not appear to have been operated by the US government, so we’re pretty comfortable and ruling out that they were a US government objects,” Kirby said.
Radar settings altered
The spate of sightings came after NORAD officials changed their radar settings to be more sensitive to objects at high altitudes after discovering that China deployed a surveillance balloon in airspace above Alaska on Jan. 28.
President Biden allowed the balloon to cross the US for a week — passing over sensitive military sites — before ordering it to be shot down on Feb. 4.
Unlike the spy balloon, the three UFOs were not maneuverable, meaning they could not change direction and moved largely at the whim of the wind. Conversely, the spy balloon could move “left, right, slow down, speed up” and “loiter” over targets to collect information, Kirby said Monday.
If not Chinese spy balloons, they could have been any number of different craft used for benign research, Melissa Dalton, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense and hemispheric affairs, said at a Sunday briefing.
“A range of entities — including countries, companies, research organizations — operate objects at these altitudes for purposes that are not nefarious, including legitimate research,” she said.
As of Tuesday afternoon, no private companies or nations had come forward to claim any of the downed objects, Kirby said.
“The intelligence community is going to keep looking at this, and certainly they will not dismiss as a possibility that these could be balloons that were simply tied to commercial or research entities and therefore benign,” Kirby said.
Intelligence officials gave senators a closed briefing on the mysterious objects Tuesday morning. After its conclusion, lawmakers from both parties reiterated calls for Biden to provide more detail about the shoot-downs.