NEW YORK — Since late January, four vessels, including a suspected Chinese spy balloon, have been seen in U.S. and Canadian airspace and were all subsequently shot down by the U.S. military.
Some details link the incidents, including all of them occurring within a few days of each other, but there are key differences as well -- with U.S. officials saying that the objects, which were not all flying at the same height or following the same path, did not necessarily resemble one another.
"That's not to say they were blissfully ignorant before," the official said,"but there are lots of things floating around and now we are more finely attuned to it."The balloon entered U.S. airspace on Jan. 28 north of the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, according to a senior military official. Photos from later sightings appear to show the craft was an enormous white dirigible with an undercarriage described by one U.S. official as the size of three buses.
The balloon was ultimately downed in U.S. airspace over U.S. territorial waters by fighter aircraft assigned to U.S. Northern Command, according to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Only an"extremely limited" amount of the vessel was recovered so far and brought to the FBI's evidence collection lab at Quantico, the officials said.
Administration officials also revealed more information on China's prior balloon operations targeting the U.S. In a television interview, Defense Secretary Austin said the aircraft had been detected over parts of Florida and Texas. The agencies are examining the possibility that weather conditions pushed the balloon off course as first reported by the Washington Post and that the Chinese may not have initially intended to traverse the United States. However, once the balloon was in U.S. airspace, it was intentionally flown over sensitive U.S. sites.State Dept Ned Price said it didn't matter whether the aircraft was blown off course it was still a violation of U.S. sovereignty.
Asked if was"balloon-like," the official said,"All I say is that it wasn't 'flying' with any sort of propulsion, so if that is 'balloon-like' well -- we just don't have enough at this point." The object was shot down approximately 100 miles from the Canada-U.S. border in central Yukon, Canadian Defense Minister Anita Anand told reporters during a press briefing on Feb. 11."These objects did not closely resemble and were much smaller than the [suspected Chinese] balloon and we will not definitively characterize them until we can recover the debris, which we are working on," a spokesperson for the White House Security Council later told ABC News.
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