Amid a baffling series of incidents in which the U.S. has shot down three unidentified flying objects, the White House said Monday it would create a team expected to study airborne objects and the potential security and safety risks they pose.
The new group, created at the behest of national-security adviser Jake Sullivan, would comprise elements of the Pentagon, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies, said U.S. officials.
The group will look at the “broader policy implications” of the objects for detection, analysis and disposition, said John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, on Monday. “Every element of the government will redouble their efforts to understand and mitigate these events,” he said.
The Pentagon shot down on Feb. 4 what it described as a large Chinese spy balloon that entered American airspace, triggering the Pentagon to begin looking more closely at other airborne objects. American jet fighters have shot down three unidentified flying objects, two in the U.S. and one over Canadian airspace, in recent days.
Unlike the balloon, which was floating in excess of 60,000 feet in the air, all of the three objects were flying at much lower altitudes that could interfere with commercial and other air traffic, officials said. The last one was shot down over Lake Huron on Sunday.
Mr. Kirby said there are no other known unidentified objects floating over U.S. airspace on Monday.
But U.S. officials said they couldn’t explain what the other three objects were, even after closely studying them in the air before shooting them down. Some U.S. officials, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), on Sunday morning, described the unidentified objects that had been shot down over Alaska on Friday and over Canada’s Yukon territory on Saturday as balloons.
The U.S. military continues to call them all objects. Collection of the resulting debris has been stymied by severe weather and terrain, U.S. military officials said Monday. Officials believe the first debris will be pulled out of Lake Huron and quickly sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation lab at Quantico, Va., for analysis. U.S. officials have so far declined to provide any imagery of the items.
Mr. Kirby said President Biden was first given a briefing on the issue of unidentified aerial phenomena in his presidential daily briefing June 21, 2021. On Sunday, the head of U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command wouldn’t rule out that the airborne objects the Pentagon has been shooting down are connected to aliens or extraterrestrials. (SOURCE)
