The pilots of US Air Force F-35 fighters sent to intercept the mystery object over Alaska on Friday say that whatever it was had been “interfering with the sensors of their aircraft” before they shot it down.
Three unidentified objects have been spotted over North America in the past 10 days. The first, a giant airship “the size of three buses” is understood to have originated in China although the US and Chinese governments disagree about its exact purpose.
While the Pentagon says it was a spy balloon, China says the monster airship was a civilian craft designed to monitor weather systems – but even if that turns out to be correct, the two smaller objects sighted over the US in recent days remain unexplained. The USAF pilots who shot down the object over Alaska “were not able to identify what they saw,” reports CNN’s Natasha Bertrand.
“When the US first detected this object over Alaska on Thursday, they sent up F-35 jets to … see what was going on,” she explained. “And these pilots reported back very conflicting accounts”.
The pilots of the cutting-edge stealth fighters said “that this object was actually interfering with the sensors of their aircraft and they couldn’t figure out why, because there was no identifiable kind of surveillance equipment on the object,” she said. The pilots were also mystified as to what kind of aircraft they were actually dealing with.
According to Bertrand, the pilots “were saying that they did not see anything on the object that appeared able to propel it, that it seemed like there was no way that this was actually able to stay in the air”.
It’s possible that in the head of the high-speed, high-altitude encounter the pilots may have misinterpreted the type of aircraft, which was described as being “about the size of a small car”.
A Pentagon official told ABC News that the object was “cylindrical and silver-ish gray” and gave the “balloon-like” appearance of floating without “any sort of propulsion”. (SOURCE)
