Unidentified object shot down over Alaskan waters, US Pentagon says

The US Pentagon has shot down an unidentified object over frozen waters round Alaska. Officials say they do not know who owns the thing

By Jeremy Hsu

A US fighter jet shot down an unidentified object over icy waters close to Alaska on 10 February. This comes per week after the US shootdown of a suspected surveillance balloon from China.

The unidentified object was first detected and tracked by North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) on 9 February. The object was thought-about a possible menace to civilian air site visitors, so President Joe Biden gave the order for the US navy to take it down.

A pair of Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor jets have been concerned within the intercept and one of many fighter jets shot down the unidentified object. The object was travelling at an altitude of about 12,000 metres (40,000 toes) and headed in a north-east course over the Arctic Ocean when it was taken down. It had beforehand flown over land in Alaska.

The US navy has despatched helicopters as a part of the trouble to retrieve the wreckage of the unidentified object, as it could have landed on ice relatively than in open waters. A White House spokesperson described the unidentified object as being in regards to the measurement of a small automotive.

By comparability, the suspected surveillance balloon from China carried a a lot bigger payload the scale of a regional jet, round 30 metres (1oo toes) in measurement. That balloon initially entered Alaskan airspace on 28 January, flew south over Canada after which reentered US airspace over Idaho on 31 January earlier than travelling throughout a lot of the continental US.

Patrick Ryder from the US Air Force described the conditions involving the People’s Republic of China balloon and the unidentified object as being “apples and oranges” throughout a press briefing on 10 February. But Ryder additionally acknowledged that “we’re all very attuned to balloons at the moment”.