Another aerial object, this time over Lake Huron, shot down by military – World News

Another aerial object, this time over Lake Huron, shot down by military – World News
The announcement of a fourth object being shot down over North America comes as lawmakers press the White House for more information

Write: Ann E. Marimow, Mark Johnson, Alex Horton and Ben Brasch

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The U.S. military shot down a fourth aerial “object,” this time over Lake Huron on Sunday afternoon, according to the Defense Department, which described the object as “unmanned” and not a military threat to anything on the ground.

Officials said the object, initially detected Saturday night, was flying over Michigan’s upper peninsula at about 20,000 feet — an altitude and path that raised concerns about potential interference with commercial aviation.

Military leaders determined the object was not a threat, but they opted to shoot it down after tracking it over Lake Huron because it could pose a hazard to air traffic, Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, who oversees the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), said at a news conference Sunday night. The debris appeared to land in Lake Huron, where recovery operations are being handled by the FBI on the American side and by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on that country’s side, VanHerck added.

In describing the latest shoot-down, officials acknowledged that the Pentagon tried and failed to confront the object late Saturday afternoon, when radars detected something suspicious 70 miles north of the U.S. border in Canada. As the object crossed into U.S. airspace, F-15 fighter jets out of Portland, Ore., were scrambled to investigate over Montana, but they were unable to find the object as darkness closed in, VanHerck said. Radar operators lost the object over Montana.

The object was detected once again by radar operators on Sunday over Wisconsin and later Michigan. “Based on its flight path and data, we can reasonably connect this object to the radar signal picked up over Montana, which flew in proximity to sensitive DOD sites,” Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement before the Sunday night news conference.

Fighter aircraft tracked the object in eastern Wisconsin, “assessed it was no threat” and continued to track it across Michigan’s Upper Peninsula before shooting it down, VanHerck said. It was shot down by an AIM-9X Sidewinder from an F-16 at 2:42 p.m. Sunday.

The takedown of a fourth mysterious airborne object was initially announced in a pair of tweets from Michigan lawmakers. Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) said the object was “downed” by pilots from the U.S. Air Force and National Guard. Slotkin said in a tweet that she learned about the latest object from the Defense Department and “that all parties have been laser-focused on it from the moment it traversed our waters.”

The increase in detection of these kinds of objects comes as military officials have been more closely scrutinizing the skies following the downing of what the Biden administration has called a Chinese surveillance balloon, Melissa Dalton, assistant defense secretary of Homeland Defense and Hemispheric Affairs, said at the news conference Sunday night.

Officials at the briefing declined to comment on the shape of the object until they recover it. But earlier Sunday, a senior Biden administration official, who provided a statement on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, described it as an “octagonal structure” with no visible sensors or cameras.

Even before the latest shoot-down became public, members of Congress on Sunday were pressing for more information from the Biden administration about the objects shot down over North America in recent days.

Rep. Jim Himes (Conn.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, was critical of the lack of details from the White House.

“I have real concerns about why the administration is not being more forthcoming with everything that it knows,” Himes said during an interview on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.”

Himes acknowledged that the limited information is probably due in part to the second and third objects being shot down in remote areas off the northern coast of Alaska and over Canada’s Yukon territory, which has complicated recovery efforts. But he warned that the dearth of details from the administration could quickly lead to public anxiety and wild speculation about alien invasions or additional spying by China or Russia.

The Washington Post

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