The Biden administration was caught unawares regarding a Chinese spy balloon that breached US airspace earlier this month. It was detected over Montana and floated for days before being shot down off the Carolina coast. It was a device launched from Central China, and there were multiple opportunities to shoot down this surveillance vehicle. It was not seen as a threat, so everyone moved like molasses. Also, I’m betting that the Biden administration felt no one would care, which was a gross miscalculation. When the White House press pool is all wondering the same thing, like how could this spy balloon penetrate US airspace, and you don’t have a good answer, you know you’re in trouble.
Since then, three more unidentified high-altitude objects have been detected over Canada and Alaska. All were shot down, but no debris has been recovered. The latest object was octagonal-shaped and shot down over Lake Huron. The hunch is that these were possibly surveillance devices, but the truth is that no one knows. The Biden team will get to the bottom of this, though they admitted they don’t know where to go from here; at least John Kirby doesn’t.
The latest explanations are that these UFOs were being used for commercial or benign purposes (via NBC News):
The White House said Tuesday that the U.S. intelligence community’s leading explanation for the three most recent unidentified objects shot down over North America is that they were being used for commercial or benign purposes.
That was the message National Security Council spokesman John Kirby conveyed to reporters Tuesday and said the evaluation is based on what the U.S. knows now, from visual images of the objects.
By the end of the week, the interagency team that President Joe Biden ordered his national security team to coordinate on Monday will lay out parameters regarding how the U.S. will address these objects going forward, Kirby said.
[…]
Mille [sic] said that debris from those three objects has not been recovered due to rocky terrain and other difficult conditions.
"Two, three and four are not yet recovered. They are in very difficult terrain," Milley said. "The second one off the coast of Alaska, that's in some really, really difficult terrain in the Arctic Circle, with very, very low temperatures in the minus 40s. The second one is in the Canadian Rockies and the Yukon. Very difficult to get that one and the third one is in Lake Huron, probably a couple 100 feet depth, so we'll get them eventually, but it's going to take some time to recover those."
Senior officials from the Pentagon and Office of the Director of National Intelligence also provided a classified briefing on the objects to all senators on Capitol Hill Tuesday morning.
We’ll see how long this clarification holds up.