An American fighter plane shot down an unidentified object over Canada on Saturday afternoon, February 11, on the orders of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, marking a new incident in North American skies since the destruction of a supposed Chinese spy balloon last week.
Justin Trudeau announced on Saturday that an “unidentified object” was shot down while flying over the northwest of the country, a day after the United States destroyed a flying object over Alaska. “I have ordered the grounding of an unidentified object that violated Canadian airspace,” tweeted Justin Trudeau.
“Planes from Canada and the United States were dispatched to the scene”, and “the firing” of an AIM 9X missile from an American F-22 “hit” its target.
Debris recovered for analysis
US President Joe Biden had authorized the aircraft, one of the aircraft of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad), to “work with Canada”, explained the spokesman of the Pentagon, Pat Ryder.
Canadian forces “will now recover and analyze the debris of the object,” added the Canadian Prime Minister.
The object was flying at an altitude of “40,000 feet” (12,200 meters), detailed Canada’s Minister of National Defense, Anita Anand, during a press conference on Saturday evening, and was shot down at “approximately 100 miles (160 km, Ed) from the Canada-US border” around 8:40 p.m. GMT.
The object is a “cylindrical device” smaller than the balloon destroyed in North Carolina last week, said the Canadian defense minister.
“For the moment, we are continuing the analyzes of the object, so it would not be prudent on my part to speculate on its origin”, she added, before thanking the Pentagon and the members of the Canadian and American for their cooperation.
Two objects in twenty-four hours
Justin Trudeau spoke to US President Joe Biden about the downed target over the Yukon, a territory in northwestern Canada bordering Alaska where US forces destroyed another flying object on Friday, ” the size of a small car,” because it posed “a threat to air traffic security,” according to John Kirby, spokesman for the White House National Security Council.
Search and recovery operations for the remains of the object destroyed on Friday continued on Saturday but were hampered by “cooling Arctic air, snow and limited daylight”, the Command said. North American in a statement, adding that the Pentagon could not provide “any further details (…) on the object, including its capabilities, purpose or origin”.
The shootings come a week after Washington destroyed a balloon off its Atlantic coast, which had flown over sensitive military sites and had been described by Beijing as a “civilian aircraft used for research purposes, mainly meteorological”.
Footage captured by US military aircraft shows that the Chinese balloon that flew over the United States last week was well equipped with spy tools and not intended for weather forecasting.
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