Canada hunts for wreckage of latest object shot down by US fighters

“Recovery teams are on the ground, looking to locate and analyze the object,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters on Sunday.

“Safety of the citizens is our top priority and hence I have decided to shoot down the unidentified object,” he said.

North America has been on high alert for aerial intrusion since the appearance of a white, sleek Chinese airship over American skies earlier this month.

The 200-foot-long (60-metre-high) balloon – which Americans have accused Beijing of spying on the United States – caused an international incident, the principal secretary Stat Antony Blinken to call off a planned trip to China just hours before it was scheduled to depart.

Fears of surveillance seem to have US officials on high alert.

Twice in 24 hours, US authorities closed the airspace – only to swiftly open it. On Sunday, the Federal Aviation Administration briefly closed the space over Lake Michigan. On Saturday, the US military scrambled fighter jets to investigate a radar anomaly in Montana.

China denies that the first balloon was being used for surveillance and says it was a civilian research craft. It condemned the United States for shooting it down off the coast of South Carolina last Saturday.

At least two other flying objects have been destroyed over North America, with military and intelligence officials focusing on the new aerial threat.

US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told US broadcaster ABC that US officials believe the two latest objects were also balloons. The original balloon was brought down off the coast of South Carolina on 4 February. A second was shot on sea ice near Deadhorse, Alaska, on Friday. The third was destroyed over the Yukon on Saturday.

“They believed they were (balloons), yes, but much smaller than the first one,” Schumer said.

white House only said that the recently dropped objects “did not resemble Chinese balloons”, describing Schumer’s description as “too short”.

A spokesman said, “We certainly won’t be marking them until we’ve fixed the wreckage which we’re working on.”

Schumer said he believed it was being used for what US investigators were crossing the ocean off South Carolina to recover debris and electronic gadgetry from the original balloon.

debris in remote location

Canadian counterparts trying to piece together what was dropped on the Yukon may have their own challenges. The region is a sparsely populated region in the far northwest of Canada, bordering Alaska. It can be brutally cold in the winter, but temperatures are unusually mild for this time of year which should make the recovery effort easier.

Speaking to Fox News, Michael McCaul, chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, said the balloon that was shot down off the South Carolina coast was on a mission to obtain imagery of sensitive US nuclear sites.

“They want to get imagery, they want to get intelligence on our military capability, particularly nuclear,” McCall said. “And they’re building up quite a nuclear stockpile themselves.”

Republican lawmaker Mike Turner, who serves on the US House Armed Services Committee, suggested the White House could overcompensate for what he described as its past lax surveillance of US airspace.

“They appear to be somewhat trigger-happy,” Turner told CNN on Sunday. “I would prefer them to be trigger-happy than permissive.”

Republicans criticized the Biden administration over its handling of the intrusion by a suspected Chinese spy balloon, saying it should have been shot down a long time ago.

The text of this story is published from a wire agency feed without any modification.