Three unidentified objects downed since last Friday served commercial purposes and weren’t used for spying, the Biden administration said on Tuesday. The judgment may help ease anxiety over a Chinese balloon that traversed the US before being shot down.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby stated that the intelligence community believes the objects “unlike the giant airship shot down on February 4, could just be balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose”.
“We don’t see anything that points right now to these being part of the PRC spy balloon program or in fact, intelligence collection against the United States of any kind,” Kirby added, as quoted by Bloomberg news.
Chinese spy balloon, Unidentified Flying Objects, mystery objects in the sky has been making headlines for the past week. The controversy began when the US allegedly shot down a Chinese Spy Balloon, and later encountered three separate incidences wherein they shot down ‘unidentified objects’, all within a span of seven days.
A theory that has been doing the rounds, while the pentagon refuses to define the last three shootings as anything but ‘objects’, says that these are ‘sky trash’.
China has insisted that the balloon shot down off South Carolina was a weather-monitoring device that blew off course, and accused the US of hyping the issue.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has also canceled a trip to Beijing after the Chinese balloon was identified. However, Blinken is now considering a meeting with China’s top diplomat, Wany Yi, in Germany this week, a person familiar with the matter said.
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that US officials, who were not named, said the balloon had shifted course abruptly over the Pacific Ocean as a cold front moved in, and that analysts were looking into the possibility that its flight over the continental US might not have been intentional.
The administration has struggled to keep the uproar around the balloon under control, amid criticism from Republicans that Biden was wrong to let it traverse the US before shooting it down.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a report on UFO sightings in the USA which has some interesting observations. In the report, it is mentioned that the instances of UFO sightings increased significantly between March 2021 and August 2022.
The report stated that during this time frame a total of 247 new sightings were reported and it was mostly by US Navy and Air Force pilots and personnel. However, from 2004 to 2021 a total of 144 UFO sightings were reported in the 17-year period.
(With inputs from agencies)
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