Ten days after a Chinese spy balloon crossed the US before being shot down in the Atlantic, the Joe Biden government has dropped three unidentified flying objects in just three days in different parts of North America.
Last Friday, one was shot down over Alaska; on Saturday, another in Canada, and this very morning a third party has been neutralized while flying over the great lakes region in Michigan, as confirmed by the Pentagon, which indicated that this third object was just over 6,000 meters above sea level and was shot down on Biden’s own orders by an Air Force F-16.
The same institution explained that its location made it a danger to civil aviation, so it was decided to throw it in an area where the fall of debris would not cause damage.
While the Army strives to recover remains of this third object, near the Canadian border, the Republican opposition is demanding more information about these episodes and the characteristics of the objects downed, of which hardly anything is known.
The new episodes of sightings of suspicious objects arrive in full US-China crisis by the spy balloon, which the Chinese dictatorship assumed as its own but which it affirms was a civilian object, for scientific purposes and which ended up in American airspace by mistake.
The Biden government has accused China of having developed, with the involvement of the Armed Forces, a balloon “program” for espionage work and that they have already flown over more than 40 countries on 5 continents.
From China, meanwhile, they have responded by accusing the US of being behind 22 spy balloons located in its territory since the beginning of 2022. The spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Wang Wenbin, has affirmed that Beijing “reserves the right to take the necessary measures to respond to relevant incidents” after indicating that “it is not uncommon for United States balloons to illegally enter the airspace of another country”.
“It is China that has a high-altitude surveillance balloon program to collect intelligence information,” said the spokeswoman for the US National Security Council, Adrienne Watson.
For his part, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg assured this Monday that the flying objects shot down in recent days in the United States and Canada are “part of a pattern” in which China and Russia “are increasing surveillance and intelligence activities” against Alliance countries. “We see it in cyberspace, we see it with satellites, more and more satellites, and we see it with balloons,” she said.
For Stoltenberg, this trend highlights “the importance” of surveillance and the increased presence of the Alliance, as well as the fact of intensifying and increasing how allies share information from intelligence services and how they monitor and protect their airspace. .