Sky News Asia has reported that Chinese authorities are considering shooting down an unidentified flying object after it was “detected” near a “port city” in the Northern Shandong province.
“According to a Shanghai newspaper, fishing boats were warned to be on alert,” he told Sky News Australia.
China’s state-controlled Global Times said in a tweet in the morning that maritime authorities in eastern Shandong province announced that they had spotted the object in waters near the coastal city of Rizhao and were preparing to shoot it down, reminding fishermen to be safe.
It was not immediately clear to whom the flying object might belong, every country was now looking to the skies with more skepticism, ever since the US military shot down a Chinese spy balloon on February 4. On Friday, US fighter jets downed another object off Alaska’s north coast.
As the ‘UFO’ adventures continued, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in a tweet that Canadian and US aircraft were scrambled in a joint military operation, and a “US F-22 successfully fired at the object” to take it down.
Canada’s Defence Minister Anita Anand later said the object shot down in the Yukon was “small, cylindrical” in shape. she added that “the object was flying at an altitude of approximately 40,000 feet, had unlawfully entered Canadian airspace, and posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight”.
Shortly afterward, in a sign of jitters over possible intrusions, aviation authorities shut down part of the airspace over the northwest US state of Montana after detecting what they called a “radar anomaly”. The US Northern Command said the fighter jets took to the skies but “did not identify any object to correlate to the radar hits” and skies were then reopened to commercial air traffic.