On Sunday, the United States military shot down a high-altitude object above Lake Huron, the fourth such operation in eight days over North America.
An F-16 jet shot down the object off the coast of Michigan as it traveled close to the Canadian border at 20,000 feet. The event occurred after the United States fired down unidentified flying objects over Canada’s Yukon on Saturday and Alaska on Friday.
The three episodes occurred about a week after the United States shot down a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina.
General Glen VanHerck, commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad), said the decision to shoot down the object over Lake Huron came after the joint US-Canadian military command had been tracking it since Saturday when it seemed to cross American airspace.
Norad found that the object, which it could not track continuously, had been flying close to important military facilities in Montana. The Chinese spy balloon that traversed North America also hovered over a US military facility in Montana that holds nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles.
VanHerck said Norad defined the three targets shot down over the past three days as “objects” and emphasized he was “not going to categorize them as balloons.”
“We are calling them objects for a reason. I am not able to categorize how they stay aloft. It could be a gaseous type of balloon inside a structure, or it could be a propulsion system,” he said.
According to VanHerck, the US and Canada were looking into the matter. Still, there was not enough information available to pinpoint the source of the objects, which he characterized as being similar in size and moving at wind speed.
“I would be hesitant and urge you not to attribute it to any specific country. We don’t know,” he said.
On Saturday, Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, announced that teams were seeking to recover an object that some officials had described as “cylindrical” in shape.
“There’s still much to know about it,” Trudeau said.