US completes Chinese spy balloon recovery off South Carolina

WASHINGTON – The US military has completed its recovery of the Chinese spy balloon that spent a week traveling from Alaska to South Carolina earlier this month, the Pentagon announced Friday.

The Navy on Thursday concluded its recovery efforts that began after President Biden ordered the shoot-down on Feb. 4 of the surveillance device that had loitered over sensitive US military sites along its path.

NORAD commander Gen. Glen VanHerck had described the balloon as close to 200 feet tall with a payload the size of a jetliner, producing much debris to collect.

As pieces of the payload were recovered, the Navy helped transport them to shore, where they were taken into custody by federal investigators and sent to the FBI Lab at Quantico, Va.

US officials hope to use the debris to learn more about the balloon’s capabilities and purpose, as well as to gain insight into China’s spy balloon program.

It took the Navy 12 days to recover the balloon’s pieces from the ocean floor as weather and rough water affected the operation, which began with the USNS Pathfinder survey ship “using sonar and other means to map out the debris field,” VanHerck said on Feb. 6.

At the time, VanHerck estimated the debris field to be roughly 5,000 feet by 5,000 feet or “more than 15 football fields by 15 football fields” — slightly under a square mile.

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The area surrounding the downed balloon was closed to maritime and air traffic during the recovery operation. Those routes have since reopened, and Navy and Coast Guard vessels have left the area, the Defense Department said.

Recovery efforts for the three UFOs the military shot down in as many days last weekend remain ongoing. The US is leading the efforts to collect the objects downed in Alaska on Friday and over Lake Huron on Sunday, while Canadian officials are working to recover the UFO shot down over northwestern Canada on Sunday, US officials have said.

Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Tuesday he could not provide an estimate on when those recoveries would be complete as the objects landed “in very difficult terrain.”

“The second one off the coast of Alaska is — that’s up in some really, really difficult terrain in the Arctic Circle, with very, very low temperatures in the minus 40s,” he said. “The second one is in the Canadian Rockies in Yukon — very difficult to get that one. And the third one is in Lake Huron at probably [a] couple hundred feet depth.”

Late Thursday, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said it had suspended its search for the Lake Huron object, while the search for the Yukon UFO was continuing.