US shoots down another high-altitude ‘object’ that was the ‘size of a small car’ over Alaska

The US shot down another high-altitude “object” over the waters off Alaska on Friday afternoon – six days after a fighter jet took out a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina – an operation President Biden deemed “a success.”

The latest object, which was detected within the past 24 hours, was downed on Biden’s orders at 1:45 p.m., Pentagon spokesman Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said.

The US has not yet determined the object’s “capabilities, purpose or origin,” Ryder said. Officials hope to answer those questions after they recover and analyze it.

The object was first picked up on ground radar Thursday, prompting the military to scramble fighter jets to observe it from the air, Ryder said. Pilots determined the object was unmanned, and later used an F-22 to shoot it down after the president gave the go-ahead.

At 40,000 feet, the object “posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters during a White House briefing. Unlike the first device, the object intercepted Friday didn’t appear to have the same “maneuverable capability” and was moving “virtually at the whim of the wind.”

“It was much, much smaller than the spy balloon that we took down last Saturday,” he said. “The way it was described to me was roughly the size of a small car, as opposed to a payload that was like two or three buses sized … no significant payload, if you will.”

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It isn’t clear yet if the object had surveillance capabilities, Kirby said. Though the surveillance balloon last week came from China, the US has not contacted Beijing to ask if the new object was theirs.

“We’re calling this an object, because that’s the best description we have right now. We do not know who owns it,” the NSC spokesman said. “… We do expect to be able to recover the debris since it fell not only within our territorial space but on what we believe is frozen water.”

However, Ryder declined to rule out that the object could be a balloon, saying he did not want to “characterize” it until it is recovered and analyzed.

While it took a full week for the first spy balloon to be identified, publicized and taken down, officials took less than a day to shoot the new object out of the sky.

The second shootdown comes after Congress skewered defense officials Thursday over their decision to allow the Chinese spy device to meander over Alaska, through Canadaian airspace and across the continental US before shooting it down off Myrtle Beach on Feb. 4.  

NORAD said it did not believe the earlier spy balloon posed a military threat when first identified, and talks with President Biden about whether to shoot down the craft did not begin until it was spotted hovering over Montana on Feb. 1.

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At an Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense hearing Thursday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) raged against the call not to take down the spy balloon when it was first spotted approaching her home state on Jan. 28.

“As an Alaskan, I am so angry. I want to use other words, but I’m not going to,” she said. “If you’re going to have Russia coming at you, if you’re going to have China coming at you, we know exactly how they come: They come up and they go over Alaska.”

Ryder denied that congressional criticism influenced the swift decision regarding the latest object, instead reiterating that its lower altitude posed a greater risk to air traffic than the spy balloon, which flew at about 60,000 feet – roughly double that of the average jetliner.