The “object” doesn’t appear to be maneuverable, he said.
A US fighter jet shot down an unidentified object drifting over Alaska on Friday, the White House said, just six days after the downing of a Chinese spy balloon caused a rift. new diplomacy with Beijing.
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said at a news conference that there was a stark difference between the ‘subject’ shot down today and the Chinese balloon that was shot down six days ago. .
Here are the top quotes:
The President was fully involved in this decision. He ordered it on the recommendation of Pentagon leaders. He wanted it taken down and they did.
They did it (take down the ‘object’) with fighters assigned to US Northern Command. It’s much smaller than the scout ball we dropped last Saturday. The way it is described to me is roughly the size of a small car as opposed to a payload the size of two or three buses. So it’s much smaller and doesn’t have a significant payload.
We call this ‘object’ because that’s the best description we have right now. We don’t know who owns it: whether it’s public or corporate or private. We just don’t know.
We do not understand its full purpose. We do not have any information that would confirm this object’s stated purpose… ‘Object’ was flying over a very sparsely populated area and over open water when we gave the order to land. .
We hope to be able to recover debris as it not only landed in our territorial space but also landed in what we believe to be frozen water, so a recovery effort will be made. We hope that it works out and then we can learn a little more about it
On the difference between the two: “This is a completely different size, much smaller (than a balloon) and the debris field for one, we expect to be smaller than the other.
The second difference, we know for sure that the People’s Republic of China balloon that we shot down is actually a surveillance vehicle and is capable of monitoring sensitive military sites, and at the same time it has autonomous and manoeuvrable, there is no indication that this exists.
I would not say that the information we gathered from our monitoring of the Chinese surveillance balloon provided the insights that enabled this to be discovered.
The object was at 40,000 feet and the President’s primary concern was the safety of flight at that altitude. The balloon was shot down last week at more than 65,000 feet, so there is no threat to civilian aircraft. This one at this altitude poses a threat to civilian aircraft.
The ‘object’ does not seem to have the same maneuverability as the other and is mostly carried by the wind.
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