The United States Department of Defense has shot down an unidentified object in frozen waters around Alaska.Officials say they don’t know who owns the object
technology
February 10, 2023
F-22 fighter jets were used to shoot down the object Alamy Stock Photos
On February 10, a US fighter jet shot down an unidentified object in icy waters near Alaska. This comes a week after the US shot down a surveillance balloon suspected of originating from China.
The unidentified object was first detected and tracked by the North American Aerospace Defense Force (NORAD) on February 9th. The object was deemed a potential threat to civilian air traffic, so President Joe Biden ordered the U.S. military to remove it.
Two Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor jets were involved in the interception, and one of the fighters shot down an unidentified object. The object was traveling at an altitude of about 12,000 meters (40,000 feet) and was heading northeast over the Arctic Ocean when it was lowered. It used to fly over land in Alaska.
The U.S. military has dispatched a helicopter as part of an effort to retrieve the remains of an unidentified object that may have landed on the ice rather than the open ocean. A White House spokesperson explained that the unidentified object was about the size of a small car.
By comparison, the suspected surveillance balloon from China carried a much larger payload, about the size of a regional jet, about 30 meters (10 feet) in size. The balloon entered Alaska airspace on January 28, sailed south over Canada, and reentered US airspace over Idaho on January 31 before transiting most of the continental United States.
At a February 10 press conference, US Air Force officer Patrick Ryder described the situation involving the People’s Republic of China balloon and the unidentified object as “apples and oranges.” But Ryder also admits that “we’re all very familiar with balloons at this point.”
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