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The U.S. government is still working to identify the three high-altitude objects that it shot down over the past three days, the Biden White House said Monday.
“We have not yet been able to definitively assess what these most recent objects are,” said John Kirby, spokesman for White House’s National Security Council, during a press briefing.
American officials know that countries, companies, scientific researchers and academic organizations operate objects at high altitudes for purposes that aren’t nefarious, but the military acted out of an abundance of caution to protect national security interests and the safety of commercial flights, he told reporters.
“We haven’t found the debris,” Kirby also said. “All three have fallen into some pretty remote, difficult areas to reach, but we’re going to do everything we can to find them, and that will tell us a lot.”
Kirby’s remarks come after a U.S. fighter jet shot down an “unidentified object” over Lake Huron on Sunday — the fourth such downing in eight days. The three most recent objects — downed Friday, Saturday and Sunday — were much smaller in size, different in appearance and flew at lower altitudes than the suspected Chinese spy balloon that was shot down on Feb. 4.
Kirby also echoed defense officials who have said U.S. troops have been more closely scrutinizing airspace, including enhancing radar, and that may at least partly explain the increase in objects detected over the past week.
U.S. troops “have modified the filters and the gains as we call it, of the radar capabilities to look more discreetly at high-altitude, small-radar-cross-section and low-speed objects,” the White House spokesman said. “If you set the parameters in such a way to look for a certain something, it’s more likely that you’re going to find a certain something.”
Kirby and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre both said there wasn’t a connection to aliens.
“There is no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns. I wanted to make sure that the American people knew that,” Jean-Pierre told reporters.
When asked if President Joe Biden should be speaking directly to Americans about the state of affairs with high-altitude objects, Kirby said he “won’t speak for the president’s personal speaking schedule,” but Biden has been deeply engaged on the issue.
During Monday’s briefing, Kirby also announced that Biden has directed an interagency team to study the broader policy implications around the detection, analysis and disposition of unidentified aerial objects that pose safety or security risks.
“We were able to determine that China has a high-altitude balloon program for intelligence collection that’s connected to the People’s Liberation Army. It was operating during the previous administration, but they did not detect it. We detected it. We tracked it, and we have been carefully studying it to learn as much as we can,” the spokesman said.
“We know that these PRC surveillance balloons have crossed over dozens of countries on multiple continents around the world, including some of our closest allies and partners. We assessed that, at this time, these balloons have provided limited additive capabilities to the PRC’s other intelligence platforms used over the United States. But in the future, if the PRC continues to advance this technology, it certainly could become more valuable to them.”
On Monday, China alleged that the U.S. had flown high-altitude balloons through its airspace more than 10 times since the start of 2022, adding fuel to an escalating diplomatic standoff on this issue.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is considering a meeting with top Chinese diplomat Wang Yi at the Munich Security Conference this coming weekend, in what would be their first face-to-face talks since the U.S. shot down the high-altitude objects, according to a Reuters report citing unnamed sources. The State Department earlier this month postponed Blinken’s trip to Beijing after American officials said they had found a Chinese spy balloon above the continental U.S.
