Mystery Objects Not Yet Linked to China’s Spy Balloon Program, White House Says, Feb. 14, 2023.
By Gordon Lubold and Natalie Andrews
Several objects shot down remain elusive, while FBI is analyzing electronics recovered from suspected Chinese spy balloon
The U.S. hasn’t seen any evidence that the three objects shot down since Friday over the U.S. and Canada were part of China’s spy balloon program, though searchers have yet to recover debris from them, a senior White House official said.
The search for the remnants of the objects is hampered by the remoteness of the search area and frigid conditions there, said John Kirby, the National Security Council’s coordinator for strategic communications, Tuesday.
“We don’t know of any evidence right now that confirms that they were in fact doing intelligence collection by another government,” Mr. Kirby said. “But again, don’t have the debris.”
While U.S. officials have said confidently that the balloon shot down over the South Carolina coast earlier this month was a Chinese spy balloon, U.S. officials still don’t know even how the three other objects were being propelled, let alone who sent them or what their purpose was. Officials haven’t even described them as balloons, instead using the term “objects.”
“We’re pretty comfortable in ruling out that they were U.S. government objects,” Mr. Kirby told reporters. But Mr. Kirby said intelligence agencies haven’t dismissed the possibility they were commercial or research balloons.
Following a classified briefing Tuesday in the U.S. Senate, senators said the objects appeared to have posed no threat.
“There are a lot of things that are put up in the air by commercial interests, by governments, by agencies, by universities and so forth and we don’t track all of them, but we’re probably going to do a better job doing it in the future,” said Sen. Mitt Romney (R., Utah).
Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.), said he suspected no more objects were floating over the U.S., “but we don’t know that for sure.”
“It’s an expensive endeavor to scramble planes and jets, shoot these down and then muster recovery teams,” he said. “We just have to decide whether that’s going to be our continuing approach anytime you see one of these.”
Mr. Kirby said intense operations were under way to recover debris from the takedowns that occurred over Alaska on Friday, Canada’s Yukon territory on Saturday and Lake Huron on Sunday.
“We’re up against it when it comes to just the weather and the general geographic conditions, but we’re going to keep at it,” Mr. Kirby said Tuesday before acknowledging the U.S. may never recover all the debris. “At this point in time, we absolutely still want to recover it because that’s our best way of knowing for sure what these things were.”
The remote locations made recovery difficult given the latitude of the debris in some cases, as well as the fact some may have fallen into icy, remote bodies of water, he said.
Meanwhile, no significant developments had emerged in the recovery of debris from the suspected spy balloon the Air Force shot down off the Atlantic coast earlier this month, Mr. Kirby said. He said divers were able to get into the water over the weekend and retrieve a significant amount of debris, including some of the structure and some of the electronics, he said.
Those items had been shipped to the Federal Bureau of Investigation at Quantico, Va., where they are being analyzed to learn more about the surveillance balloon.
In Brussels, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark Milley acknowledged reports that the first missile fired at the object over Lake Huron missed, requiring a second shot. Mr. Kirby said he believed the munition landed in the lake and sank to the bottom.
The interagency task force created by President Biden to look at policy issues surrounding the balloons and the unidentified flying objects has begun its work, Mr. Kirby said. That group, which includes personnel from the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Homeland Security, among others, will review the policy implications of shooting down the objects and determine the best way forward if other objects are discovered. So far, the U.S. isn’t seeing any in U.S. airspace, Mr. Kirby said.
There is no blanket policy, he said, to shoot down any new objects, and each issue is looked at on a case-by-case basis, he said.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Antony Blinkenreiterated the Biden administration’s denial that the U.S. had sent balloons over China.
“We do not send spy balloons over China. Period,” Mr. Blinken said in an interview with NPR that aired Tuesday.
On Monday, China alleged that the U.S. had flown high-altitude balloons over its airspace more than 10 times since the start of 2022, the first time China has made such an accusation since the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon was spotted over the U.S. earlier this month.
—Lindsay Wise and William Mauldin contributed to this article.