China prepared on Sunday to shoot down an unidentified flying object (UFO) currently over Shandong Province, the state media said, hours after a US fighter jet brought down an unidentified object over Canada, the third such incident in North American skies in over a week.
China’s state-controlled Global Times said in a tweet in the morning that maritime authorities in eastern Shandong province announced that they had spotted the object in waters near the coastal city of Rizhao and were preparing to shoot it down, reminding fishermen to be safe.
It was not immediately clear whom the flying object might belong to, every country was now looking to the skies with more scepticism, ever since the US military shot down a Chinese spy balloon on February 4. On Friday, US fighter jets downed another object off Alaska’s north coast.
As the ‘UFO’ adventures continued, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in a tweet that Canadian and US aircraft were scrambled in a joint military operation, and a “US F-22 successfully fired at the object” to take it down.
Canada’s Defence Minister Anita Anand later said the object shot down in the Yukon was “small, cylindrical” in shape. she added that “the object was flying at an altitude of approximately 40,000 feet, had unlawfully entered Canadian airspace, and posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight”.
Shortly afterwards, in a sign of jitters over possible intrusions, aviation authorities shut down part of the airspace over the northwest US state of Montana after detecting what they called a “radar anomaly”. The US Northern Command said the fighter jets took to the skies but “did not identify any object to correlate to the radar hits” and skies were then reopened to commercial air traffic.
Trudeau said Canadian forces in the Yukon “will now recover and analyse the wreckage of the object”. He added he spoke with US President Joe Biden over the latest incursion, while Anand also said she spoke with US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin.
The US Department of Defence said US and Canadian planes flew together to take on the object on Saturday. “President Biden authorised US fighter aircraft assigned to NORAD [North American Aerospace Defence Command] to work with Canada,” Pentagon Spokesman Pat Ryder said.
An F-22 fighter jet fired an AIM 9X missile that brought down the “high-altitude airborne object over northern Canada today” in Yukon that borders the US state of Alaska, Spokesman Ryder said in a statement.
The operation came after US fighter jets downed another object on Friday off the US state’s north coast near the village of Deadhorse. Search and recovery operations for the remains of that object continued but were hindered by Arctic “wind chill, snow, and limited daylight,” the Northern Command said.
Over the past eight days, F-22 fighter jets have taken out three objects in the airspace above the US and Canada, a stunning development that is raising questions on just what, exactly, is hovering overhead and who has sent them, US media reports said.
On February 4, a US jet shot down a large white balloon off the coast of South Carolina. The balloon was part of a large surveillance programme that China has been conducting for “several years,” the Pentagon said.
The US has said that Chinese balloons had flown over dozens of countries across five continents in recent years, and it learned more about the balloon programme after closely monitoring the one shot down near South Carolina.
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