A US fighter jet shot down an unknown object flying at the height of about 40,000 feet off the northern coast of Alaska on orders of President Joe Biden, officials said, less than a week after the military brought down a Chinese spy balloon that had flown across America.
According to Pentagon Press Secretary Brigadier General Pat Ryder, the object, which was about the size of a small car, was first detected inside American airspace on Thursday.
The object, whose origin is not known so far, posed a “reasonable threat to civilian air traffic”, he said.
This came almost a week after the US shot down a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina in the Atlantic Ocean. It hovered over continental America for several days after entering the US airspace on January 30 in Montana.
China has acknowledged that the balloon was theirs but denied that it was for surveillance purposes rather than for weather monitoring and that it had drifted off course.
About the unidentified object over Alaska, Ryder told reporters at a news conference, “At the direction of the President of the United States, fighter aircraft assigned to US Northern Command successfully took down a high-altitude airborne object off the northern coast of Alaska at 1:45 pm Eastern Standard Time today (Friday) within US sovereign airspace over US territorial water.”