The White House said Tuesday that the U.S. intelligence community’s leading explanation for the three most recent unidentified objects shot down over North America is that they were being used for commercial or benign purposes.
That was the message National Security Council spokesman John Kirby conveyed to reporters Tuesday and said the evaluation is based on what the U.S. knows now, from visual images of the objects.
By the end of the week, the interagency team that President Joe Biden ordered his national security team to coordinate on Monday will lay out parameters regarding how the U.S. will address these objects going forward, Kirby said.
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Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said during a separate press conference Tuesday with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in Brussels that no debris from any of the objects shot down in the last week has been recovered. Milley also revealed that when targeting the object shot down Sunday over Lake Huron, the first U.S. missile missed.
“The first balloon, the Chinese spy balloon that went down over the Atlantic, on the South Carolina coast, that shot hit,” Milley said about the downing of the balloon on Feb. 4. “Second one, over Alaska, on the north coast of Alaska, that one hit. The third one that landed in the Yukon, that one hit. On the fourth one over Lake Huron, first shot missed, second shot hit.”
Milley indicated the first missile that missed the fourth object Sunday “landed harmlessly in the water of Lake Huron” and the U.S. military tracked it on the way down. He emphasized that officials made sure that airspace was clear of commercial or civilian aviation traffic.
Mille said that debris from those three objects has not been recovered due to rocky terrain and other difficult conditions.
“Two, three and four are not yet recovered. They are in very difficult terrain,” Milley said. “The second one off the coast of Alaska, that’s in some really, really difficult terrain in the Arctic Circle, with very, very low temperatures in the minus 40s. The second one is in the Canadian Rockies and the Yukon. Very difficult to get that one and the third one is in Lake Huron, probably a couple 100 feet depth, so we’ll get them eventually, but it’s going to take some time to recover those.”
Senior officials from the Pentagon and Office of the Director of National Intelligence also provided a classified briefing on the objects to all senators on Capitol Hill Tuesday morning.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
