- Sam Cabral
- BBC – Washington
Kirby alleged that the UFOs were launched as part of “an intelligence-gathering balloon program for the Chinese military.”
The White House said its decision to shoot down three objects that were flying in North American airspace a few days ago was out of “extreme caution.”
John Kirby, a White House spokesman, said these objects posed a threat to the safety of commercial flights and were shot down in the “greater interest” of the American people.
The United States has been monitoring its airspace more vigilantly since the intrusion of a Chinese balloon suspected of being used for espionage.
China claimed that Washington was launching its own balloons into Chinese airspace.
China’s foreign ministry said Monday that Washington had launched balloons into Chinese airspace 10 times over the past year alone.
A spokesman for the ministry in Beijing said it was “not uncommon for the United States to also violate the airspace of other countries”.
Kirby, during an interview he made from the White House, denied the allegations, saying: “We do not launch control balloons over China, and I have no information about any other air vehicles that we launch in Chinese airspace.”
And the United States shot down a high-altitude balloon off the coast of South Carolina after it continued to fly over the United States for days.
US officials said that the balloon was made in China and was used to monitor sensitive US military sites, but China denied that the object was used for espionage, claiming that it was a weather monitoring device that strayed into the United States.
Since then, US fighter jets have shot down three more UFOs that were flying in US airspace; Specifically over the state of Alaska, the Canadian Yukon region, and the state of Michigan, which made the US administration under pressure to clarify what those flying objects were.
Kirby, who is also a spokesman for the US National Security Council, said there are differences between the alleged spying balloon by China and the three objects shot down over the weekend.
He added that the three flying objects “did not pose a direct threat to the safety of people on the ground, but they were shot down to protect our security, interests, and the safety of flights.”
Efforts are continuing at the present time in terms of collecting the debris of the three bodies from their fall sites, but Kirby suggested that the objects that fell in Alaska and Canada were in remote areas with rugged terrain and it would be difficult to obtain their debris in this winter weather while the body that was flying over the state of Michigan fell. in Lake Huron.
Scientists have not yet been able to reach a “final assessment” of what these objects are, but they did not rule out that they were used for monitoring purposes, according to Kirby.
A White House spokesman claimed that Beijing had launched a “intelligence-gathering balloon program” for the benefit of the Chinese army, which was not discovered during the term of former US President Donald Trump.
Kirby said: We have monitored and tracked it, and we have already begun to study it carefully until we get as much information as possible about this matter.