A US warplane shot down an unidentified object over North American airspace, the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, said on Saturday. It was the second day in a row in which the US military shot down an unidentified airborne object.
“I ordered the take down of an unidentified object that violated Canadian airspace,” Trudeau tweeted on Saturday afternoon. A US F-22 fighter plane with the North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad), which protects Canadian and American airspace, shot down the object over Yukon, Canada.
Trudeau said he had spoken with the US president, Joe Biden, on Saturday afternoon, and that Canadian forces would recover and analyse the object.
I ordered the take down of an unidentified object that violated Canadian airspace. @NORADCommand shot down the object over the Yukon. Canadian and U.S. aircraft were scrambled, and a U.S. F-22 successfully fired at the object.
— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) February 11, 2023
Fighter jets have now shot down three objects in the airspace above the US and Canada in the last week.
The Canadian defence minister, Anita Anand, declined to speculate about the origin of the object, which she said was cylindrical in shape.
She stopped short of describing it as a balloon but said it was smaller than the Chinese balloon shot down off South Carolina’s coast a week ago but similar in appearance. She said it was flying at 40,000ft and posed a risk to civilian air traffic when it was shot down at 3.41pm EST.
“There is no reason to believe that the impact of the object in Canadian territory is of any public concern,” Anand told a news conference.
Hours later, airspace over the western US state of Montana was temporarily closed on Saturday evening after a “radar anomaly” was detected but no object was found by fighter aircraft dispatched to investigate, Norad said.
The downing of the latest object over Canada comes just over 24 hours after the US military took down another airborne object that was in Alaskan airspace. An American F-22 fighter jet shot down the high-altitude object off Deadhorse, Alaska, along the northern coast of the state, on Friday afternoon. Officials said the object entered US airspace but was heading toward the north pole at 20-40mph.
Few details about the object have been released by the US government. At a White House press briefing on Friday afternoon, the national security council spokesperson John Kirby described the object as being the size of a small car and said it was flying at an altitude of 45,000ft, the level of a commercial plane.
In a statement on Saturday, Norad and the US northern command said they, along with the Alaska National Coast Guard, FBI and local law enforcement, were conducting search and recovery activities of the object.
“Arctic weather conditions, including wind chill, snow and limited daylight are a factor in this operation, and personnel will adjust recovery operations to maintain safety. Recovery activities are occurring on sea ice,” the statement said. “We have no further details at this time about the object, including its capabilities, purpose or origin.”
The shooting down of the objects over Canada and Alaska comes a week after the US military took down a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina on 4 February. Though Chinese officials apologised for the balloon and said it was a civilian airship meant for weather research, US officials maintain that the balloon was carrying equipment capable of intercepting and geolocating communications and did not have equipment consistent with weather balloons.
US officials say the balloon was part of a fleet that has been used to collect intelligence in more than 40 countries on five continents. They maintain that balloons went into US airspace at least three times during Donald Trump’s presidency and twice so far during Biden’s.
Despite the technology carried by the balloon, the Pentagon said the balloons do not give China any intelligence-collecting capacity beyond existing technology, such as satellites.
The appearance of the Chinese balloon over US airspace has caused a rift in the strained and delicate relationship between the Chinese and US governments. The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, postponed an trip to Beijing, which would have been the first visit to the country by a top American diplomat since 2018.
Blinken said the spy balloon was “an irresponsible act and a clear violation of US sovereignty and international law that undermined the purpose of this trip”.
Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report
• This article was amended on 12 February 2023. Justin Trudeau is Canada’s prime minister, not president as an earlier version said. And the object was shot down at 3.41pm EST, not “3.41am local time”.
