A US fighter jet shot down an unidentified object over Canada on Saturday afternoon, as part of a joint operation between Washington and Ottawa, marking a new incident in North American skies since the downing of a Chinese supposed spy balloon last week.
Mr. Trudeau announced on Saturday that a “unidentified object” had been shot down while flying over the northwest of the country, the day after the destruction by the United States of an object flying over Alaska.
Planes from both countries were dispatched to the scene, and the firing of an AIM 9X missile from an American F-22 hit its target, Trudeau said.
US President Joe Biden had authorized the aircraft, one of the aircraft of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), to “working with Canada”Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder said.
The neutralization of the object was validated by MM. Biden and Trudeau by “for the sake of caution and on the recommendation of their armed forces”said a statement from the White House.
Canadian Forces “will now recover and analyze the debris of the object”added the Canadian Prime Minister.
The craft, which was flying at an altitude of approximately “40,000 feet” (12,200 meters), “had illegally entered Canadian airspace and posed a (possible) threat to the safety of civilian flights”Canadian National Defense Minister Anita Anand told reporters.
The object was shot at “about 100 miles (160 km, editor’s note) from the Canada-US border” around 8:40 p.m. GMT, she added.
“We detected (it) together and defeated (it) together” under NORAD, said Ms. Anand.
It was a “cylindrical device” smaller than the balloon destroyed in North Carolina last week, said the Minister of Canadian Defense.
“At this time, we are continuing to analyze the object, so it would not be prudent for me to speculate on its origin”she added, before thanking the Pentagon and members of the Canadian and American armies for their collaboration.
Earlier in the afternoon, Anita Anand, had claimed on Twitter to have exchanged with her American counterpart, the Secretary of Defense of the United States, Lloyd Austin, reaffirming that “We will always defend our sovereignty together”.
Also on Saturday evening, a combat aircraft was dispatched to investigate a “radar anomaly” above the US state of Montana, the US military said.
“This plane did not identify any object (allowing) to correlate the radar echoes”said NORAD and the US Northern Command, adding continue “to monitor the situation”.
The airspace of this territory in the northwest of the United States had been temporarily closed “to support Department of Defense operations. The airspace has been reopened”said the American regulator of civil aviation (FAA) on Saturday evening.
– Two objects in 24 hours –
Trudeau spoke with Biden about the downed target over the Yukon, a territory in northwestern Canada bordering Alaska where US forces destroyed another flying object on Friday, from “the size of a small car”because it represented “a threat to air traffic safety”according to John Kirby, spokesman for the White House National Security Council.
It is therefore the second flying object shot down over North America by the United States in about 24 hours.
Search and recovery operations for the remains of the object destroyed on Friday continued on Saturday but were hampered by “Chilling Arctic air, snow and limited daylight”the US Northern Command said in a statement, adding that the Pentagon could not provide “no other details (…) about the object, including its capabilities, purpose or origin”.
These incidents come a week after Washington destroyed a balloon off its Atlantic coast, which had flown over sensitive military sites and was described by Beijing as an aircraft. “civilian used for research purposes, mainly meteorological”.
Footage captured by US military aircraft shows that the Chinese balloon that flew over the United States last week was well equipped with spy tools and not intended for weather.
This diplomatic clash had led the head of American diplomacy Antony Blinken to postpone a rare visit to China.
The American authorities are still busy collecting the debris from the balloon in the Atlantic, near the coast of South Carolina.
