The incidents follow one another in the North American sky since the destruction of a Chinese balloon supposedly spy last week. On the orders of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, an American warplane shot down an unidentified object that was flying over northwestern Canada on Saturday.
“I have ordered the grounding of an unidentified object that violated Canadian airspace,” tweeted Justin Trudeau. “Aircraft from Canada and the United States were dispatched to the scene, and the fire from” an American F-22 “hit” its target. Canadian forces “will now recover and analyze the debris of the object,” added the Canadian Prime Minister.
Two objects shot down in the sky in 24 hours
US President Joe Biden had authorized the aircraft, one of the aircraft of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), to “work with Canada”, explained the spokesman of the Pentagon, Pat Ryder. Canada’s Minister of National Defense, Anita Anand, for her part, said on Twitter that she had exchanged with her American counterpart, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, reaffirming that “we will always defend our sovereignty together”.
Justin Trudeau spoke to Joe Biden about the downed target over the Yukon Territory in northwestern Canada bordering Alaska where US forces destroyed another flying object on Friday, “the size of a ‘a small car’ because it posed a ‘threat to air traffic security’, according to John Kirby, spokesman for the White House National Security Council. It is therefore the second flying object shot down by the United States in some 24 hours.
“We don’t know who owns it, whether it’s a state or a company or an individual, we don’t know. (…) And we do not currently understand its use, ”assured John Kirby.
The shooting down of a new “object” on Saturday comes a week after Washington destroyed a balloon off its Atlantic coast, which had flown over sensitive military sites and had been described by Beijing as a “civilian aircraft used in 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.