WASHINGTON ― The seeming spate of new high-altitude objects over the United States is likely explained by the fact that the U.S. military is now specifically looking for them, a top White House national security official said Monday.
Early-detection radar has historically looked for fast airplanes and even faster missiles approaching the United States. But defense officials are now setting those instruments to detect smaller, slower-moving objects, said John Kirby, the National Security Council’s coordinator for strategic communications.
“And if you set the parameters in such a way, to look for a certain something, it’s more likely that you’re going to find a certain something,” he said.
Kirby drew a distinction between the lower-altitude objects shot down by fighter pilots on Friday, Saturday and Sunday over Alaska, Canada and Lake Huron and the takedown of a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon off the South Carolina coast on Feb. 4.
That balloon was flying at 60,000 feet, well above the level of commercial air traffic, and was carrying a payload the size of three buses, making it dangerous to bring down over land. The three more recent objects ― Kirby pointedly declined to call them balloons ― were much smaller and flying at heights of between 20,000 and 40,000 feet, right in the altitudes used by airliners, leading to the decision to shoot them down at the earliest opportunity.
China has not claimed ownership of any of the three recent objects. Nor has any other foreign government, Kirby said.
Still unclear is what information the People’s Republic of China, as the country is formally known, would have been able to gather from a balloon in the stratosphere that it has not been able to collect from its multiple camera-packed satellites that pass barely 100 miles over the United States each day ― or from satellites in geosynchronous orbits over the equator, where they can eavesdrop on electronic communications in North America.
“These balloons have provided limited additive capabilities to the PRC’s other intelligence platforms used over the United States,” Kirby said.
“When you are at a lower altitude than space, you could perhaps get a better fidelity of imagery, for instance of things on the ground,” he added. “When you are not moving at the speed of a satellite and therefore, you know, only getting seconds over a site, when you can maneuver left, right, slow down, speed up like this thing could, then you can loiter. And if you can loiter, you can soak in a little bit more. You can spend more time over a sensitive site.”
Kirby, though, declined to say whether the payload beneath the balloon was transmitting data during its crossing of the United States, and did not offer more details about the balloon’s capabilities. “That’s a terrific question you should be asking Beijing,” he said.
In Monday’s White House press briefing, Kirby ran through a chronology of China’s use of high-altitude spy balloons in recent years and the United States’ discovery of that program.
“It was operating during the previous administration, but they did not detect it. We detected it. We tracked it. And we have been carefully studying it to learn as much as we can,” Kirby said. “We know that these PRC surveillance balloons have crossed over dozens of countries on multiple continents around the world, including some of our closest allies and partners.”
Kirby said that President Joe Biden has created a task force, led by national security adviser Jake Sullivan, to study the balloons and the other objects and come up with a strategy to deal with them. “Every element of the government will redouble their efforts to understand and mitigate these events,” he said.
He said that, more generally, Biden has instructed the military and intelligence communities to better understand “unidentified aerial phenomena,” referred to in common parlance over the decades as “unidentified flying objects,” or UFOs.
The Pentagon released videos in 2021 documenting instances of pilots seeing aircraft moving at speeds and performing maneuvers that appeared to defy the laws of physics.
“These unidentified aerial phenomena have been reported for many years without explanation or deep examination by the government,” Kirby said. “We are finally trying to understand them better.”
Kirby added, though, that none of the recent objects brought down by U.S. fighter jets qualifies as the type of UFO conspiracy theorists love best.
“I don’t think the American people need to worry about aliens with respect to these craft, period,” he said.