A “high altitude object” was shot down “At the direction of the President of USA“ since it supposed a “founded threat” for “civilian flights”
That’s what he says Pentagon after an F-22 aircraft fired on the object that was flying aimlessly about Alaska.
The size was described as that of a small car and it was flying at an altitude of more than 12 km.
John Kirby, spokesman for the National Security Council of the White Househas highlighted:
“We do not understand the ultimate goal. We do not have any information confirming a stated purpose for this object. We hope to be able to recover the wreckage, as it fell not only in our territorial space, but also on what we believe to be ice. Therefore, An effort will be made to retrieve it.”
This comes after a Chinese balloon was shot down last week. This raised security concerns in the country.
Also, the “spy balloon” Chinese had the ability to maneuver, but the “object” that was shot down today did not have that ability and was at the mercy of the wind, the spokesman explained.
When giving the order to demolish the “object”, one of the factors that concerned Biden was the altitude at which he was flying, about 12 kilometerswhich placed it at a height where it could interfere with the trajectory of civilian aircraft, Kirby said.
Unlike the downed “object”, the “spy balloon” Chinese was flying at an altitude of about 20 kilometers.
The “object” was shot down over frozen waters in the state of Alaska and now the fragments of the downed entity are being collected to determine exactly what it was, Kirby said.
The Pentagon spokesman, General Pat Ryder, specified in a subsequent press conference that the object was shot down by the US Northern Command at 18:45 GMT this Friday over the northeast coast of Alaska.
The contraption was detected on Thursday and shot down this Friday by a US F-22 fighter that left the Elmendorf joint base in Alaska with an AIM-9X air-to-air missile, because they considered that there was “a threat reasonable” for commercial aircraft when flying at a similar height as this type of aircraft.
Asked why this object was shot down so quickly after its detection, unlike the Chinese spy balloon, which was flying through the skies of the United States for days, Ryder indicated that they study each case individually.
This time, seeing that the object could pose a “reasonable threat” to civil air traffic, the decision was made to shoot it down.
Ryder stressed that for now they do not know the origin of the device, although he specified that it was the size of a small car and that it was not similar “neither in size nor in shape” to the Chinese spy balloon.
The United States has accused the Chinese government of having developed, with the involvement of the Armed Forces, a “program” of balloons for espionage work and which have already flown over more than 40 countries on 5 continents.
China defends that the balloon that the US shot down on Saturday was a meteorological device that “diverted from its original course” due to “force majeure.”
The discovery of these “spy balloons” has triggered a new diplomatic crisis between the United States and China and led to the suspension of a trip that the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, had planned to make to the Asian country.
Source: Euronews Español
