The UFO fever gripping Washington

Four unidentified flying objects have been shot down over the US and Canada over the past few weeks, raising questions about who is controlling them and what they are intended for.

The furore was initially sparked by what is now suspected to have been a Chinese surveillance balloon, which was shot down off the coast of South Carolina by the US military on 4 February after floating in US airspace for several days. The US said it appeared to be monitoring sensitive military sites.

Since then three other unidentified, smaller and quite different objects have also been shot down over northern Alaska, Canada’s Yukon territory and Lake Huron in Michigan, said the BBC. The fourth object was travelling at an altitude of 20,000ft (6,100m), and so could have interfered with commercial air traffic, the US said. Asked about the shooting down, President Joe Biden said only that “it was a success”.

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What are the objects that have been shot down?

The initial balloon spotted over the US was filled with helium and was about 60 metres in diameter, said The Guardian. It carried a payload of solar panels estimated to be about the size of a regional airplane, and to weigh more than 900kg.

The objects spotted later varied in shape but were significantly smaller. Officials said those shot down over Alaska and Canada were the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.

“All of the objects are similar in certain ways and then dramatically different in certain ways. What we don’t yet understand is what sorts of technology are in there,” a US official told The Washington Post. “Really capable technology can be very small and portable. So the size doesn’t tell us a whole lot.” Analysts think the balloons, like drones, can be remotely piloted – at about 30 to 60mph.

The first balloon was also followed by a similar one spotted near Costa Rica. China has denied that the balloons are meant for surveillance, and claims they are weather monitoring devices that had been blown off course.

However, US officials have said that China has for several years been operating a vast surveillance balloon operation out of Hainan province off China’s south coast. According to several officials who spoke to The Washington Post on condition of anonymity: “It has collected information on military assets in countries and areas of emerging strategic interest to China including Japan, India, Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines.”

Why is this happening now?

This is not the first time aerial balloons have been spotted in airspace around the world, but it might be the first time some countries are realising what they were.

US officials have now revealed that three such balloons were spotted during Donald Trump’s presidency, but says they were only recently identified as Chinese surveillance airships, said The Washington Post.

In Japan in 2020, an aerial orb caused some speculation. “Some people thought this was a UFO,” a Japanese official told the newspaper. “In hindsight people are realising that was a Chinese espionage balloon. But at that time it was purely novel – nobody had seen this… So there’s a lot of heightened attention at this time.”

Other balloons have been spotted over Latin America and allied countries in the Pacific. As for the other objects, an official told the paper: “The incursions in the past week have changed how analysts receive and interpret information from radars and sensors.”

What will happen next?

The US Navy has retrieved the first balloon shot down, but efforts are ongoing to bring in the other objects. Teams are being hampered by Arctic weather, wind chill and limited daylight, as well as the difficulty of retrieving an object from sea ice.

Only once all the objects have been retrieved and examined might we expect to know more about what they are.

Britain’s defence secretary Ben Wallace said the incidents are a “sign of how the global threat picture is changing for the worse”. The UK will now review what these sightings mean for its own airspace, reported The Guardian.

In the wake of the Chinese balloon being spotted over the US, Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed an official trip to China, marking “a significant new phase in the tensions between Washington and Beijing”, said CNN.