WASHINGTON – The recent proliferation of high-altitude objects in the United States may be explained by the fact that the US military is now specifically looking for them, a White House national security official said Monday.
Early detection radars have historically looked for fast-moving aircraft and even faster-moving missiles approaching the United States. But defense officials are now tuning their instruments to detect smaller, slower objects, said John Kirby, the National Security Council’s coordinator for strategic communications.
“And if you set the parameters in such a way, to search for something specific, it is more likely that you will find something specific,” he said.
Kirby drew attention to the difference between high-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 coast of South Carolina on February 4.
The balloon flew at an altitude of 60,000 feet, above the level of commercial air traffic, and carried a load the size of three buses, making it dangerous to bring it down on land. The three most recent objects – Kirby clearly refused to call them balloons – were smaller and flew at a height between 20,000 and 40,000 feet, exactly at the height used by the aircraft, which led to the decision to take them down at the earliest opportunity.
China has not yet claimed ownership of the three new objects. Neither did any other foreign government, Kirby said.
It’s still unclear what information the People’s Republic of China, as the country is officially known, can glean from balloons in the stratosphere that can’t be gleaned from numerous camera-wrapped satellites nearly 100 miles away. over the United States every day – or from satellites in geosynchronous orbit over the equator, where they can eavesdrop on electronic communications in North America.
“This balloon provides a limited additive capability to the PRC’s other intelligence platforms used by the United States,” Kirby said.
“If you’re in a place that’s lower than space, you might get better image fidelity, like things on the ground,” he said. “If you are not moving at the speed of the satellite and therefore, you know, just take a few seconds through the site, when you can maneuver left, right, slow down, speed up like this is possible, then you can loiter. And if you can loiter, you can soak in a little more. You can spend more time going through sensitive sites.
However, Kirby declined to say whether the payload below the balloon was transmitting data during its crossing of the United States, and did not provide further details about the balloon’s capabilities. “That’s a good question you should ask in Beijing,” he said.
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In a White House press briefing Monday, Kirby reviewed the chronology of China’s use of high-altitude spy balloons in recent years and the United States’ findings on the program.
“It was an operation during the previous administration, but it was not detected. We were detected. We were tracked. And we have studied carefully so that we can learn,” said Kirby. “We know that these PRC surveillance balloons have crossed dozens of countries on many continents around the world, including some of our closest allies and partners.”
Kirby said President Joe Biden has created a task force, led by national security adviser Jake Sullivan, to study the balloons and other objects and come up with a strategy to deal with them. “Every element of the government will increase its efforts to understand and mitigate the event,” he said.
He said that, more generally, Biden has instructed the military and intelligence communities to better understand “unknown aerial phenomena,” which the common term for decades has been called “unidentified flying objects,” or UFOs.
The Pentagon released a video in 2021 documenting an incident where a pilot saw a plane moving at high speed and performing maneuvers that appeared to defy the laws of physics.
“These unknown aerial phenomena have been reported for years without explanation or in-depth investigation by the government,” Kirby said. “We’re finally trying to get to know him better.”
However, Kirby added that none of the recent objects dropped by US fighter jets qualifies as his favorite type of UFO conspiracy theory.
“I don’t think Americans should worry about aliens in this job, period,” he said.