The United States is not experiencing a "sudden increase" of aerial objects in U.S. airspace, according to President Joe Biden.
Over the last two weeks, the U.S. military has shot down four different objects that had crossed U.S. airspace. The first one, which was shot down on Feb. 4 off the coast of South Carolina, was a Chinese surveillance drone, while the other three are unrelated to the first. The intelligence community's leading explanation is that these objects are tied to some commercial or benign purpose.
WHITE HOUSE SAYS NO INDICATION THREE OBJECTS SHOT DOWN WERE CHINESE SURVEILLANCE
"I want to be clear, we don't have any evidence that there has been a sudden increase in the number of objects in the sky," Biden told reporters on Thursday.
The three more recent objects that the military shot down were, in order, shot down off the coast of Alaska near the Arctic Circle last Friday, in the Canadian Rockies in the Yukon region one day later, and over Lake Huron on Sunday. It's unclear what these objects were, and it will be difficult for U.S. personnel to recover them, given the terrain where they were downed.
"We don't yet know exactly what these three objects were," the president continued. "But nothing right now suggests they're related to China's spy balloon program, or there were surveillance vehicles from any other country. The intelligence committee's current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions, studying weather or conducting other scientific research."
The three unknown objects are smaller than the Chinese surveillance balloon, and between their size and the slow speed they were traveling, it made it difficult for U.S. military radars to pick up.
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“It’s how you use your radars. We typically are focused on things that are moving fast, and it’s a bit more difficult to collect on slow-moving objects like a balloon,” Austin said in an interview with NBC News. “As they made adjustments, they were able to see some of that."
"We're now just seeing more of them partially because the steps we've taken," Biden added.