Just hours after an American fighter jet shot down an unidentified flying object over Canada on Saturday afternoon, airspace over Montana was briefly shut down “to support Department of Defense Operations” in the area, the Federal Aviation Administration announced.
While the airspace was quickly reopened, panic ensued as Montana Congressman Matt Rosendale said it had been closed due to an “object that could interfere with commercial air traffic.” The area was near Havre, Montana, close to the border with Canada.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command later issued a statement saying airspace had been shut due to a “radar anomaly” that required fighter aircraft “to investigate.”
“Those aircraft did not identify any object to correlate to the radar hits,” NORAD said, adding that it would continue to monitor the situation.
The incident was just the latest twist in a dizzying saga over unidentified flying objects in North American skies. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the downing of yet another object earlier Saturday, after NORAD warned of a “high-altitude airborne object” flying over northern Canada.
“I ordered the take down of an unidentified object that violated Canadian airspace,” Trudeau said in a statement.
“Canadian and U.S. aircraft were scrambled, and a U.S. F-22 successfully fired at the object,” he said, adding that Canadian authorities will now “analyze” the wreckage. Canadian Defense Minister Anita Anand said “recovery operations” were underway for further investigation into the object.
“It appears to be a small, cylindrical object, and smaller than the one that was downed off the coast of North Carolina,” Anand said at an evening press conference.
The White House also confirmed that President Joe Biden and Trudeau had authorized the shoot-down. It was the second object shot down over North American skies in the past two days. On Friday, the White House announced that an unidentified object posing a “reasonable threat” was shot down over Alaska. The Pentagon has largely been tight-lipped about that incident, saying only that the object was about the size of a small car and was unmanned at 40,000 feet.
Northern Command offered an update on Saturday, saying it had “no further details at this time about the object, including its capabilities, purpose, or origin.”
Earlier this month, on Feb. 4, a U.S. fighter jet took down a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon over the Atlantic Ocean after it spent several days traversing across the country.
In recent weeks, a string of flying objects have been spotted over various countries in the Western Hemisphere, sparking a diplomatic crisis between the U.S. and China.
China eventually acknowledged the existence of the balloon shot down last week, but claimed it was of a purely “civilian nature” and had been blown off course by unexpected weather conditions.
The fallout from the discovery led Secretary of State Antony Blinken to cancel an upcoming trip to China intended to cool relations between the two superpowers, which have exchanged increasingly hostile rhetoric in recent months.
In the days following the sighting of the first balloon, other similar objects were reportedly spotted in the skies over Costa Rica and Colombia. China claimed these balloons also had no intelligence-gathering function.
Recent intelligence has revealed a larger Chinese airborne surveillance effort, which saw the country using the giant inflatables to snoop everywhere from Europe to Southeast Asia.
