The U.S. military has called off its search to locate the unidentified objects shot down over Alaska and Lake Huron nearly two weeks ago.
One object was downed near Deadhorse, Alaska, on February 10, while the second over Lake Huron was shot down two days later.
According to a statement from U.S. Northern Command, as per Politico, the United States and Canada decided to halt the recovery effort after “systematic searches of each area using a variety of capabilities, including airborne imagery and sensors, surface sensors and inspections, and subsurface scans, and did not locate debris.”
News of the called-off search came shortly after items were collected from the original balloon downed on February 4. According to U.S. officials, the remnants from that first object were consistent with a Chinese spy balloon, Politico reported.
The debris from the downed balloon was reportedly recovered off the ocean floor off the coast of South Carolina. The efforts netted potentially critical equipment from the craft that could reveal what was being monitored and captured by the spy balloon.
Per Politico, John Kirby, a national security spokesman for the White House, said that a substantial amount of debris included “electronics and optics.” Kirby did not reveal whether the U.S. has gleaned any intelligence from the analysis.
The announcement of the end of the search followed three weeks of headlines detailing unidentified objects breaching North American airspace and the subsequent military action used to bring them down. Over the three weeks in February, a total of four objects were downed by the U.S. military, including the initial February 4 balloon.
The Biden administration has said that the initial object downed in U.S. airspace was likely a Chinese spy balloon, AP News reported.
Beijing has maintained that the balloon was a civilian aircraft and that the U.S. is overreacting.
This difference of opinion reared its head this weekend during the Munich Security Conference when U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and senior Chinese diplomat Wang Yi exchanged words, NBC reported.
Noting that Wang offered “no apology,” Blinken told NBC that he made it clear “that [the violation of U.S. airspace] was unacceptable and can never happen again.”
For his part, Wang claimed that the U.S. is acting “hysterical,” according to NBC, adding, “There are so many balloons all over the world, and various countries have them, so is the United States going to shoot all of them down?”
President Biden has said that the subsequent three smaller objects recently downed were potentially crafts owned by civilians.
“The intelligence community’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,” he revealed in a statement, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The objects were detected following radar recalibration to help identify slower-moving objects over American airspace, AP News reported.
As The Dallas Express reported, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers continue to push the Biden administration to provide more insight into the incursions, with Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) recently calling the lack of transparency “unacceptable.”
The February 2023 incident represents the first peacetime downing of unauthorized aircraft in U.S. history, according to AP News.