Chinese spy balloon recovery mission completed, military mum on investigation
The U.S. military has finished recovering parts of the Chinese spy balloon shot down off the South Carolina coast.
The joint Navy, Coast Guard and FBI operation concluded Thursday, the Defense Department’s U.S. Northern Command said Friday in a statement. The final pieces were transported from the crash site to FBI headquarters in Virginia.
Though China maintains the balloon was a weather monitoring device that blew off course, U.S. leaders said recovery operations confirmed it was designed for surveillance. Northern Command said the FBI was conducting “counterintelligence exploitation.”
The payload included “electronics and optics,” according to White House national security spokesman John Kirby. He did not go into specifics.
U.S. fighter jets shot down the hulking, 200 foot-tall balloon on Feb. 4 about 10 miles off the South Carolina coast, initiating a recovery operation that lasted 12 days across a square mile of the Atlantic Ocean.
In the ensuing days, the military shot down three more mysterious flying objects over North America — one in northern Alaska, one in Canada’s Yukon Territory and one over Lake Huron.
President Biden said Thursday that all of those objects were likely civilian-owned balloons, not foreign surveillance devices. The military has already given up searching for the object that landed in Lake Huron and is expected to abandon the other searches as well.
“We don’t yet know exactly what these three objects were,” Biden said. “But nothing right now suggests they were related to China’s spy balloon program.”
Military leaders said the three follow-up missions were launched after radars were recalibrated to better detect slow moving objects. The Chinese spy balloon was significantly larger than the other objects.
An Illinois hobby group, the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, said Wednesday that it was missing a tiny “pico balloon” last heard from over northern Alaska.
With News Wire Services
