What happened
In the week after the Chinese balloon was shot down, NORAD tuned its radars to catch slower, smaller targets, and three more objects appeared. On 10 February an F-22 destroyed an object about the size of a small car near Deadhorse, off Alaska's north coast. On 11 February, on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's order, a US F-22 brought down another over central Yukon, the first time NORAD had downed an aerial object in its 64-year history. On 12 February an F-16 fired two missiles at a third over Lake Huron; General Mark Milley confirmed the first missed and fell harmlessly into the lake before the second hit. Officials described the targets only as objects. They were smaller than the Chinese balloon, flew lower and drifted with the wind with no apparent propulsion. Searches in Arctic sea ice, Yukon mountains and deep lake water were called off on 17 February without finding debris. The White House said they were most likely commercial or benign balloons with no link to China's program.
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The official explanation
White House spokesman John Kirby said the intelligence community saw balloons tied to commercial or research purposes as the leading explanation and that the objects were not maneuvering or self-propelled. Officials attributed the sudden detections to recalibrated radar filters. The Guardian reported that one object may have been a cheap hobbyist balloon, and documents released in November 2024 indicated recovered Lake Huron debris came from a company selling weather-monitoring equipment.
The anomalous case
For a few days the most powerful air force on Earth was shooting at things it could not name. Asked whether the objects could be extraterrestrial, NORAD commander General Glen VanHerck said he personally had not ruled out anything and deferred to intelligence analysts. Kirby admitted officials needed to be humble about identifying small objects from fighters moving at hundreds of miles an hour. Pilots gave conflicting descriptions, and no debris from the Alaska or Yukon objects was ever publicly recovered, so their identity rests on inference rather than wreckage. The episode also confirmed a startling admission: VanHerck said that before 2023 most raw radar returns of slow objects were filtered out, meaning similar craft may have crossed North American airspace unseen for years.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- Still no answers on mysterious object shot down off Alaska's north coast newspaper, alaskapublic.org
Sources
- U.S. general cautions recovery of objects over Lake Huron, Alaska, Yukon 'going to take some time' CBC News
- Still no answers on mysterious object shot down off Alaska's north coast Alaska Public Media
- Military finishes recovering Chinese balloon debris Associated Press (via WSLS)
- List of high-altitude object events in 2023 Wikipedia
Witness reports elsewhere
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