The United States announced on Friday (February 17, 2023) that it had completed recovery efforts off the coast of South Carolina to collect sensors and other debris from a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon shot down by a U.S. fighter jet on February 4.
Investigators are now analyzing the guts of the balloon. Authorities in both the United States and Canada have announced that they will no longer be searching for the wreckage of three unidentified flying objects that were shot down over the weekend.
According to Vice President Joe Biden, intelligence officials believe unidentified objects were recently shot down over U.S. and Canada and you can see the Tweet we have provided below.
President Joe #Biden said intelligence officials currently believe unidentified objects recently shot down over U.S. and Canada “were most likely #balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions.” pic.twitter.com/2x59XrMWl2
— KCCI News (@KCCINews) February 16, 2023
The United States intelligence community has concluded that the other three objects were not part of China’s spy program but rather were balloons tied to private companies, recreational organizations or academic institutions.
U.S. Northern Command has announced that the remaining pieces of the Chinese balloon that was shot down by a Sidewinder missile are on their way to an FBI laboratory in Virginia for examination and Reuters first reported on Thursday(Feb, 17) that efforts to recover the Chinese spy balloon had been called off.
National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby described the amount of recovered material as significant noting that it included the payload structure as well as some of the electronics and the optics, all of which are now at the FBI laboratory in Quantico, (according to the reports of CNBC.com).
Kirby claimed:
The United States had learned a great deal about the balloon just by watching it fly over the country. We’re going to learn even more, we believe, by getting a look at the guts inside it and seeing how it worked and what it was capable of.
U.S. Navy and Coast Guard ships that had been searching the sea for nearly two weeks have left the area, according to the military.
The United States military claims to have recovered the Chinese balloon’s primary sensors, electronics and large portions of its structure all of which could aid counterintelligence officials in determining the means by which Beijing may have been collecting and transmitting surveillance information.
The Chinese balloon incident has further strained relations between Washington and Beijing prompting U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to cancel a trip to Beijing scheduled for this month.
It was hoped that the Blinken visit the first by a U.S. secretary of state to China in five years would help ease tensions between the two countries.
As a result, American officials have been considering setting up a meeting between Blinken and China’s top diplomat Wang Yi on the fringes of the Munich Security Conference, which kicked off this past Friday.
What did Kamala Harris Say about Chinese Balloon?
Kamala Harris, the vice president is currently in Munich for a conference and has defended the administration’s response to the balloon incident and the shooting down of three other objects.
Harris told MSNBC that the Chinese balloon needed to be shot down because we were confident that China was using it to spy on American people.
She reaffirmed the United States’ stance on how it should relate to China, saying, “We will maintain the perspective that we have”. That’s not going to alter, but that balloon was not useful in the least.
Joe Biden stated that there is no evidence to suggest that the three objects that were shot down in North American air space were connected to China’s spy balloon program and you can read more about it in our post titled ” Joe Biden say about the Objects Shot Down in North America” You can follow us on Twitter for the more latest news.