The US military has recovered important electronic components from the suspected Chinese spy balloon that was shot down this month off the coast of South Carolina, Northern Command said on Monday.
The US military command said crews had retrieved significant debris, including all the “priority sensor and electronics pieces” as well as large sections of the structure.
Retrieval of the sensors and other electronic components is critical to US efforts to demonstrate that the balloon was a surveillance craft and not a civilian airship conducting meteorological research as China has claimed.
Separately, the White House on Monday said there was no evidence that three objects shot down over North America over the weekend were engaged in surveillance but added it could not rule out the possibility of espionage.
John Kirby, National Security Council spokesperson, said US president Joe Biden had ordered the shootdown of the unidentified aerial objects — over Alaska on Friday, Canada’s Yukon territory on Saturday and Lake Huron on Sunday — due to the risk to civilian aircraft and because he could not rule out that they were spying.
“Their altitudes were considerably lower than the Chinese high-altitude balloon and did pose a threat to civilian commercial air traffic,” Kirby said, explaining the decision to strike the objects with air-to-air missiles. “While we have no specific reason to suspect that they were conducting surveillance of any kind, we couldn’t rule that out.”
General Paul Prévost, director of staff for the Canadian Strategic Joint Staff, said at a media briefing that the object shot down on Sunday was a “suspected balloon”. His comment came after General Glen VanHerck, head of the joint US-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad), said he was not prepared to describe the targets as balloons.
Prévost added that the US and Canada first detected that object over southern Alberta and suggested the military was trying to determine its origin before it entered Canadian airspace.
The Pentagon said two of the three objects appeared to have been balloons, according to one person familiar with the US assessment.
The US shot down the suspected Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina on February 4 after it had flown over North America and loitered over sensitive military sites.
Washington insists the aircraft, which carried a payload the size of three school buses, was a surveillance balloon. Beijing claims it was a civilian airship conducting meteorological research.
Kirby on Monday also rejected Chinese claims that the US flew 10 high-altitude balloons through its airspace last year. “We’re not flying surveillance balloons over China [and] I’m not aware of any other craft that was flying over into Chinese airspace”, he said.
US officials said one reason Norad appeared to be detecting more objects was that the military had recalibrated its radars to be more sensitive following the suspected Chinese spy balloon’s incursion.
Kirby added the US was still trying to assess the three aerial objects shot down since Friday and would learn more after recovering debris. “We don’t know who owns them,” he said.
But he cautioned that the salvage operations were challenging because the objects had fallen into “pretty remote, difficult areas to reach”.
Canadian and US officials said they had not recovered debris from any of the three unidentified objects.
Sean McGills, executive director of the Canadian Federal Policing Strategic Management, said conditions in the Yukon were “treacherous” and the salvage operation in Lake Huron was also facing very tough weather conditions.
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