BREAKING NEWS: Pentagon shoots down ‘high-altitude’ unidentified object over Alaska just week after fighter jets downed Chinese spy balloon
- National Security Council spokesman John Kirby confirmed Friday there was an object flying over Alaska airspace and President Joe Biden ordered it shot down
- ‘The object was flying at 40,000 feet and posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight,’ he said
- Kirby said the military successfully shot down the object over the U.S.’s territorial waters, which are currently frozen
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby confirmed Friday that there was an object flying over Alaska airspace and President Joe Biden ordered it shot down.
‘So I can confirm that the Department of Defense was tracking a high-altitude object over Alaska airspace in the last 24 hours,’ he said at Friday’s briefing. ‘The object was flying at 40,000 feet and posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight.’
Kirby said that ‘out of an abundance of caution and at the recommendation of the Pentagon, President Biden ordered the military to down the object and they did, and it came inside our territorial waters.’
The admission comes after much of last week was devoted to Biden’s handling of a Chinese spy balloon, which was spotted in Montana and then drifted all the way to South Carolina’s coastline, before the Air Force sent an F-22 to take it down with a AIM-9X Sidewinder missile.
The Pentagon described that balloon as being 200-feet tall, weighing thousands of pounds and with a payload the size of a jetliner.
The president, speaking to Noticias Telemundo’s Julio Vaqueiro Thursday in Tampa, said it was ‘not a major breach’ for the balloon to fly almost the entire length of the U.S.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby confirmed Friday that there was an object flying over Alaska airspace and President Joe Biden ordered it shot down
More to follow …
