President Biden directed the strike, said John Kirby, a White House spokesman. The Pentagon had recommended downing the object because it was soaring at about 40,000 feet, potentially threatening civilian air traffic. It was taken down over frozen territorial waters off the coast of northeastern Alaska, north of the Arctic Circle, Kirby said.
“We’re still trying to learn more from it,” he said. “I want to stress again we don’t know what entity owns this object. There’s no indication it’s from a nation or an institution or an individual.”
Whether the object was capable of surveillance, Kirby said, the United States has not “ruled anything in or out.”
Biden was first notified about the object Thursday night, after fighter aircraft were dispatched to observe it more closely, Kirby said. Its speed and small size, coupled with the nighttime darkness, left military commanders with few easy options upon the initial intercept, officials said.
Fighter aircraft were dispatched again on Friday, when it was determined the craft did not have a pilot on board, Kirby said.
“They worked really hard to try to get as much information as they could about this object,” Kirby said. “It was difficult for the pilots to glean a whole lot of information.”
The shoot-down was carried out by a pair of F-22 Raptors launched from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, with one of the advanced jets launching a single AIM-9X Sidewinder missile at 1:45 p.m. Eastern time, Ryder said.
Recovery operations are underway, he added, with an array of aircraft responding. Among them, he said, are an HC-130, a search-and-rescue plane. One could be seen on online flight trackers Friday circling near Prudhoe Bay, a coastal community of about 2,000 people where the Federal Aviation Administration had closed a patch of airspace extending into the Arctic Ocean. The forecast there Friday included temperatures below minus 20 degrees and light snow.
The shoot-down occurred as U.S. Navy and Coast Guard personnel continued to recover remnants of the suspected surveillance airship that was taken down Feb. 4 off the coast of South Carolina. U.S. officials have said it was part of a sprawling Chinese surveillance program. That device was roughly 200 feet tall and carried a payload measuring roughly the size of two or three buses, officials have said.
Kirby said Friday that he was not aware of any other similar objects flying over the United States.
“We’re going to remain vigilant about the skies over the United States,” he said. “And as I said earlier, the president takes his obligations to protect our national security interest. And those of us in the safety and security of the American people is paramount. And … he’s always going to decide and act in a way that is commensurate with that duty.”
