An American fighter jet, acting on the orders of President Biden and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, shot down another unidentified flying object on Saturday, Canadian and American officials said, in the latest installment of the drama playing out in the skies of North America.
“I ordered the take down of an unidentified object that violated Canadian airspace,” Mr. Trudeau said in a
statement posted on Twitter. He said an American F-22 with the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which is operated jointly by the United States and Canada, downed the object over the Yukon Territory.
As with the object that Mr. Biden ordered shot down near Alaska on Friday, officials said they had yet to determine just what had been blasted out of the sky over the Yukon, which borders Alaska.
Mr. Trudeau said he had spoken with Mr. Biden on Saturday afternoon. “Canadian Forces will now recover and analyze the wreckage of the object,” he said in his Twitter post.
The White House said in a statement Saturday that Mr. Biden and Mr. Trudeau had “discussed the importance of recovering the object in order to determine more details on its purpose or origin.”
Late Saturday, the Federal Aviation Administration briefly closed an area near Havre, Mont., to air traffic. The agency had used similar terminology a week earlier, just before the United States shot down a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina. A joint statement from NORAD and U.S. Northern Command later said that NORAD had detected a radar anomaly and sent fighter aircraft to investigate, but they did not find anything that correlated with the radar hits. Officials have acknowledged that a heightened awareness could lead to false positives.
The object taken down over the Yukon was picked up on radar as it passed over Alaska late Friday, Pentagon officials said earlier on Saturday. NORAD sent American fighter jets, which were soon joined by Canadian fighters, to track it.
“Monitoring continued today as the object crossed into Canadian airspace,” said Brig. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary. The F-22 shot down the object over Canadian territory using the same Sidewinder air-to-air missile that was used to take down two previous flying objects, General Ryder said, including the Chinese spy balloon a week earlier.
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin spoke by phone Saturday with his Canadian counterpart, Anita Anand, General Ryder said. Speaking at a news conference that evening, Ms. Anand described
the object as cylindrical and said it was smaller than the spy balloon taken down over the Atlantic the previous weekend.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he and President Biden had ordered the object violating Canadian airspace to be taken down, a day after another object was shot out of the sky near Alaska.
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