US fighter jet shoots down new mystery ‘object’ over Canada

WASHINGTON/OTTAWA       -     A US F-22 fighter jet shot down an unidentified cylindrical object over Canada on Saturday, the second such in­stance in as many days, as North America appeared on edge fol­lowing a week-long Chinese spying balloon saga that drew the global spotlight. Separately, the US military also scrambled fighter jets in Montana to inves­tigate a radar anomaly that trig­gered a brief federal closure of airspace. “Those aircraft did not identify any object to correlate the radar hits,” the North Amer­ican Aerospace Defence Com­mand (NORAD) said in a state­ment. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau first announced Saturday’s shootdown over the northern Yukon territory, say­ing Canadian forces would re­cover and analyse the wreckage. Canadian Defence Minister Ani­ta Anand declined to speculate about the origin of the object, which she said was cylindrical in shape. She stopped short of call­ing it a balloon but said it was smaller than the Chinese bal­loon shot down off South Caro­lina’s coast a week ago, though similar in appearance. Aloft at 40,000 feet (12,200 m), it posed a risk to civilian air traffic and was shot down at 3:41 EST (2041 GMT), she added.“There is no reason to believe that the impact of the object in Canadi­an territory is of any public con­cern,” Anand told a news confer­ence. The Pentagon said NORAD detected the object over Alaska late on Friday.

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