(Trends Wide) — The lesson the US military is learning, it seems, is that if you look for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs, you’ll find them hovering in the skies of the United States.

In the days since the Chinese balloon craze prompted authorities to adjust how they police US airspace, warplanes have intercepted and shot down objects over Alaska, northern Canada and Lake Huron.

That term – “objects” – is deliberately imprecise in relation to the three artifacts shot down since Friday. No one currently knows what they are or to whom they belong.

That said, the White House was willing to rule out that the objects are from another world.

They are not aliens or threatening

“I don’t think the American people have to worry about extraterrestrials with respect to these craft. And that’s it: there’s nothing more to say about it,” John Kirby, the National Security Council’s coordinator of Strategic Communications, said at a session briefing held Monday at the White House.

He also suggested that the downed objects posed no immediate threat, did not send communication signals, showed no signs of “maneuvering or propulsion capability” and were unmanned.

Under scrutiny for President Joe Biden’s lack of public comment, the government is now struggling to appear engaged. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan is going to lead a new “interagency team” to assess UAPs.

What we know about the last three objects

Trends Wide’s Natasha Bertrand summarized the descriptions we have of these latest objects:

Those intercepted over Alaska and northern Canada, he said, had characteristics similar to balloons with small cylindrical metal objects attached, and were flying at about 40,000 feet (12,000 meters).

The object shot down Sunday over Lake Huron, first detected the previous day over Montana, was different: It was octagonal in shape with dangling ropes and hovering at 20,000 feet (6,000 meters) over Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

The military decided to shoot down the objects because at those altitudes they could pose a threat to civilian aircraft.

The United States changed its “filter” and began to see objects

Bertrand also described how the military adjusted their protocols and began noticing these additional objects:

One of the reasons the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) has detected additional “objects” in recent days could be because it recently retuned its filters to better detect slow-moving targets operating above a certain altitude. a source briefed on the matter told Trends Wide.

The filters were not reset and expanded until last week, according to the source, after a suspected high-altitude Chinese Spy Balloon transited the United States and ignited a debate over the country’s ability to detect and defend against any potentially threatening objects. to enter its airspace.

Hundreds of reports on UAP since 2021

The most informative interview I saw on Monday was the one Trends Wide’s John King conducted with former Deputy Director of National Intelligence Beth Sanner, who is now a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

He noted that the Director of National Intelligence just reported to Congress last month on 247 new documented reports of unidentified aerial phenomena since March 2021 and an additional 119 reports since before March 2021. Read the unclassified version of this report .

About half of the total are “characterized as globes or globe-like entities.” Others act more like drones. And a few appear to be nothing more than “airborne debris like plastic bags.”

Here are some key excerpts from what Sanner told King.

It is important that these reports are taken seriously

TRUE: There was a lot of discussion, when we started looking at this in 2021, that it was about aliens. And I think since then, people have taken it back and said, you know, most of this stuff can probably be explained. But to me, these stories really do connect, right?

Because the things that pilots have been seeing – and were often discouraged from talking about it, there was a stigma attached to it – could very well be spies or other types of threats. So it’s important to get these things out there.

We can’t shoot down all the UAPs. We have to find out what is really a threat

TRUE: We have neither the interest nor the capacity to continue launching F-22s every time we see an object in the sky. So now we have to really focus and say, “How do we identify the things that are real threats?”.

We’ve ignored these types of low-tech threats, if that’s what they are

TRUE: These things are not that hard to do. This is low-tech technology. And it exposes our vulnerabilities, really. The defense of the continental United States has been neglected for decades, in terms of this type of air threat, cruise missile threat.

We have invested in defense against ballistic missiles, but not in this. So it might be a secret to all of us, but it’s not a secret to the US military, and the Biden administration put money in this year’s budget to start looking at this.

But we have a big gap. We have a geographic gap: we’re really just looking at what’s coming from the North Pole. But if something makes it to southern Alaska, we may not see it.

And then we have this technology gap, in terms of most of our radars being from the 1980s. through so much stuff. So we had to filter it to identify threats that looked like things that we recognize as threats.

China has accused the US of flying balloons over mainland China, Sanner thinks they are wrong

TRUE: We are in a game of cross accusations. You know, I think the Chinese are going to make things up in order to cover their own tracks.

But with that said, we spy too. And this is another form of espionage. So we have to be very careful how outraged we get in terms of what we do. But I don’t think we’ll send balloons of this nature over Chinese territory.

Patience is required to identify these objects

According to Andrew McCabe, Trends Wide Senior Law Enforcement Analyst and former FBI Deputy Director, it could take some time to figure out what the objects are.

“Some of them are landing in harder-to-reach places than others,” McCabe told Trends Wide’s Kate Bolduan on Monday. “Then those materials have to be transported back to Virginia, to the FBI lab, in Quantico.”

“Then you have to bring together the right partners, whether they’re international partners or researchers here in the United States, to participate in what we call the exploitation of that technology, of the team.”

“All of that takes time. I’m sure we’ll come to understand the full scope of these things and what they’re capable of, but it may not be quickly.”

Political support for the shootdowns

Although criticism of the Biden administration for not communicating these incidents more effectively has not been lacking, there is bipartisan support for tearing down the objects.

“I’d rather they were trigger-happy than permissive, but we’re going to have to see whether or not this is just the administration trying to change the headlines,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner said. of Ohio to Trends Wide’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” before the shooting down Sunday.

“What I think this shows, which is probably more important to our political discussion here, is that we really have to declare that we’re going to defend our airspace. And then we have to invest,” Turner added. “This shows some of the problems and gaps that we have. We have to fix them as soon as possible, because we certainly now know that there is a threat.”