Specifically, this object detected by Beijing has been located in the waters of the Yellow Sea, near the coast of the city of Rizhao, according to the provincial maritime authorities in a statement collected by the Chinese international state newspaper Global Times. The Chinese Army, according to the note, is preparing to shoot down the object.
The authorities asked the fishermen in the area this Sunday to adopt the necessary protection measures. This announcement takes place in the midst of the “balloon crisis”, which began after the discovery of an alleged Chinese spy balloon over US territory, later shot down, followed by more sightings and one last demolition this Sunday of another object after its identification in Canada.
The city of Rizhao in Shandong province is a port on the Yellow Sea roughly halfway between Beijing to the northwest and Shanghai to the southeast. Directly to the east is South Korea.
The United States shot down a Chinese spy balloon on February 4, a week after the balloon crossed the country. Beijing said it was a balloon for meteorological studies.
That balloon was first seen near Alaska before traveling across Canada and into Montana. He was seen by civilians near Billings before he spent the rest of the week crossing the United States, floating through North and South Carolina before the military shot him down when he finally drifted over the Atlantic Ocean.
Canadian Defense Minister, Anita Anandconfirmed that the unidentificated object Shot down with an AIM-9X infrared missile launched by an F-22 Raptor of the United States Air Force yesterday, it had a cylindrical shape and was flying over the northwest of the country at about 12,000 meters above sea level. He said that it represented a threat to civil aviation. Anand declared during a press conference that the device was shot down at 15:41 Ottawa time.in the central area of the Yukon Territory, in northwestern Canada, and about 160 kilometers from the border with the United States.
In turn, Chuck Schumer, leader of the Democrats in the Senate, interviewed by the “This Week” program on ABC, said that national security adviser Jake Sullivan informed him of what happened on Saturday, shortly after the demolition of the Yukon River.
An object the size of a car was shot down over a remote area of Alaska on Saturday, according to the White House. Asked if those two objects were balloons, Schumer replied: “They think they were, yes, but much smaller than the first one.”
The White House appeared to contradict the Democratic Senate Majority Leader: “Objects shot down over Alaska and Canada in recent days did not resemble the Chinese surveillance balloon shot down off the coast of South Carolina and were much smaller,” a National Security Council spokesman said.
“Those objects did not look much alike and were much smaller than the PRC balloon and we will not characterize them definitively until we can recover the debris, which we are working on,” he added.
US reopened Michigan airspace after closure for “national defense”
The airspace over the lake Michigan, in the north of USA, temporarily closed for “national defense” reasonswas reopened, the US Civil Aviation Authority (FAA) announced on Sunday.
“The FAA briefly closed a portion of the airspace over Lake Michigan to support Department of Defense operations. The airspace has been reopened“, the regulator said in a statement.
Contacted by AFP, the Pentagon had not yet reacted.
The news comes after three flying objects, including one described by Washington as a Chinese spy balloon, were shot down over the United States and Canada in a week.
On Saturday, the airspace of the US state of Montana was temporarily closed, but a fighter jet sent to investigate failed to identify a “flying object”according to the military, which later acknowledged that the alert was due to a radar anomaly.
The United States believes that the first officially detected object was a balloon controlled by the Chinese military that was part of a fleet sent by Beijing to more than 40 countries on five continents for espionage purposes.
Source: Ambito
