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Some mysterious objects have been flying in the US skies over the past few days. The aerial objects have restarted the tension between the US and China. While the US military has shot down all objects of different shapes and sizes but has also plunged the ties with China to another level.
The US downed two more "mysterious" objects over Alaska and Canada on Friday and Saturday. And, a fourth was destroyed on Sunday over Michigan.
The saga began last month when the US detected a 60-metre tall balloon of China that entered national airspace near the Aleutian Islands.
The US exploded the balloon which drifted over the South Carolina coast, while China insisted that it was a "civilian warship used for research".
The next incident occurred on Friday 10 February when US fighter jets downed another object over sea ice near Deadhorse in northern Alaska. This object was the size of a Volkswagen Beetle and was flying at 40,000 feet.
The US military knocked out the third mysterious object from the sky on Saturday at Canada's central Yukon Territory, about 100 miles from the US border.
The fourth object was destroyed by the US fighter planes over Lake Huron in Michigan on Sunday.
The US government has said that it is unaware of the origin or purpose of the recent three aerial objects that were shot down during the weekends.
White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said, "We have not yet been able to definitively assess what these most recent objects are".
He said that the objects, flying at altitudes of between 20,000 and 40,000 feet, were considered a risk to air traffic, he said, although they did not pose a threat to people on the ground. They also were shot down because U.S. authorities could not rule out that they were spying.
China on Monday widened its dispute with the United States over aerial surveillance, claiming that US high-altitude balloons had flown over its airspace without permission more than 10 times since the beginning of 2022. The White House denied the assertion.
Kirby said: "There is no US surveillance aircraft in Chinese airspace. I'm not aware of any other craft that we're flying over into Chinese airspace."
When pressed about whether any US craft was being used over Chinese-claimed airspace in Taiwan and the South China Sea, he declined to specify further.
The White House, which has tried to tamp down rhetoric around China following the balloon incident, took a noticeably sharper tone on Monday.
"This is the latest example of China scrambling to do damage control," Adrienne Watson, another White House national security spokesperson, said.
The United States says the large Chinese balloon was obviously a spy craft and that the debris is currently being plucked from the Atlantic Ocean for analysis.
The other three unidentified objects -- shot down Friday over Alaska, Yukon in Canada, and at Lake Huron on the US-Canadian border -- so far present a greater challenge.
Other than that they were much smaller, less sophisticated, and flying lower than the Chinese balloon from earlier this month, US officials know little -- not even to whom they belonged.
"Countries, companies, research, and academic organizations operate objects at these altitudes for purposes that are not nefarious at all, including scientific research," Kirby said.
Whether they were spying also remains unknown.
In Yukon province, Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he toured with some country's forces who will be leading recovery efforts on the ground.
"This is a very serious situation," Trudeau said, adding that he would speak to US President Joe Biden fact-to-face about the objects next month.
A Canadian coast guard ship and two helicopters were helping the search and recovery in Lake Huron.
US officials say that the answer may be not that an increased number of devices is coming over the United States but simply that an adjustment in the sensitivity of radar settings after the February 4 shootdown means that items once passing unseen are now caught.
"One of the reasons that we think we're seeing more is because we're looking for more," Kirby said.
The truth will not be clear until debris is collected and that is not simple, either.
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