US officials on Sunday restricted airspace over Lake Michigan in Wisconsin, citing a new potential threat to national security, as the United States and Canada respond to a series of recent air intrusions.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced “temporary flight restrictions” over one of the Great Lakes along the US-Canada border, designating it as “national defense airspace”. ”, just one day after a similar lockdown occurred in Montana and the activation of US fighter jets.
The army has already shot down three suspicious objects. The last one was this Saturday in northern Canada, on Friday in Alaska and last weekend another Chinese surveillance balloon.
Despite these operations, so far there are no indications that the objects have any kind of relationship with the one that was discovered a few days ago and that was intended to spy on US territory by the Chinese government.
By contrast, the 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, according to a statement from a spokesman for the National Security Council. the White House.
“These 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, and that is something we are working on,” the authoritative voice of the government of China confirmed. USA.
That statement came in response to inquiries from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer that US officials believed the drones were balloons.
“In short, until a few months ago we didn’t know about these balloons,” Schumer said. “It’s amazing that we didn’t know…Now they are learning so much more. And the military and intelligence agencies are laser-focused on collecting and accumulating the information, and then doing a full analysis.”
China has denied that the balloon shot down on Saturday, February 5, was a spy device and accused the United States of launching an “information war against Beijing.”
In a briefing last Thursday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning insisted that the balloon was a civilian weather craft that accidentally went off course, and that the United States had “exaggerated” in shooting it down.
[Con información de Reuters y AFP]
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