U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin at the Pentagon in Washington DC (Credit: US DOD)

By Gary  Raynaldo   –  DIPLOMATIC  TIMES

WASHINGTON   –  Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin  says the  various unidentified objects shot down over U.S. skies recently are “not a military threat” to Americans.  Austin sought to reassure Americans who have become jittery over the Department of Defense’s shooting  down of  four objects over North America in just the past week alone.  On Saturday, at the direction of President Biden, and based on the recommendations of Secretary Austin and military leadership, an F-16 fired an AIM9x to successfully shoot down an airborne object flying at approximately 20,000 feet altitude in U.S. airspace over Lake Huron in the State of Michigan. The DOD said the object’s path and altitude raised concerns, including that it could be a hazard to civil aviation. 

“The safety and the security of the American people is the President and the department’s number one priority, and I want to reassure Americans that these objects do not present a military threat to anyone on the ground. They do, however, present a risk to civil aviation and potentially an intelligence collection threat, and we’ll get to the bottom of it.”

-U.S. Defense Secretary Austin 

The Defense Secretary made the comments to the press upon his arrival in Brussels Monday ahead of the meeting of NATO’s Ukraine Defense Contact Group. At the moment, Austin said,  the priority is on debris recovery so that “we can get a better sense of what these objects are”.   He added that the Pentagon is  working closely with “the rest of the federal government”,  including the FAA, the FBI, NASA.  Austin has said the three objects shot down are different from the  first object discovered two weeks ago that  has been identified by U.S. officials as a “Chinese spy balloon”.   China steadfastly denies the object was a spy balloon, maintaining it was used for weather research. 

“I want to be clear — the three objects taken down this weekend are very different from what we were talking about last week. We knew exactly what that was, a PRC surveillance balloon. As we have said, we do not assess that the recent objects pose any direct threat to the people on the ground and we will continue to focus on confirming their nature and purpose”.

-Defense Secretary Austin