It is the fourth incident in just over a week – and the third in as many days – after objects were shot down in Alaska and Canada on Friday and Saturday,
A senior US official, speaking anonymously, described the latest object as having “an octagonal structure with strings hanging off but no discernible payload”.
The four flying objects
On Friday 4 February, the US military downed a suspected Chinese spy balloon off the Carolina coast after it said had traversed sensitive military sites across North America.
On Friday 10 Friday, a second “car-sized” object was shot down over sea ice near Deadhorse, Alaska.
On Saturday 11 February, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered a US warplane to shoot down a third unidentified object that was flying high over the northern Canadian territory of Yukon.
On Sunday 12 February, a fourth unidentified object was shot down with a missile by US fighter jets over Lake Huron on the US-Canada border.
Authorities restricted airspace over the lake, near the Canadian border, before both US and Canadian jets were sent to intercept it.
Jets were also scrambled on Saturday after radar detected an object over Montana, but it could not be located and it was thought it could be an error.
However, the signal was picked up again by North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) on Sunday, the Pentagon said.
Advertisement
“Based on its flight path and data we can reasonably connect this object to the radar signal picked up over Montana, which flew in proximity to sensitive DOD [Department of Defense] sites,” said a statement.
“We did not assess it to be a kinetic military threat to anything on the ground, but assess it was a safety flight hazard and a threat due to its potential surveillance capabilities.”
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
1:10
Where have flying objects been shot down?
Teams are trying to recover the object from the lake.
US Air Force general Glen VanHerck admitted he did not know what the last three objects shot down were or how they stay aloft.
“We’re calling them objects, not balloons, for a reason,” he said – also refusing to rule out any explanation when asked if they could be extra-terrestrial.
A National Security Council spokesperson earlier on Sunday said the unidentified objects shot down over Alaska and Canada were “much smaller” than the Chinese balloon.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
0:36
Trudeau confirms UFO shot down
‘Object was cylindrical’
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said teams were searching for the object shot down over his country.
A US F-22 stealth jet brought it down on Saturday over the sparsely populated Yukon territory in the northwest.
“Recovery teams are on the ground, looking to find and analyse the object,” Mr Trudeau told reporters.
“There’s still much to know about it. That’s why the analysis of this object is going to be very important.”
Canada’s defence minister Anita Anand described it as cylindrical but smaller than the Chinese balloon.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
0:58
4 February: Moment ‘spy balloon’ shot down
Image: The US Navy collected the wreckage of the Chinese balloon from the sea
It was flying at 40,000ft and posed a risk to civilian planes when it was brought down about 100 miles from the border at 3.41pm EST (8.41pm GMT), said Ms Anand.
The Pentagon said NORAD had spotted the object over the coast of Alaska late on Friday.
Jets were scrambled from the Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson and joined by Canadian CF-18 and CP-140 aircraft after the object crossed the border.
The Pentagon said the US F-22 shot down the object using an AIM 9X missile “following close coordination” between the countries.
Mr Trudeau said the military would recover the wreckage and that he had spoken to President Biden and thanked NORAD for “keeping the watch over North America”.
Meanwhile, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has said the UK will conduct a security review following the latest development.
Analysis: China meets insinuations with accusations
Neither America nor Canada has officially confirmed where the shot down “unidentified objects” are from, but the insinuation that China is responsible feels pretty clear.
Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader no less, has said he thinks that’s “likely”
The Chinese are well aware of the accusations and thus there were a lot of questions today, not least how they would respond?
The answer was with defiance but no clear denial.
At a routine press conference at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the spokesperson Wang Wen Bin was asked multiple times whether he would confirm or deny that the crafts were Chinese.
He would not be drawn either way, his answer instead was an accusation.
An accusation that it is, in fact, America that’s the world’s most aggressive surveillance power, that it’s America that has questions to answer about illegal spying and, most notably, an accusation that America has sent more than 10 such spy balloons over Chinese territory since January 2022.
Such a claim is hard to assess as there was no further detail about when and where these alleged incursions happened and how China responded at the time, but the accusation alone is a clear sign that China feels hard done by over this issue.
Another sign of pressure, perhaps, are reports that China is preparing to shoot down an unidentified object over its airspace.
Such an action would no doubt raise eyebrows given the resolute condemnation of the American response as “trigger-happy” and “an obvious overreaction”.
Some form of face-saving retaliation is not out of the question but, for now at least, it’s a topic that China doesn’t want to engage with.
Multiple attempts to ask were met with a “referral to previous statements”, in other words, “no comment”.
He said: “The UK and her allies will review what these airspace intrusions mean for our security. This development is another sign of how the global threat picture is changing for the worse.”
Earlier this week, Beijing admitted that the balloon shot down off South Carolina had come from China but insisted it was a “civilian airship”.
It said it had strayed into US airspace and was for meteorological and other scientific research.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has apologised to Donald Trump over an anti-tariff advert featuring a clip of Ronald Reagan.
Speaking at the Asia-Pacific summit in South Korea, he also said he had reviewed the commercial and told Ontario Premier Doug Ford not to air it.
“I did apologise to the president,” Mr Carney said on Saturday, confirming earlier comments made by the US president on Friday.
“I told [Doug] Ford I did not want to go forward with the ad,” he added.
The private conversation with Mr Trump happened at a dinner hosted by South Korea’s president on Wednesday.
The commercial, commissioned by Mr Ford, included a quote from Republican former president Ronald Reagan saying that tariffs cause trade wars and economic disaster.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
1:26
TV advert deepens trade rift between Trump and Canada
In a post on Truth Social, he wrote: “Because of their serious misrepresentation of the facts, and hostile act, I am increasing the Tariff on Canada by 10% over and above what they are paying now.”
The ad by the Ontario government has a voiceover of Ronald Reagan criticising tariffs on foreign goods while saying they cause job losses and trade wars.
The video uses five complete sentences from a five-minute weekly address recorded in 1987, but edited together out of order.
The ad does not mention that the former US president was explaining that tariffs imposed on Japan by his administration should be seen as a sadly unavoidable exception to his basic belief in free trade as the key to prosperity.
Meanwhile, Mr Carney said his talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday were a turning point in relations after years of tensions.
He also met Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on the sidelines of the summit.
Donald Trump has said he is designating Nigeria a “country of particular concern” as “thousands of Christians” are being killed there.
Posting on Truth Social, he said radical Islamists are committing “mass slaughter” and Christianity is “facing an existential threat” in the West African nation.
The US president said he was asking officials to “immediately look into this matter, and report back to me”.
Mr Trump quoted figures suggesting 3,100 Christians had been killed in Nigeria, but did not state any source for the numbers or timeframe.
He stated: “We stand ready, willing, and able to save our Great Christian population around the World!”
Nigeria now joins North Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan and China on a list of countries “of particular concern” due to violations of religious freedom.
The move is one step before possible sanctions – which could mean a ban on all non-humanitarian aid.
More on Donald Trump
Related Topics:
The Nigerian government has vehemently rejected the claims. Analysts have said that, while Christians are among those targeted, the majority of victims of armed groups are Muslims in the country’s Muslim-majority north, where the most attacks take place.
Mr Trump’s move follows efforts by Republican senator Ted Cruz to get fellow evangelical Christians to lobby Congress over claims of “Christian mass murder” in Nigeria.
Boko Haram – which kidnapped more than 270 schoolgirls in 2014 – is the main group cited in previous warnings by US and international governments.
The group has committed “egregious violations of religious freedom”, according to a 2021 report by the bipartisan US Commission on International Religious Freedom.
It said more than 37,000 people had been killed by Islamist groups in Nigeria since 2011.
Churches and Christian neighbourhoods have been targeted in the past, but experts say Muslims are the most common victims of Boko Haram attacks, which routinely target the police, military and government.
Other groups operating said to be operating in the country include Boko Haram offshoot Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP).
About half of Nigeria’s population is estimated to be Muslim, who mostly live in the north, with roughly the other half following Christianity.
US travellers are currently urged to “reconsider” travel to Nigeria due to a threat of terrorism, crime, kidnapping and armed gangs. The UK advises its citizens along similar lines.
The US is drastically cutting the number of refugees it will allow into the country to 7,500, and giving priority to white South Africans.
The new figure, announced on Thursday in a memo in the Federal Registry, the official journal of the US administration, is a dramatic reduction from last year’s 125,000, set by former president Joe Biden.
No reason was given for the decrease, but the note said the admission of the 7,500 refugees during the 2026 fiscal year was “justified by humanitarian concerns or is otherwise in the national interest”.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
1:50
Trump-Xi meeting: Three key takeaways
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
6:44
Is Trump trying to topple Maduro?
The notice posted to the register’s website said the 7,500 admissions would “primarily” be allocated to Afrikaner South Africans and “other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands”.
It is half the 15,000 total set for 2021 during Donald Trump’s first term in office at the height of the COVID pandemic, which reports said was the previous lowest refugee admissions cap.
Refugee rights groups were quick to condemn the proposal, with International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) president Sharif Aly, saying that by “privileging Afrikaners while continuing to ban thousands of refugees who have already been vetted and approved, the administration is once again politicising a humanitarian programme”.
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, CEO of Global Refuge, said: “Concentrating the vast majority of admissions on one group undermines the programme’s purpose as well as its credibility.”
More on Donald Trump
Related Topics:
Human Rights First president, Uzra Zeya, called it a “new low point” in US foreign policy, which will “further destabilise front-line states that host over two-thirds of the world’s nearly 43 million refugees, undermining US national security in tandem”.
Image: US President Donald Trump showed South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa printed-out articles in the Oval Office. Pic: AP
In May, Mr Trump confronted South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa in the White House, claiming white farmers in his nation were being killed and “persecuted”.
A video purporting to show burial sites for murdered white farmers was played but was later shown to be scenes from a 2020 protest in which the crosses represented farmers killed over multiple years.
The South African government has vehemently denied that Afrikaners and other white South Africans are being persecuted.
In January, the US president suspended the US Refugee Admissions Programme (USRAP) to, in his words, allow US authorities to prioritise national security and public safety.
During the Oval Office meeting, Mr Ramaphosa said only that he hoped that Trump officials would listen to South Africans about the issue, and later said he believed there is “doubt and disbelief about all this in [Mr Trump’s] head”.