Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) on Feb. 13 said he will continue pushing for transparency after being briefed by senior military officials over aerial objects being shot down recently.
“We still don’t know what these other 3 objects were. We’re calling them unidentified aerial phenomenons (UAPs),” Crenshaw added, adding that the UAPs were in Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) commercial zones and had “no signals or navigation lights.”
“The first two UAPs were smaller, the size of an ATV [all-terrian vehicle], and harder to detect. The third resembled a balloon, and was easier for the radar to pick up. All moved with wind currents,” Crenshaw added.
Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL who served in Afghanistan, is a member of the House Intelligence Committee.
As for the question of why these objects are being detected in the sky, Crenshaw said there has been “heightened surveillance,” meaning that more objects are being tracked. The three UAPs “posed a danger to commercial aircraft,” and so they were shot down, he added.
In comparison, the Texas lawmaker said the Chinese balloon was above 60,000 feet and posed no threat to civilian aircraft.
“Newer technology has allowed for more detection in recent years,” he added. “UAPs weren’t detected before because our radars were not adjusted for slow-moving objects.
Biden Administration
Separately, John Kirby, a spokesperson for the White House’s National Security Council, said on Tuesday that the three objects shot down in North American airspace could be commercial balloons.“The intelligence community’s considering as a leading explanation that these could just be balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose,” Kirby said, before adding that these objects were not tied to spying efforts.
He added: “I want to caveat that we haven’t found the debris. We’re still doing the best we can with the observations that were made by the pilots, with the flight profile data that we’ve tried to collect.”
Tough weather conditions had hampered debris recovery, Kirby said, adding that “it could be some time before we located the recovered debris.
“We’re taking this day by day and doing the best we can to try to locate the debris and then develop a plan to recover it,” Kirby said.
“Crews have been able to recover significant debris from the site, including all of the priority sensor and electronics pieces identified as well as large sections of the structure,” the Northern Command said.
“Given the pertinent homeland equities involved in the Chinese surveillance balloon incident, it is unacceptable that we learned about these incidents through news reports,” the group wrote.
Resolution
Sens. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), chair and vice chair of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, introduced a resolution (pdf) on Tuesday condemning China’s use of the spy balloon.“China’s deployment of a spy balloon to surveil some of our most sensitive military assets was a brazen act,” Collins said. “The fact that the military was able to act so quickly to shoot down several subsequent objects raises very serious questions about why the Administration did not act quickly on the first one.”
The resolution also calls on President Joe Biden “to keep Congress fully informed by continuing to provide comprehensive briefings” on the balloon incident, as well as past incidents.
