US fighter jets shot down an unidentified object over Lake Huron on Sunday, marking the third time such action was taken in as many days and coming on the heels of last week’s Chinese spy balloon scandal.
Sunday’s takedown is believed to have involved an object that was spotted over Montana on Saturday, The Associated Press said, citing US officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.
US and Canadian authorities restricted airspace over the lake earlier in the day as military jets scrambled to intercept and identify the object, AP said.
US Rep. Jack Bergman (R-Mich.), a former Marine lieutenant general, tweeted that “he’d been in contact” with the Defense Department “regarding operations across the Great Lakes region today.
“The US military has decommissioned another ‘object’ over Lake Huron. I appreciate the decisive action by our fighter pilots,” he said. “The American people deserve far more answers than we have.”
US Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), a former CIA analyst and Pentagon official, also tweeted that “the object has been downed by pilots from the U.S. Air Force and National Guard.
“We’re all interested in exactly what this object was and it’s purpose,” she added.
The incident followed the US takedowns of two other unidentified objects over Alaska and Canada on Friday and Saturday, respectively.
Those incidents came after an alleged “maneuverable” Chinese spy balloon floated across the US before being blown out of the sky off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4.
Earlier Sunday, the North American Aerospace Defense Command said it had separately “implemented a temporary flight restriction airspace over Lake Michigan” around noon Eastern time.
The move — made “with the cooperation of the Federal Aviation Administration” — was intended “to ensure the safety of air traffic in the area during NORAD operations,” the joint US-Canada defense organization said.
NORAD didn’t elaborate at the time, but on Saturday, it blamed a radar anomaly for reports that an object that had been spotted in Montana’s airspace.
Military fighters that investigated “did not identify any object to correlate to the radar hits,” NORAD said Saturday.