US completes recovery of Chinese balloon, other 'object' searches called off

The US has successfully concluded recovery efforts off South Carolina to collect sensors and other debris from a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon shot down by a US fighter jet on February 4 and investigators are now analysing its “guts”, the country said on Friday.

US and Canadian authorities added they had called off searches for three unidentified objects shot down last weekend, without locating any debris.

President Joe Biden said this week the US intelligence community believed the other three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions, not China's spy programme.

The last of the debris from the Chinese balloon is heading to an FBI laboratory in Virginia for analysis, the US military's Northern Command said.

“It's a significant amount (of recovered material), including the payload structure as well as some of the electronics and the optics, and all that's now at the FBI laboratory in Quantico,” said National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby.

Kirby said the US had learnt a lot about the balloon by observing it as it flew over the country.

“We're going to learn even more, we believe, by getting a look at the guts inside it and seeing how it worked and what it was capable of,” he told a White House news briefing.

The US military has said it believes it has collected all of the Chinese balloon's priority sensors and electronics as well as large sections of its structure, elements that could help counterintelligence officials determine how Beijing may have been collecting and transmitting surveillance information.

The balloon, which Beijing denies was a government spy vessel, spent a week flying over the US and Canada before being shot down off the Atlantic coast on Biden's orders.

The episode caused an uproar in Washington and led the US military to search the skies for other objects that were not being captured on radar. Northern Command carried out an unprecedented three shootdowns of unidentified “objects” between last Friday and Sunday.

Late on Friday, it said search operations for the two objects shot down in US airspace — one over Alaska and the other over Lake Huron — had concluded, having “discovered no debris”.

The third object was shot down over Canada's Yukon. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said in a statement on Friday it had also decided to end search efforts.

“Given the snowfall that has occurred, the decreasing probability the object will be found and the current belief the object is not tied to a scenario that justifies extraordinary search efforts, the RCMP is terminating the search,” it said.

The Chinese balloon incident prompted US secretary of state Antony Blinken to postpone a planned visit this month to Beijing and has further strained relations between Washington and Beijing.

That Blinken trip would have been the first by a US secretary of state to China in five years and was seen by both sides as an opportunity to stabilise increasingly fraught ties.

Reuters