The U.S. military released new details Monday afternoon about another mysterious balloon that recently flew over Hawaii late last week.
“Applying newly-established parameters for monitoring U.S. airspace, the Department of Defense and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) detected and observed April 28th an unmanned, balloon off the coast of Hawaii, floating at approximately 36,000 feet,” a DOD spokesperson said in a statement.
“Ownership of the balloon is unknown, but there is no indication that it was maneuvering or being controlled by a foreign or adversarial actor,” the statement claimed. “The balloon did not transit directly over defense critical infrastructure or other U.S. Government sensitive sites, nor did it pose a military or physical threat to people on the ground.”
Officials said that it did not pose a threat to civil aviation despite it flying at an altitude common in civil aviation.
“Based on these observations, the Secretary of Defense concurred with the recommendation of his military commanders that no action need be taken against the balloon,” the statement concluded. “The balloon is now out of Hawaii’s airspace and territorial waters.”
NBC News reported on the balloon earlier on Monday and said that officials believe that it is currently headed toward Mexico.
The report comes after a Chinese spy balloon flew over the U.S. back in February after President Joe Biden’s administration failed to shoot it down when it first entered U.S. airspace.
Biden officials initially claimed to Congress that they took measures to prevent the Chinese spy balloon from being able to transmit whatever information that it collected as it flew over sensitive U.S. military installations.
However, a report from early last month revealed that the balloon gathered and reported intelligence from multiple sensitive American military sites despite the Pentagon’s claims that it blocked transmission.
The report, which cites two current American officials and one former administration official, says the balloon was controlled by China, which maneuvered it to make several passes over certain military sites, sometimes in a figure-eight pattern – all while transmitting the gathered data back to Beijing in “real time.” The three officials say the data obtained by China was primarily electronic signals that could be collected from weapons systems or base communications.
The spy balloon was shot down over the Atlantic Ocean on February 4 when the U.S. military used an F-22 Raptor to down the object with a single air-to-air AIM-9X Sidewinder missile.
General Glen VanHerck, Commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), said that the balloon was up to 200 feet tall and weighed “in excess of a couple thousand pounds.”
After the balloon was shot down, the U.S. subsequently downed three more unidentified objects over Alaska, Lake Huron, and Canada.
