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US Ends Search for Downed Chinese Balloon Debris, Other Objects

US Ends Search for Downed Chinese Balloon Debris, Other Objects
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By staff, Agencies

The US military's Northern Command announced Friday that the United States had given up looking for pieces of an alleged Chinese surveillance balloon it shot down earlier this month, as well as two other objects that had crashed in Alaska and on Lake Huron.

"Recovery operations concluded February 16 off the coast of South Carolina, after US Navy assets assigned to US Northern Command successfully located and retrieved debris from the high-altitude PRC surveillance balloon," NORTHCOM said in a statement, referring to the People's Republic of China. "Final pieces of debris are being transferred to the Federal Bureau of Investigation Laboratory in Virginia for counterintelligence exploitation”.

Before being shot down on February 4 by a US F-22 Raptor over the Atlantic Ocean, the Chinese balloon had traversed most of the US Washington identified the object as a highly developed high-altitude eavesdropping spacecraft.

Still, Beijing asserted that a piece of meteorological monitoring equipment had gotten lost. Nevertheless, the balloon incident has caused tensions between China and the United States to worsen.

Late on Friday, NORTHCOM declared in a different statement that it was ceasing its search for two further objects that had been shot down on February 10 and February 12, respectively, one off the northern coast of Alaska and the other over Lake Huron.

"The US military, federal agencies, and Canadian partners conducted systematic searches of each area using a variety of capabilities, including airborne imagery and sensors, surface sensors and inspections, and subsurface scans, and did not locate debris," the statement said.

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