Baffled pilots who shot down mystery object over Alaska say it 'interfered with sensors'

The mysterious object shot down by US fighters over Alaska is not thought to be connected to the Chinese spy balloon downed on February 4, with a Pentagon spokesman saying it was like comparing 'apples and oranges'

Michael Moran Audience Writer

17:41, 12 Feb 2023Updated 13:48, 13 Feb 2023

The elite US pilots were baffled by what they saw(Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto)

The pilots of US Air Force F-35 fighters sent to intercept the mystery object over Alaska on Friday say that whatever it was had been “interfering with the sensors of their aircraft” before they shot it down.

Three unidentified objects have been spotted over North America in the past 10 days. The first, a giant airship “the size of three buses” is understood to have originated in China although the US and Chinese governments disagree about its exact purpose.

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While the Pentagon says it was a spy balloon, China says the monster airship was a civilian craft designed to monitor weather systems – but even if that turns out to be correct, the two smaller objects sighted over the US in recent days remain unexplained.

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The USAF pilots who shot down the object over Alaska “were not able to identify what they saw,” reports CNN's Natasha Bertrand.

The US military says a number of Chinese surveillance balloons have overflown America in the past few years

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“When the US first detected this object over Alaska on Thursday, they sent up F-35 jets to … see what was going on,” she explained. “And these pilots reported back very conflicting accounts”.

The pilots of the cutting-edge stealth fighters said “that this object was actually interfering with the sensors of their aircraft and they couldn't figure out why, because there was no identifiable kind of surveillance equipment on the object,” she said.

The pilots were also mystified as to what kind of aircraft they were actually dealing with.

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US Senate Leader Chuck Schumer says US officials believe the two unknown objects shot down over Alaska and Canada were some new type of balloon(Image: ABC)

According to Bertrand, the pilots “were saying that they did not see anything on the object that appeared able to propel it, that it seemed like there was no way that this was actually able to stay in the air”.

It’s possible that in the head of the high-speed, high-altitude encounter the pilots may have misinterpreted the type of aircraft, which was described as being “about the size of a small car”.

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A Pentagon official told ABC News that the object was “cylindrical and silver-ish gray” and gave the “balloon-like” appearance of floating without “any sort of propulsion”.

US nuclear installations and warships have been repeatedly buzzed by unexplained 'drones' in the past few years(Image: TWITTER)

Pentagon spokesman Brigadier General. Patrick Ryder said that recovery teams are now collecting the debris that is sitting on top of ice in US territorial waters.

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Asked whether the Alaska object was related to the giant Chinese airship spotted over Missouri, Brig. Gen. Ryder said they appeared to be very different, saying it was like comparing “apples and oranges”.

He added that officials do not know the origin of the object, which did not appear to be manned and that it had been shot down because it posed a “reasonable threat to civilian air traffic” as it was flying at 40,000 feet – around the same height as commercial airliners.

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