The US has called off its search for two mysterious objects shot down by the military last week after crews came up empty-handed in their efforts, according to a report.
US authorities had been searching for debris of the unidentified flying objects downed by US fighter jets over Lake Huron last Sunday and a remote area of Alaska last Friday.
But a US official told the New York Times Friday that conditions made it too difficult to continue the search.
Canadian authorities will continue efforts to locate a third object shot down over the Yukon last Saturday, the official said.
On the final day of searching, military pilots flew over an area 20 miles off Alaska’s northern coast with ice-penetrating radar but had no success locating any debris. The downed object is believed to be about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, according to the official.
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters Friday that the US government may never fully determine what the three objects shot down over North America were.
“We all have to accept the possibility that we may not be able to recover” debris from the objects, Kirby said.
President Biden said Thursday that there is no evidence the trio of UFOs belonged to China or were surveillance crafts from another country, but also admitted: “We don’t yet know exactly what these three objects were.”
“The intelligence community’s current assessment is that these three objects are most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreational or research institutions, studying weather or conducting other scientific research,” added Biden, 80.
The three shootdowns came after a spy balloon reportedly originating from China’s Hainan Island was allowed to hover over sensitive US military sites and float across the country for days before it was shot down off the South Carolina coast on Feb. 4.
The last of the debris from the Chinese balloon has been recovered from the Atlantic Ocean and is heading to an FBI laboratory in Virginia for analysis, the U.S. military’s Northern Command said in a statement Friday.
“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,” Kirby said Friday.