DULUTH — The small “octagonal” object flying over Lake Huron on Feb. 12 appeared to have strings hanging below it before it was shot down, according to cockpit audio of the two F-16 pilots from the Minnesota Air National Guard’s Duluth-based 148th Fighter Wing that responded.
The Detroit News confirmed the authenticity of the audio with a U.S. Air Force spokesperson Wednesday, Feb. 15. The audio was first reported by The War Zone , a military news site.
“It’s almost like an octagonal shape. I’m going to call it a balloon,” one of the pilots said. “I’m able to see strings hanging down below it but I don’t see anything below it. It’s pretty small, I don’t know, like the size of a four-wheeler or something.”
The pilots can be heard in the 14-minute audio clip trying to see and describe the object.
“It definitely looks like something, there’s some kind of object that’s suspended in the air? It’s hard to tell. It’s pretty small,” one of the pilots said.
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At one point, one of the pilots said he had a “tone” at 3 miles. A tone indicates a missile has locked onto a target.
“I just can’t see it with my eyes, with the glare in the cockpit,” he said. “It’s so small.”
“Looking outside if it’s kind of a blackish, I’m going to call it a container,” one of the pilots said. “I can’t really tell, though, what the shape is.”
Eventually, one of the F-16s would down the object, which was flying at an altitude of about 20,000 feet, with an AIM9x Sidewinder missile.
The object fell into a deep area of Lake Huron and likely in Canadian waters. A search for it is underway.
It was the third unidentified object shot down over the U.S. and Canada in as many days. The shootdowns come after a Chinese spying balloon was brought down Feb. 4 off the coast of South Carolina after crossing much of the country.
First shot missed
The missile that downed the object wasn’t the only missile fired by the F-16s Sunday. The first missed, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Tuesday.
“First shot missed, second shot hit,” he said.
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Milley said the missed missile was tracked and “landed harmlessly in the water of Lake Huron.”
“We go to great lengths to make sure that the airspace is clear and the backdrop is clear to the max effective range of the missile,” he said.
Object could be ‘benign’
All three objects shot down last weekend have yet to be recovered.
John Kirby, the White House national security spokesperson, on Tuesday said there has been no indication those objects were part of China’s spy balloon program, Reuters reported.
The intelligence communities are considering the possibility that the three objects could be balloons "tied to some commercial or benign purpose," Kirby said, according to Reuters.
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