The White House provided more details about the objects that were shot down in North American airspace in recent days, saying that a leading theory is that they were commercial balloons.
“The intelligence community’s considering as a leading explanation that these could just be balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose,” John Kirby, a spokesperson for the White House’s National Security Council, told multiple news outlets on Tuesday. Kirby further asserted that unidentified objects that were downed in Alaska, the Yukon, and over Lake Huron were not tied to spying efforts, unlike the high-altitude balloon that was shot down earlier this month over the Atlantic Ocean.
