World News| The military completes the recycling of Chinese balloon fragments

WASHINGTON, Feb. 17 (AP) — The U.S. has completed efforts to recover the wreckage of a massive balloon that was shot down off the coast of South Carolina, and analysis of the debris so far has strengthened the conclusion that it was a Chinese spy balloon, U.S. officials said Friday.

The U.S. believes Navy, Coast Guard and FBI personnel collected all the balloon debris from the ocean floor, including critical equipment in the payload that could reveal information it was able to monitor and collect, officials said.

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U.S. Northern Command said in a statement that the recovery operation concluded on Thursday and that the final fragments were on their way to an FBI laboratory in Virginia for analysis. It said air and sea restrictions had been lifted in South Carolina.

The announcement caps a dramatic three weeks in which U.S. fighter jets shot down four aerial objects — a large Chinese balloon on Feb. 4 and three much smaller ones over Canada, Alaska and Lake Huron about a week later. objects. It was the first known peacetime shooting down of an unauthorized object in U.S. airspace.

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Officials also said the search for a small aerial object that was shot down over Lake Huron had been halted and nothing had been found. The U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, discussed the military action. The U.S. and Canada have also so far failed to recover any debris from two other objects shot down in the Yukon and northern Alaska.

While the military is confident the balloon that was shot down in South Carolina was a surveillance blimp operated by China, the Biden administration has acknowledged that the three smaller objects were likely civilian balloons, following attacks on U.S. homeland defense radars. They are targeted during reinforcement responses. Recalibrated to detect slower moving aerial objects.

Because of their small size and the remoteness of the area where they were shot down, officials acknowledged that recovering any fragments would be difficult, and probably unlikely. However, the last two searches have not been officially called off.

Most of the Chinese balloons fell into about 50 feet (15 meters) of water, and the navy was able to collect what remained floating on the surface, with divers and unmanned naval vessels lifting the rest from the seafloor. All Navy and Coast Guard ships have left the area, Northern Command said Friday. (Associated Press)

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