WASHINGTON/OTTAWA - A US F-22 fighter jet shot down an unidentified cylindrical object over Canada on Saturday, the second such instance in as many days, as North America appeared on edge following a week-long Chinese spying balloon saga that drew the global spotlight. Separately, the US military also scrambled fighter jets in Montana to investigate a radar anomaly that triggered a brief federal closure of airspace. “Those aircraft did not identify any object to correlate the radar hits,” the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) said in a statement. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau first announced Saturday’s shootdown over the northern Yukon territory, saying Canadian forces would recover and analyse the wreckage. Canadian Defence Minister Anita Anand declined to speculate about the origin of the object, which she said was cylindrical in shape. She stopped short of calling it a balloon but said it was smaller than the Chinese balloon shot down off South Carolina’s coast a week ago, though similar in appearance. Aloft at 40,000 feet (12,200 m), it posed a risk to civilian air traffic and was shot down at 3:41 EST (2041 GMT), she added.“There is no reason to believe that the impact of the object in Canadian territory is of any public concern,” Anand told a news conference. The Pentagon said NORAD detected the object over Alaska late on Friday.
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