Either China has launched too many spy balloons, or it really is aliens. US Air Force shot down another unidentified flying object on February 12, 2023 over Lake Huron on the US-Canada border near Detroit and Toronto.

This time, an F-16 fighter jet flew to intercept, as the object was at an altitude of only 6,000 meters, against 12,000 and 24,000 in previous cases. But the same AIM-9X Sidewinder air-to-air missile was used.

According to Reuters, the US military had to admit the obvious – they had an “awareness gap” about Chinese high-altitude spy balloons that have apparently been visiting the United States undetected in recent years. So the US military set up NORAD radars to detect just such objects and, as it turned out, there are quite a few of them in the airspace of the US and Canada. US officials admit that such balloons are very difficult to detect.

We will remind, the day before yesterday F-22 shot down an unidentified flying object over Canada. A few days before F-22 destroyed an unknown object in Alaska. A week ago, the US Air Force destroyed a Chinese spy balloon over the Atlantic.

“What makes them really hard to detect and track is their size and potentially the shape,” said Gen. Glen VanHerck, head of U.S. North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), describing them as “very, very small objects that produce a very, very low radar cross-section.”

US government officials told Reuters that NORAD is adjusting the filters and algorithms used to check radar data to make them sensitive enough to detect the kind of objects whose ability to stay ability to stay aloft, moving with the wind, is confounding U.S. officials.