White House officials said Tuesday that there's no evidence the three aerial objects taken down by the military during the weekend were conducting surveillance for the Chinese.
"While we can't definitively say, again without analyzing the debris, what these objects were, thus far — and I caveat that by saying thus far — we haven't seen any indication or anything that points specifically to the idea that these three objects were part of the [Chinese] spy balloon program, or that they were definitively involved in external intelligence collection efforts," National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said, according to The Hill.
There has been a delay in analyzing the debris from the objects because recovering it from where they landed has been difficult.
"The second one off the coast of Alaska, that's up in some really, really difficult terrain in the Arctic Circle," Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Tuesday.
"With very, very low temperatures in the minus-40s. The second one is in the Canadian Rockies in Yukon, very difficult to get down, and the third one is in Lake Huron. It's probably a couple hundred feet deep, so we'll get them eventually, but it's going to take some time to recover those."
When asked if the debris potentially might never be found, Kirby avoided giving a direct answer.
"I think we're taking this day by day and doing the best we can to try to locate the debris and then develop a plan to recover it," he said.
On Monday, Kirby said that the unknown spy capabilities of the three aerial objects prompted President Joe Biden's orders to shoot them down. The takedown of the objects came approximately one week after a Chinese spy balloon traveled the country before being shot down in South Carolina waters.
In three separate incidents, the first object was shot down Friday off the coast of northern Alaska, the second on Saturday in northern Canada and the third on Sunday over Lake Huron on the U.S.-Canada border.
The debris "would certainly be of immense value," Kirby said of the ongoing effort to identify the objects and determine their point of origin.
The "leading explanation" is that the three objects were balloons connected to a "commercial or benign purpose," said Kirby, adding that no individual or organization has claimed them thus far. Officials have ruled out that they were the property of the federal government, he said.
"We don't know of any evidence right now that confirms that they were in fact doing intelligence collection by another government."
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