Biden says objects shot down over North America last week appear to not be part of China's spy balloon operation
The US intelligence community believes the objects were most likely balloons used by private companies or institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research, the president noted.
The president delivered his most substantial account Thursday of U.S. efforts to track, monitor and potentially shoot down unknown aerial objects.
(CNN) -- President Joe Biden on Thursday said that the United States has no indication that the three objects shot down in North American air space are tied to China's spy balloon program and are likely from private entities.
"We don't yet know exactly what these three objects were but nothing right now suggests they were related to China's spy balloon program or that they were surveillance vehicles from any other country," Biden said from the White House. "The intelligence community's current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research."
The comments were the president's first formal remarks on the objects shot from the sky last weekend over Canada and the U.S.
Biden emphasized that there hasn't been evidence to suggest "a sudden increase in the number of objects in the sky." And although the most recent three objects appear to have been benign, Biden warned, "If any object presents a threat to the safety and security of the American people, I will take it down."
The president said he has directed his team to devise "sharper rules for how we will deal with these unidentified objects moving forward, distinguishing between those that are likely to pose safety and security risks that necessitate action and those that do not." Those classified parameters will be shared with Congress when they are finished.
The president also said he's directing national security adviser Jake Sullivan to lead a "government-wide effort" for how to address future encounters with similar high-altitude objects.
Specifically, the administration will be establishing an improved inventory of unmanned airborne objects above American airspace, implementing further measures to detect the objects, update rules and regulations for encounters with these types of objects above US skies, and establishing common global norms for similar encounters.
The president said he expects to speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the matter, along with keeping allies and Congress informed.
"And I hope we are going to get to the bottom of this, but I make no apologies for taking down that balloon," he added.
Federal officials have said an initial Chinese surveillance balloon downed off the coast of South Carolina earlier this month was capable of conducting signals intelligence collection operations and had a payload around the size of three buses. By comparison, the subsequent objects, which haven't been attributed to a specific country or entity, are believed to be much smaller.
A fighter jet flies near the remnants of a large balloon after it was struck by a missile over the Atlantic Ocean, just off the coast of South Carolina near Myrtle Beach, Saturday, Feb. 4, 2023. (Chad Fish via AP)
It's anticipated that new protocols on how the U.S. will handle similar unidentified objects going forward will be released this week.
Administration officials from the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence community have briefed lawmakers on Capitol Hill on the initial Chinese spy balloon in recent days.
Republicans on Capitol Hill have criticized Biden for not approving the military to down the first balloon quickly enough, letting it sail eastward for days. They had also called on him to speak on the matter.
But administration officials argued that the U.S. didn't move earlier to shoot down the balloon in part over fears it could provoke an escalation of military tensions with China. They also told lawmakers the balloon was not first shot down when it entered Alaskan airspace because the waters there are cold and deep, making it less likely they could have recovered the balloon.
And officials had been wary of having the president speak publicly about the objects until more information was gathered about the three unidentified objects that were downed last weekend.
Biden on Thursday justified the decision to wait to shoot the Chinese balloon, saying he gave the green light for the U.S. military to take it down "as soon as it was safe to do so."
"The military advised against shooting it down over land because of the sheer size of it. It was the size of multiple school buses and it posed a risk to people on the ground if it was shot down where people lived," he said. "Instead, we tracked it closely, we analyzed its capabilities and we learned more about how it operates. Because we knew its path, we were able to protect sensitive sites against collection. We waited until it was safely over water, which would not only protect civilians, but also enable us to recover substantial components for further analytics."
Shooting down the balloon, Biden added, sent "a clear message that the violation of our sovereignty was unacceptable. We'll act to protect our country and we did."
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