WASHINGTON, Feb  14, 2023 (BSS/AFP) - The White House sought Tuesday to
take the air out of an escalating diplomatic crisis with Beijing, saying that
preliminary evidence suggests three unidentified aerial objects shot down by US
jets were not involved in a broader Chinese spy balloon program.

The United States has been in a state of alarm since a huge white balloon
from China was spotted tracking over a series of top secret nuclear weapons
sites, before being shot down just off the east coast on February 4.

In the wake of the incident, the US military adjusted radar settings to
detect smaller objects and promptly discovered three more unidentified craft
that President Joe Biden ordered shot down -- one over Alaska, another over
Canada and the third over Lake Huron off Michigan.

US authorities "haven't seen any indication or anything that points
specifically to the idea that these three objects were part of (China's) spy
balloon program or that they were definitely involved in external
intelligence," National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said.

With Congress, the media and public speculating over everything from a
coordinated Chinese spying offensive to aliens, officials are now stressing
that the three new objects appear to be neither Chinese nor involved in spying.
Kirby said they "could be balloons that were simply tied to commercial or
research entities and therefore benign."

That "could emerge as a leading explanation here," he said.
Beijing denies it uses spy balloons and says the huge craft shot down off
the coast February 4 was for weather research, while another spotted over South
America was for pilot training.

On Monday, Chinese authorities upped the ante by accusing Washington of
sending its own spy balloons over their territory -- something US officials
deny.

The spat has already inflicted diplomatic damage between the rival
superpowers, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken abruptly canceling a rare
visit to Beijing.

- Complicated search -

Kirby stressed that China is running a "well funded, deliberate program" to
use high-altitude, hard-to-detect balloons for spying on the United States and
other countries.

But whether the three latest objects downed were part of that will not be
definitively known until the debris is analyzed -- and that is taking more time
than US authorities would like.

"It will certainly help us hone in on that if and when we can get the
debris," Kirby said.

But due to "pretty tough" weather and geographical conditions in all three
cases, "we're recognizing that it could be some time before we locate and
recover the debris," Kirby said. "We haven't found them yet."

The next question will be how to calibrate the military's radar shield.
If the three destroyed objects turn out to have been private or otherwise
non-hostile aircraft, then the Pentagon will have to decide whether it should
be responding so aggressively after every sighting.

An inter-agency security review is underway, Kirby said, and in the
meantime there's no reason to expect a similar rate of drama. "I never said
there was some sort of blanket policy, that we're just going to shoot things
out of the sky."