A U.S. Sidewinder missile fired at a high-altitude object over Michigan missed its target on Sunday and landed in Lake Huron, the U.S. military’s top general revealed Tuesday during a press conference at NATO headquarters.
Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was asked about the incident during the latest meeting in Brussels Tuesday of the “contact group” of allies supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia.
“The first shot missed [but] the second shot hit,” Gen. Milley said. “The missile landed harmlessly in the water. We tracked it all the way down.”
The U.S.-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command, known as NORAD, detected the still-unidentified airborne object shortly before 5 p.m. Saturday while it was in Canadian airspace about 70 miles north of the U.S. border. It entered the airspace over Montana and drifted eastward before being taken out by the Air Force F-16, officials said.
Each AIM-9X Sidewinder missile costs about $400,000, meaning the U.S. spent almost $1 million to take out an object described in press accounts as a “small, metallic balloon with a tethered payload below it.”
But, Gen. Milley said military officials are very deliberate in their planning and stressed that protecting the American people is their priority.
“We evaluate the risks of the balloons themselves — are they a kinetic threat or not, yes or no? Are they an intelligence threat? Are they a threat to civilian aviation?” he said. “All those things we go through very carefully.”
Military officials said the efforts are continuing to recover any remnants of the object shot down over Lake Huron — the third such incident since U.S. officials successfully engaged a Chinese surveillance balloon on Feb. 4.
White House officials have ruled out an alien invasion, but admit they’re in the dark over who or what was behind the trio of airborne objects shot down in the days after a U.S. fighter jet took out a Chinese surveillance balloon that flew across the country on Feb. 3. U.S. and Canadian investigators are still trying to reach the debris from the three crafts to analyze their capabilities and likely mission.
• Mike Glenn can be reached at mglenn@washingtontimes.com.
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