The 2023 High-Altitude Object Shootdowns

January 28, 2023. A balloon entered US airspace over the Aleutians. It drifted over Yukon, the Northwest Territories and northern Idaho. On February 1 it hung above Billings, Montana. Photojournalist Chase Doak noticed a circle that seemed out of place. To him it looked like "a tiny moon in the sky." Ten year old Max Hewett saw a "white speck" near the moon. "And I thought it was the comet." He and his father, Todd Hewett, filmed it through a telescope.

Officials soon gave it a scale. Gen. Glen VanHerck of NORAD put it at about 200 ft tall. Beneath it hung a technology bay the size of "two or three school buses." On February 4, at 2:39 p.m. ET, F-22s shot it down about 6 nautical miles off Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. In Murrells Inlet, people watched contrails and a white object falling. China called it a civilian meteorological airship blown off course. A second Chinese balloon crossed Latin America. It was never engaged.

Then the sky seemed to fill. February 10. Over the frozen Beaufort Sea off Deadhorse, Alaska, pilots found a silver cylinder "appearing to float" at about 40,000 ft. It was about the size of a small car. Some pilots said it interfered with their sensors. Some saw no means of propulsion. It was shot down that morning.

February 11, 3:41 a.m. Over Yukon, a second cylinder was brought down. A Canadian email described it plainly. "The top quarter is metallic, remainder white," with a "20 foot wire hanging below with a package of some sort suspended from it." It was NORAD's first use of force in its 64-year history.

February 12. Over Lake Huron, F-16s from the 148th Fighter Wing closed on an octagonal object with strings hanging from it, at about 20,000 ft. One pilot radioed: "I wouldn't really call it a balloon … I don't know what … I can see it outside with my eyes." Later: "I'm gonna call it a balloon." The first Sidewinder missed and fell into the lake. At 2:42 p.m. CST, the object came down.

The Chinese balloon was recovered and sent to the FBI lab. Pieces of the Alaska object came from the ice and from divers. Its owner was never made public. In Yukon, nothing was found. In early March 2023 the RCMP collected debris from the Lake Huron shore. An email linked one module to "a company who sells weather monitoring equipment." It added: "Whether or not it is from the shoot down is uncertain."

On February 16, 2023, President Joe Biden said the three objects were "most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions." Hobbyists had a candidate. K9YO-15, a pico balloon from the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, last reported its position off Alaska on February 10. Tracking consultant Dan Bowen put the chance it was the Yukon object at "98%". The club said there was "presently no connection." No identification was ever confirmed.

In 2026, Sean Kirkpatrick, former head of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, was blunt. "Do you know what we shot down? Balloons." Yet at the height of the affair, VanHerck said he had not "ruled out anything."

Saturday Night Live cast Bowen Yang as the balloon. The Wall Street Journal wrote of a new task force on UFOs. And the images kept coming. In September 2024 Canada released a grainy still of the Yukon object, a "broadly doughnut-like shape with an open center." On May 22, 2026, the Pentagon's PURSUE release showed 46 seconds of F-16 infrared video over Lake Huron. A roughly spherical object with a single line below it. Then it bursts apart.