China says balloon over US airspace is civilian airship
Al JazeeraForeign ministry says alleged surveillance balloon is used mainly for weather monitoring and deviated from its planned course. In a statement on Friday, the ministry said the balloon suspected by the US of conducting surveillance was a civilian “airship” used for research, mainly for meteorological purposes. A day earlier, a senior US defence official told Pentagon reporters that the US had “very high confidence” that the object spotted over its airspace in recent days was a Chinese high-altitude balloon and that it was flying over sensitive sites to collect information. The official also said the US had assessed the balloon had “limited” value in terms of providing intelligence that could not be obtained by other technologies, such as spy satellites. The Canadian defence department said in an earlier statement that a “high-altitude surveillance balloon was detected” and was being tracked by the North American Aerospace Defense Command, a joint US-Canada agency.