US completes recovery of Chinese balloon but other "object" searches called off

But US and Canadian authorities also announced they had called off searches for three unidentified objects shot down over last weekend, without locating any debris.

President Joe Biden said this week the US intelligence community believed the other three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions - not China's spy program.

The last of the debris from the Chinese balloon, which was downed by a Sidewinder missile, is heading to an FBI laboratory in Virginia for analysis, the US military's Northern Command said.

Reuters was first to report the conclusion of the recovery efforts for the suspected Chinese spy balloon, which were halted on Thursday.

"It's a significant amount (of recovered material), including the payload structure as well as some of the electronics and the optics, and all that's now at the FBI laboratory in Quantico," said National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby.

Kirby said the United States had already learned a lot about the balloon by observing it as it flew over the United States.

"We're going to learn even more, we believe, by getting a look at the guts inside it and seeing how it worked and what it was capable of," he told a White House news briefing.

The US military said Navy and Coast Guard vessels that had been scouring the sea for nearly two weeks have departed the area.

"Air and maritime safety perimeters have been lifted," Northern Command said in a statement.

The US military has said it believes it has collected all of the Chinese balloon's priority sensors and electronics as well as large sections of its structure, elements that could help counterintelligence officials determine how Beijing may have been collecting and transmitting surveillance information.

The balloon, which Beijing denies was a government spy vessel, spent a week flying over the United States and Canada before being shot down off the Atlantic Coast on Biden's orders.

The episode caused an uproar in Washington and led the US military to search the skies for other objects that were not being captured on radar. Northern Command carried out an unprecedented three shootdowns of unidentified "objects" between last Friday and Sunday.


REUTERS