How many unidentified flying objects has the US government shot down today? What and where are they?

The United States military shot down another unidentified flying object on Sunday, officials have confirmed. As has become bizarrely common over the past week, an object was spotted hovering over North America and President Biden took the decision to take it out.

The most recent incident took place above Lake Huron on Sunday. Huron borders the Canadian province of Ontario to the north and the US state of Michigan to the south.

That marked the fourth time in little over a week that the US military has shot down an object. Last weekend Biden opted to order an F-22 mission to take down a Chinese surveillance balloon that had been observed travelling across parts of Canada and the US.

The three more recent incidents have all been described as an ‘unidentified object’ and officials insisted that they were taken out due to safety concerns for aircraft. The first of these ‘UFOs’ was downed in Alaska on Friday, followed by another over Canada on Saturday, and Sunday’s incident above Lake Huron.

What are the UFOs shot down over North America?

The term ‘UFO’ sounds like something from science fiction, but it reality it is just a broad name given to unidentified flying objects. The US government now prefers to use the term ‘UAP’ (unidentified aerial phenomena) to avoid the suggestion of alien activity.

So what were these ‘unidentified’ objects that have sparked a major national security conversation?

We know that the first of the objects, identified more than a week ago, was a Chinese surveillance balloon. The Chinese government has claimed that the balloon strayed into American airspace accidentally but a senior State Department official has claimed that China has sent similar surveillance balloons over more than 40 countries.

The three more recent objects, however, appeared to have a different structure and the Chinese government has not acknowledged their existence. Officials are still in the process of collecting the debris from those objects and will analyse the materials.

On Sunday a National Security Council spokesperson said: “These objects did not closely resemble and were much smaller than the PRC balloon and we will not definitively characterize them until we can recover the debris, which we are working on.”

However Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer did suggest that the objects shot down on Friday and Saturday may also have been balloons. Speaking to ABC on Sunday, shortly before the fourth incident was reported, Schumer claimed that Beijing could be using a “crew of balloons” that had “probably been all over the world”.