LATEST: Arctic weather conditions, including wind chill and limited daylight, are affecting the search for the 'high-altitude object' shot down off Alaska.
February 11, 2023, 4:25 PMNational Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby speaks during the daily briefing in the Brady Briefing Room of the White House, Feb. 10, 2023.Recovery operations continued Saturday to retrieve a "high-altitude object" shot down over the waters off Alaska.
Responding to reporters' shouted questions about the shootdown Friday afternoon outside the White House, Biden called the operation a "success."following a political firestorm.He said because it posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight, that out of an abundance of caution and at the recommendation of the Pentagon, Biden ordered the military to down the object.
"It came in, inside our territorial waters, those waters right now are frozen, but inside territorial airspace and over territorial waters. Fighter aircraft assigned to U.S. Northern Command took down the object within the last hour," Kirby said. On Friday, two F-22's from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson tracked it and one of them fired the AIM-9X sidewinder missile near the location of Deadhorse, Alaska which is right on Prudhoe Bay, according to the Pentagon."We were able to get some fighter aircraft up and around it before the order to shoot it down. And the pilots' assessment was that this was not manned," he said.
Biden gave the order to shoot it down Friday morning. He said the "predominant" reason Biden ordered it shot down was the "safety" of flights traveling at that altitude and the fact that it was at the mercy of prevailing winds made its flight path less predictable. "And the president just wasn't able to take that risk."
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