US says 3 mystery objects likely private, with no China link

Bloomberg

The Biden administration suspects that three unidentified objects downed served commercial purposes and weren’t used for spying, a judgment that may help ease anxiety over a Chinese balloon that traversed the US before being shot down.
The intelligence community believes the objects — unlike the giant airship shot down on February 4 — “could just be balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose,” National Security Council (NSC) spokesman John Kirby said.
“We don’t see anything that points right now to these being part of the PRC spy balloon program or in fact, intelligence collection against the United States of any kind,” Kirby said, using the abbreviation of China’s formal name, the People’s Republic of China.
That determination will ease concerns that the US has become subject to an intensive and broad-based surveillance program orchestrated by the Chinese military. Those fears were stoked by the series
of shootdowns over Alaska, Canada and Michigan and raised pressure on the Biden administration to explain the nature of the high-altitude craft, their origins and whether they posed national-security threats.
Signs are emerging that both the US and China are trying to figure out a way past the balloon dispute. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who cancelled a trip to Beijing after the Chinese balloon was identified, is considering a meeting with China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, in Germany this week, people familiar with the matter said.
All along, China has insisted that the balloon shot down off South Carolina was a weather-monitoring device that blew off course, and accused the US of hyping the issue.

Balloon recovery
The Washington Post reported that US officials, who were not named, said the balloon had shifted course abruptly over the Pacific Ocean as a cold front moved in, and that analysts were looking into the possibility that that its flight over the continental US might not have been intentional. Its original path seemed to have been headed toward the US territory of Guam, according to the Post report.
The administration has struggled to keep the uproar around the balloon under control, amid criticism from Republicans that Biden was wrong to let it traverse the US before shooting it down.
Crews are still trying to recover the three other objects that were shot down. General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters in Brussels that two were in extremely remote areas while the third was under about 200 feet of water in Lake Huron.