US To Not Shoot Down Mysterious Balloon Spotted Off Hawaii Coast, Will Continue Monitoring

The U.S. military has decided not to shoot down another mysterious balloon that flew over American soil last week.

The officials monitored the unmanned object, which was spotted off the coast of Hawaii during the weekend, and determined it posed no military or physical threat.

"Based on these observations, the Secretary of Defense concurred with the recommendation of his military commanders that no action need be taken against the balloon," a Department of Defense spokesperson said in a statement Monday, accessed by Politico.

However, it was yet not clear what the object was and to whom it belonged, according to the U.S. authorities.

The Federal Aviation Administration and the Defense Department first sighted the balloon Friday at about 36,000 feet.

According to the spokesperson, there is no indication the object is being handled by a "foreign or adversarial actor." Officials are still working on identifying the owner of the unmanned object.

"Ownership of the balloon is unknown, but there is no indication that it was maneuvering or being controlled by a foreign or adversarial actor," the Pentagon spokesperson added, as per NewsNation.

Furthermore, the balloon did not fly over sensitive U.S. government sites and posed no threat to civil aviation.

"Although it was flying at an altitude used by civil aviation, it posed no threat to civil aviation over Hawaii," the official said.

It has so far exited the Hawaii airspace and territorial waters, gradually moving toward Mexico.

The latest sighting has come months after U.S. officials shot down a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina in February. The debris of the Chinese balloon was sent to an FBI laboratory in Virginia for analysis, as per a statement by the military's Northern Command.

The military also said it believed it collected all of the Chinese balloon's priority sensors and electronics that could help counter-intelligence officials determine how Beijing was using the object to collect and transmit surveillance information.

"It needed to be shot down because we were confident that it was used by China to spy on American people," Vice President Kamala Harris had said at the time. "We will maintain the perspective that we have in terms of what should be the relationship between China and the United States. That is not going to change, but surely and certainly that balloon was not helpful."

Around the same time, a number of incidents involving mysterious flying objects came to light. Authorities took down at least three objects within the U.S. and Canada; however, they were never recovered. Later, it was determined that the objects were harmless and did not have any connection with a foreign nation. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby also said Washington did not detect any communications signals from the objects before they were taken down.

Both the U.S. military and the Joe Biden administration have acknowledged there isn't much they know about the recent sighting of the unmanned objects such as who built them, how they stay aloft and whether or not they are secretly collecting intelligence.