US spent over $1.5 million on missiles alone to down three flying objects

New Delhi: The United States spent around $1.5 million to shoot down three suspicious flying objects, which may have been nothing more than leisure balloons.

The Pentagon on Wednesday said the cost was only for the four AIM-9X Sidewinder missiles alone, which were used to down the objects over Alaska, Canada’s Yukon territory and Lake Huron. If the cost for Navy, Coast Guard, Alaska National Guard and Canadian forces in search of the debris was included, it would add hundreds of thousands of dollars to the total cost.

A single AIM-9X Sidewinder missile costs around $400 thousand.

The first shot at the flying object over Lake Huran on 12 February was missed and a second missile was used.

The cost estimates also exclude the flights used to spot and shoot the objects, which the US military considers the part of its pilots’ training and had already budgeted those flight hours.

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Biden administration has said that based on current assessment, it looked like the objects didn’t pose any imminent threat.

“The intelligence community’s current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation, or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research,” US President Joe Biden said last week.

Balloon enthusiasts have been interviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). They are trying to asses who the objects belonged to, but haven’t yet made any formal findings, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

The Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh, last week, ruled out the possibility that the three objects belonged to a “foreign entity.’’

‘Spy’ balloon hysteria

The US in last few weeks has spotted four suspicious objects in its air space.

On 28 January, the first object, which the US called a Chinese ‘spy’ balloon was spotted.

China denied the allegation and said that it was just a weather balloon that went off course due to strong winds.

The US, however, claimed that it was part of a wider Chinese spy programme in use for over several years now, which used spy balloons to collect military assets’ information from countries like India, Japan, Taiwan and Vietnam.

The ‘spy’ balloon’ was shot down by the US air force on 4 February off the coast of South Carolina.

However, it led to a hysteria of mistaking every suspicious flying object as a ‘spy’ tool and three more objects were shot down in the following days before admitting that there was no reason to believe if they belonged to any foreign entity or posed any threat.

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