The United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said Saturday it has reopened some airspace in Montana after it was shortly closed for confidential Defense Department activities.
The FAA has released a notice temporarily barring flights in an area nearly 50 by 50 nautical miles around Havre, Montana, near the Canadian border and classifying the areas as “national defense airspace.”
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Around 8.30 PM Eastern Time, the airspace had been reopened. According to a Reuters report, the FAA declined to comment on whether the directive was related to another suspected balloon or object. The FAA issued similar actions in response to a suspected Chinese spy balloon that crossed the continental United States from Montana to South Carolina and was shot down earlier this month.
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The FAA announced Saturday it issued a temporary flight restriction after an unidentified object was shot down over Canada.
Montana Republican Representative Matt Rosendale posted on Twitter that an object was spotted over Montana that could potentially interfere with commercial air travel and that the Department of Defense would resume efforts to track and possibly ground the object in the morning.
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Later, Rosendale wrote on Twitter that the airspace has been reopened and that he “will remain in contact with defense officials and share more information as it becomes available because “Montana deserves answers.”
Soon after Rosendale’s tweet, NORAD released a statement saying that it “detected a radar anomaly and sent fighter aircraft to investigate.”
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“Those aircraft did not identify any object to correlate to the radar hits. NORAD will continue to monitor the situation,” the statement added.
This comes shortly after an unknown object was shot down by a US military fighter jet over Canada in a joint NORAD operation between Canada and the United States. It was the third object to be shot down by a US-owned F-22 Raptor in the last week.
On Friday, an unknown object was shot down in northern Alaska in an incident that came roughly a week after a China surveillance balloon was shot down off the coast of South Carolina.
