The RCMP said on Friday that they will no longer be looking for remnants of the “suspected balloon” that NORAD shot down over the Yukon last week.
The RCMP has paused the search because of the recent snowfall and its assessment that the object is unconnected to a situation calling for special search efforts.
US filmmaker Andrew Gregg, who in 2022 released a film on the mysterious disappearance of a large military jet carrying 44 passengers in the same place in 1950, said Canada’s CBC News that he was not surprised by the paucity of finds in the search for the missing Yukon balloon.
Gregg said it best when he said, “Not a rivet has come up” in the investigation of the 1950s plane’s disappearance. “Well, the Yukon can just absorb these things,” as the saying goes.
How do you discover something on the frigid Arctic tundra if you don’t know what it is? Gregg said, “I don’t know.”
Although the hunt for the missing Skymaster plane was shown in Gregg’s documentary to be exhaustive and ultimately fruitless, Yukon Civil Air Search and Rescue Association chief David Downing was significantly more optimistic in an interview with a UK newspaper published only last week. Although this is true, Downing pointed out the apparent reality that in the winter, balloon debris may be buried by snow within minutes after descending, which may foil even the most sophisticated and thorough search attempt.
It may look like a close call, but as Downing put it, “the probability of missing anything is very large.”
On the weekend of February 11–13, American planes bombed three unnamed sites, including one in the Yukon, as a Chinese spy balloon crossed the United States and was shot down over the Atlantic Ocean.
The United States military has also ceased seeking remnants of the other two objects after they were destroyed over Alaska and Lake Huron.
On February 11th, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau revealed he had asked for an F-22 fighter to shoot down the UFO over the Yukon and that he had instructed the Canadian military to retrieve the debris.
It was claimed on Saturday by CTV News that Canadian military officials were hoping to analyze the object’s debris in the Yukon and would be upset if the hunt was called off.
Norad’s Deputy Commander, Lieutenant General Alain Pelletier, has stated that the objects would be collected for the sake of scientific investigation into their capabilities and origins.
A Chinese spy balloon was shot down on February 4, 2018, just off the coast of South Carolina. It’s too soon to tell if the “cylindrical device” shot down over central Yukon originated from China, but Federal Defense Minister Anita Anand stated last week that it was “possibly equivalent” to the balloon.
Evidence suggesting the Yukon item was an amateur radio balloon released months earlier by a group called the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade has sparked much discussion and some ridicule (NIBBB).
A 32-inch silver mylar sphere, a small radio tracker, a solar panel, and around 33 feet of antenna wire were all part of the NIBBB’s “pico balloon,” as described by club member Cary Willis. Pico balloons have risen in popularity among ham radio enthusiasts because of their low cost, high altitude capabilities, and extended flight periods. The electronics package for a pico balloon typically weighs less than an ounce, yet can send a signal hundreds of kilometers out at very low power and bandwidth.
When you consider that it took a couple of $450,000 missiles fired by a top-shelf $216 million jet fighter with authorization from the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Canada to prevent the pico balloon from completing a seventh journey, you realize just how impressive it is that the balloon managed to complete six circumnavigations. During the weekend of February 11, the NIBBB lost touch with their balloon, which they had dubbed K9YO-15.
There has been a wide range of reactions from pico balloonists to the Yukon incident, from amusement at the U.S. and Canadian governments’ panic and use of such powerful weapons to destroy a $13 mylar balloon to the admiration of the fighter pilot who managed to hit such a tiny object to joy at the sudden popularity of pico ballooning to fear that governments may decide to crack down on the balloons as threats to national security and civil affluence. We may never know what happened to K9YO-15 now that the RCMP has called off the search.