Slotkin: Recovery of shot-down object in Lake Huron hampered by ‘choppy’ waters

Recovery of the unidentified object shot down by an American fighter jet over Lake Huron on Sunday afternoon is being hampered by “choppy” waters, according to U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin.

“Lake Huron is choppy today, so they’re having a hard time getting ahold of it,” she said during an event in Howell.

The National Weather Service warned of wind gusts of up to 30 knots Monday, with 2- to 4-foot waves in the morning building to 6 to 9 feet in the afternoon and occasionally swelling to 12 feet.

Slotkin, a Lansing Democrat who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, also threw cold water Monday on the idea that the airborne object might have had extraterrestrial or alien origins, even though U.S. military leaders declined to rule that out during a Sunday briefing.

“I have no reason to believe this is a UFO. … I know that’s gotten all kinds of excitement, but the chances are this is just a normal, run-of-the-mill thing that we in the intelligence community know how to exploit,” said Slotkin, a former top Pentagon official and CIA analyst. “That’s what I expect to learn in the next coming couple of days.”

An F-16 fighter jet shot down the unidentified object Sunday at about 20,000 feet of altitude over Lake Huron on the U.S. side of the border with Canada after the object had flown over Michigan and other parts of the U.S. and Canada, marking the fourth such incident over North American airspace during the past eight days.

The object had passed over Wisconsin, Lake Michigan and the Upper Peninsula before it was shot down about 15 nautical miles east of the U.P. in Lake Huron, Pentagon officials said Sunday night. Once hit, they said, the object drifted and likely landed in Canadian waters in the lake, where the Coast Guard and others are working to recover it.

Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, commander of U.S. Northern Command and NORAD, said Sunday night in a briefing with reporters that he wasn’t ruling out alien or extraterrestrial life.

 “He left it so open that it has certainly fueled a lot of Michiganders’ interest in UFOs,” Slotkin told reporters on Monday. “To be clear, I do not think this was a UFO. I have zero reason to believe that. And, in general, don’t believe too much in those conspiracy theories.” 

The defense department said the object’s path and altitude raised alarms that it could be a hazard to civil aviation and a threat “due to its potential surveillance capabilities,” but the Pentagon also said it did not assess the object to be a “kinetic military threat to anything on the ground.”

The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) has enhanced its radar, “which may at least partly explain the increase in objects that we’ve detected over the past week,” said Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Hemispheric Affairs Melissa Dalton.

But Pentagon officials also indicated they haven’t been able to definitively assess what the recent objects are or even what propels them to remain airborne ― which is why debris recovery is important.

Slotkin noted that the defense department purposely waited to shoot it down until the object was over open water, so that they could collect the wreckage afterward. The military has the ability to determine whether an object like this is carrying any type of explosives by its shape and size, and that was ruled out, she added.

“They determined that it wasn’t a threat to national security. The NORAD commander has the ability to shoot down anything they want that’s over the U.S. homeland if they deem it an immediate threat,” Slotkin said.

“We do not know what it is right now. I’ve seen all kinds of speculation — from another Chinese object to an academic who put up some sort of sensing device. That’s why we like to collect things. As a former CIA officer, we’d like to exploit things that we find and so that’s the recovery effort that’s going on right now.”

She also suggested it’s unlikely that the object belongs to a for-profit company that operates in space because those are generally “extremely judicious” about communicating with NORAD and also the object was not flying at an altitude considered to be “space.”

“This wasn’t the outer orbit, and so, I just don’t think so,” Slotkin said. “But look, at this point, we just don’t know.”

If recovered from Lake Huron, Slotkin said the object would be likely taken to a classified facility for work to determine its origin and purpose. The FBI and Royal Canadian Mounted Police have jurisdiction over that operation.

The airborne object was octagonal shaped and was tracked initially over Montana and then traveled over Michigan at lower altitudes, said Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Caledonia, who was briefed Sunday by the defense department.

Potential surveillance capabilities were a concern over northern Michigan, which hosts military installations such as Camp Grayling and the Alpena Combat Readiness Training Center, he said.

“More will be known as the debris is recovered and they’re able to understand better what the object was and what propelled it and what the capabilities were,” he said. “It’s a concern because we have strategic military assets in northern Michigan, and we want to make sure we are protecting those assets and not divulging information.”

Moolenaar, who serves on a new U.S. House special committee on China, stressed that the source of the object is still unknown, but he pressed for greater transparency once more is learned.

“We don’t know what the intent or capabilities were at this time, but I think that information needs to be gathered and published, publicized to a certain degree. I think the American people deserve to know what is happening the threats are,” he said.

“At the same time, we need our capabilities to be assessed, earlier detection and make sure we are ahead of the game rather than responding and reacting.”

Politics editor Chad Livengood contributed.

mburke@detroitnews.com