Over a three-day span, from Friday to Sunday, the U.S. military engaged with and shot down three unidentified flying objects over the United States and Canada.

On Sunday, the top U.S. Air Force general in command in North America told reporters that he hadn’t “ruled out” the possibility that those objects had an extraterrestrial origin, the Daily Wire reported.

Of the unidentified objects referenced by the general, the first was shot down over Alaska on Friday, the second over Canada on Saturday, and the third over Lake Huron between the U.S. and Canada on Sunday — less than a week after the military shot down a Chinese high-altitude surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina after it had traversed across much of the continental U.S.

Pentagon shares info on third shootdown in three days

The Defense Department held a briefing on Sunday in which reporters addressed questions to Melissa Dalton, the assistant secretary of Defense for Homeland Security and Hemispheric Affairs, along with Air Force Gen. Glenn VanHerck, the commander of both the U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, better known as NORAD.

The general first explained how the third object shot down Sunday over Lake Huron had first been observed on Saturday in Canadian airspace and then was intermittently tracked by radar as it entered into U.S. airspace over Montana and moved east toward Wisconsin and Michigan before it was eventually shot down.

A reporter asked if the objects were perhaps similar but smaller variations of the Chinese spy balloon shot down last week, but VanHerck replied, “So I’m not going to categorize these as balloons. We call them objects for a reason. Certainly, the event off South Carolina coast for the Chinese spy balloon, that was clearly a balloon.”

“These are objects. I am not able to categorize how they stay aloft. It could be a gaseous type of balloon inside a structure or it could be some type of a propulsion system. But clearly, they’re — they’re able to stay aloft,” he added along with an admonition for the media to refrain from attributing the objects to any specific nation until “we can further assess and analyze what they are.”

“I haven’t ruled out anything”

Later in the briefing, a New York Times reporter asked the general, “Because you still haven’t been able to tell us what these things are that we are shooting out of the sky, that raises the question, have you ruled out aliens or extraterrestrials? And if so, why? Because that is what everyone is asking us right now.”

“I’ll let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out. I haven’t ruled out anything,” VanHerck replied. “At this point, we continue to assess every threat or potential threat as unknown that approaches North America with an attempt to identify it.”

Toward the conclusion of the briefing, another reporter asked if the Pentagon planned to publicly release any of the images it possessed of the unidentified objects, such as from the targeting pods of the fighter jets that shot them down, but the general deferred on that as a decision for others at the Pentagon to make.

Assistant Sec. Dalton added, “We absolutely want to be transparent about our military operations and what we are learning about these objects and the PRC high-altitude balloon and hope to share more in the coming days.”

Anonymous official says “no evidence” objects are of “extraterrestrial origin”

According to Reuters, while Gen. VanHerck told reporters that he hadn’t “ruled out” the possibility that the unidentified flying objects were extraterrestrial in nature and didn’t originate here on earth, others at the Pentagon are not so open-minded about that possibility.

One unnamed U.S. Defense official said, per the outlet, that “the military had seen no evidence suggesting any of the objects in question were of extraterrestrial origin.”

Whether it is ever revealed that these “objects,” more formally referred to as “unidentified aerial phenomena” or UAPs instead of UFOs these days, are from out-of-this-world or are simply new and advanced aircraft created by America’s earthly adversaries, such as China, is something that remains to be seen.