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| WASHINGTON — A top White House official said on Tuesday that three unidentified flying objects shot down in the past several days might turn out to be harmless commercial or research efforts that posed no real threat to the United States. |
| John F. Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said investigators had not yet found any evidence that the three objects were connected to China’s program of balloon surveillance similar to the balloon shot down off South Carolina’s coast this month. |
| But he cautioned that officials had not yet been able to find and collect the debris from the three objects after they were shot down, and that a different conclusion could be reached if the debris was found and analyzed. |
| Mr. Kirby said that military and intelligence officials had also found nothing to suggest that the three objects were part of an intelligence collection effort by another country. |
| “We haven’t seen any indication or anything that points specifically to the idea that these three objects were part of the P.R.C.’s spying program, or that they were definitively involved in external intelligence collection efforts,” he told reporters, referring to the People’s Republic of China. |
| In a wild weekend, American fighter aircraft shot down three unidentified flying objects from Friday to Sunday: the first over Prudhoe Bay, Alaska; the second over the Yukon Territory of Canada; and the third over Lake Huron. The third object landed on the Canadian side of Lake Huron, officials said. |
| Pentagon officials also acknowledged on Tuesday that the first missile fired by a U.S. fighter jet over Lake Huron on Sunday missed the target. |
| Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters in Brussels that the missile that missed its target is now at the bottom of Lake Huron. |
| “First shot missed. Second shot hit,” General Milley said. “We go to great lengths to make sure that the airspace is clear and the backdrop is clear up to the max effective range of the missile. And in this case, the missiles land, or the missile landed, harmlessly in the water of Lake Huron.” |
| Recovery units are trying to retrieve the unidentified objects so intelligence officials can determine what they are. Recovery efforts are also underway for the debris left after an F-22 shot down a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4, and officials said on Monday that crews had recovered “significant debris” from the craft that included “priority sensor and electronics pieces.” |
| Mr. Kirby’s comments came as senior Pentagon and intelligence community officials, including Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, the head of North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, visited the Capitol on Tuesday to deliver a similar message to the full Senate. The briefing was the latest effort by the administration to update lawmakers on the strange floating objects shot down in recent days. |
| But the admission that the administration had more questions than answers about three of the objects prompted a fresh wave of frustration among lawmakers, who criticized not only the slow recovery effort but also the administration’s lack of clarity about what was floating overhead in the first place. |
| “Everyone’s talking, acting like this is the first time we’ve ever seen these things,” said Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. “No, it isn’t.” Mr. Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, also questioned whether the craft should have been brought down. |
| He said that recovering the debris alone would not provide a full picture of what is happening in the skies above the United States. |
| “The only way you’re going to get answers to that is not just to retrieve whatever is leftover, but to understand how it compares to the hundreds of other similar cases,” Mr. Rubio said. |
| Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat who is the chairman of the committee, said the government’s tracking of airborne objects launched for legitimate purposes needs to be improved, adding that “there is not anywhere near as formal a process as there probably should be.” |
| Mr. Warner said the administration needed to be “much more aggressive” about ensuring “a much better notification process with the authorities” to register legitimate scientific, weather and other craft so officials would know which outliers were potentially cause for alarm. |
| The full Senate was most recently briefed about the Chinese spy balloon less than a week ago, in a closed-door session that precipitated pointed questions from Democrats and Republicans alike about why the craft had not been brought down as soon as it was detected hovering over Alaska. Republicans emerged from Tuesday’s briefing still questioning whether administration officials were being forthcoming with the information they were delivering to Congress, and questioning whether their briefings needed to be so secretive. |
| Yet lawmakers shared a sense that the three airborne objects brought down since the spy balloon incident should be considered in a separate category. |
| “The last three that were shot down were very, very small objects,” Senator Jim Risch of Idaho, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said after Tuesday’s briefing. He noted that “at least one” of the three, however, was carrying a payload, though he did not specify the size. |
| Mr. Kirby said the Federal Aviation Administration had determined that the objects were not operated by the U.S. government. One possible explanation for the objects, he said, might be that they were operated by private companies or research institutes. |
| “They will not dismiss as a possibility that these could be balloons that were simply tied to commercial or research entities and therefore benign,” Mr. Kirby said. “That very well could be, or could emerge, as a leading explanation here.” |
| But he said that no company or other organization had contacted the government to say they were the owners of the objects that were shot down. |
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