1st missile fired at object over Lake Huron missed target, U.S. says

The first of two missiles fired from an F-16 fighter jet at an unidentified object over Lake Huron on Sunday missed the object, but landed harmlessly in the water, the top U.S. general, Mark Milley, said on Tuesday.

"First shot missed, second shot hit," Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in response to a reporter question at a news conference in Brussels.

Reuters reported on Monday that the first of the two missiles had missed the object, one of three unidentified objects shot down by U.S. fighter jets over U.S. and Canadian airspace between Friday and Sunday.

"In this case, the missile landed harmlessly in the water of Lake Huron, we tracked it all the way down," said Milley. "And we made sure the airspace was clear of any commercial or civilian or recreational traffic."

The first two incidents of the weekend occurred in Alaska and Yukon. In both cases, Milley said, the objects were brought down in the first attempt.

The three weekend incidents ensued after U.S. officials identified an object as a Chinese surveillance balloon and shot it down off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4. That incident led to another flare-up in the testy relations between the two superpowers, with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken cancelling a planned visit to Beijing.

Milley, like other officials, said he would use the term "objects" to refer to the three most recent incidents. Citing the water depth in Lake Huron, as well as the remote locations and cold temperatures in Alaska and Yukon, Milley cautioned that "it's going to take some time to recover those."

John Kirby, the White House national security spokesperson, confirmed the first miss over Lake Huron to reporters in Washington.

Kirby told reporters that the U.S. doesn't yet have a firm grasp on the origin of the last three objects. The intelligence community is considering the possibility that the trio could be balloons "tied to some commercial or benign purpose." 

He said there was no indication that the trio of objects were tied to China's spy balloon program.

Officials have said one explanation for the recent flurry since the first balloon was detected was a change to NORAD's filters to allow them to detect objects moving slowly and at different altitudes.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he ordered the object over Yukon shot down, and an American F-22 destroyed it at 3:41 p.m. ET. Trudeau did not mention the Lake Huron miss in comments to reporters on Monday in Yukon.

An F-22 fighter from the U.S. military shot down an unidentified object said to be about the size of a small car near Deadhorse, Alaska. 

U.S. senators were reportedly receiving another briefing on the recent incidents on Tuesday.