The White House confirmed that fighter jets shot down what they described as a “high-altitude object,” about the size of a small car, over Alaska. The Pentagon said they do not know the origin of the object and that it was unmanned.

John Kirby, coordinator for Strategic Communications for the National Security Council, said the object was flying at 40,000 feet and posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flights. Unlike the Chinese balloon, it did not have the ability to maneuver. For those reasons, President Biden ordered the military to take it down at the recommendation of the Pentagon.

“We don’t know if it’s state owned. We don’t understand the full purpose. We don’t have any information that would confirm the stated purpose for this object,” Kirby said. “We do expect to be able to recover the debris since it fell not only within our territorial space but on what we believe is frozen water so a recovery effort will be made.”

While the military is still trying to figure out what it is, the military does know it didn’t have a significant payload, like the recent Chinese spy balloon which was carrying equipment about the size of three buses.

President Biden has come under bipartisan criticism for not shooting down the Chinese balloon sooner. He waited until it flew over the ocean so it wouldn’t do damage to infrastructure or harm civilians. But in the process it flew over the entire United States including sensitive military bases. The Pentagon revealed that the spy balloon had the ability to monitor U.S. communications, which is officially called “signals intelligence collections operations.”