Montana airspace over Havre temporarily closes Saturday

Airspace in the Havre area was closed temporarily to civilian airplanes by the Federal Aviation Administration Saturday morning due to a radar anomaly now confirmed to have been the yet-unidentified object that was shot down over Lake Huron, Michigan Sunday.

Saturday, the North American Aerospace Defense Command said they sent fighter aircraft to investigate the object detected in Montana airspace, but did not identify any object to correlate to the radar hits, referring to it as an anomaly at the time, and they would continue to monitor the situation.

Hill County Disaster and Emergency Services Coordinator Amanda Frickel said Sunday that she was in contact with the office’s of Montana’s congressional delegation, who have all said they are receiving updates from the Pentagon, but at that point she has little concrete information.

All members of the delegation have commented on the recent closure on social media, saying they will make sure Montanans are informed of any new information they get and Sen. Steve Daines criticized the Biden administration for not being more expedient in providing an explanation.

“Without information, the public and media are left to rely on leaks, speculation and worst of all disinformation from foreign governments,” he said in a tweet Sunday.

This closure coincides with a number of incidents across the U.S. and Canada of unidentified objects being shot down in U.S. airspace including one shot down over Lake Huron Sunday.

In the wake of that shoot-down, the U.S. Department of Defense held a press conference about these incidents Sunday afternoon where officials said the radar hits in Montana may have been the object as it made its way east, but they were not 100% sure.

“It’s likely, but we have not confirmed that the track that we saw at Wisconsin was likely the same track in Montana,” said General Glen VanHerck of North American Aerospace Defense Command.

The object detected over Montana has since been reported by outlets like The Associated Press to have been the same object shot down over Michigan.

While they did not address the Montana airspace closure beyond that, military officials did address the recent spate of alerts and shootdowns are a result of recent detection system adjustments and an overabundance of caution.

Officials said following an episode earlier this month where a Chinese high-altitude balloon, suspected to be for spying, was tracked from Montana to South Carolina and then shot down off the coast, the U.S. has adjusted its approach to detecting airborne objects to be more sensitive, and this is likely the cause of these incidents.

“In light of the People’s Republic of China balloon that we took down last Saturday, we have been more closely scrutinizing our air space at these altitudes, including enhancing our 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.

“Because we have not yet been able to definitively assess what these recent objects are, we have acted out of an abundance of caution to protect our security and interests,” Dalton added.