SALT LAKE CITY — The U.S. military has shot down four unidentified objects in North American airspace so far this month.
The latest happened over the weekend, over Lake Huron in Michigan.
"That's a bit of a concern because we have no idea what the other... unidentified objects that they've shot down are," said Mary Caputo, a lifelong Salt Lake resident who says she has been keeping her eyes on the sky.
"It looks like a surveillance balloon," she said.
This comes after a suspected Chinese spy balloon was taken down by a U.S. fighter jet off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4.
John Horel is a professor at the University of Utah and the chair of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences.
He says these objects don't appear to be weather balloons.
"What we can tell is that they're not balloons that are launched for operational weather prediction," said Horel. "It's very unlikely that their balloons that were carrying research instrumentation."
Horel gave FOX 13 News a look at what goes into making a weather balloon work.
"This is the type of instrument package that is sent up underneath a balloon," Horel said as he showed how the balloons read temperatures and soar to heights of 100,000 feet in the air.
"We can inflate it with enough helium to be able to lift this," he said.
Horel said the National Weather Service sends up a couple hundred balloons each day across the country that carry instrument packages — including here in Salt Lake City.
"Anybody can launch a balloon carrying an instrument package that weighs less than six pounds," said Horel.
Horel says anything heavier than that has to be approved by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
While the objects being shot down have brought awareness to what is going on above us, Horel says the main thing now is to get more information into what exactly these things are.
"We need to know what these kind of instrument packages that are being carried aloft," said Horel.
Caputo said she hopes this issue will eventually be resolved.
"I'm just kind of in a wait-and-see," she said.
Right now, it's unclear what the objects that were shot down were or where they came from.
U.S. officials have emphasized that Americans are not in danger.
