The US Military issued a statement late Friday evening, according to the Washington Post, saying that, "search activities have discovered no debris."
and said they would be shortly suspending the search for any debris that remains. The US White House announced earlier in the week that initial US intelligence had suggested that the objects shot down over both Alaska and Lake Huron were not a national security threat to the United States. Based on this and the difficulty of finding debris in Alaska on the ice in a remote area of Northeast Alaska where the second object of scrutiny was shot down and lies at the bottom of Lake Huron in several hundred feet of icy cold water, searching for the debris further risks human lives.
A Harvard Professor and Physicist Weighs In
Recently, Avi Loeb, Professor of Science and Institute director at Harvard University weighed in on whether these objects were consistent with the US Government's description, saying that the "Archimedes’ principle states that a body immersed in a fluid is subjected to an upwards force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid. For this reason, a balloon filled with gas of a low atomic-mass, such as hydrogen or helium, can rise up to an altitude where the ambient mass density of air equals its mean mass density. An application of this principle shows that a 3-meter balloon, the size of a small car, can rise up to an altitude of 12 kilometers, whereas a 12-meter balloon can rise up to 40 kilometers."
Loeb corroborates from a physics standpoint that the assertions of the balloon sizes and altitudes reported by the US Pentagon, NORAD, and US White House, are reasonable and that this dovetails with the White House's reports of the objects as "not extraterrestrial," remarking that "The US government does not share some information because it does not want adversaries to be aware of the quality of its sensors."
This information doesn't mean skywatchers should lose hope of spotting what Loeb says will "change the course of humanity" if and when it's discovered, he's hopeful his Galileo Project will do just that, but we should be cautious in jumping to conclusions before doing the math, or in this case, the physics.
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