this object has been described as roughly the size of a small car, much smaller than the suspected chinese spy balloon which the air force shot down last saturday. to say it was shut down to say nothing from the facts that comments from the podium at the white house today is raising questions tonight. it was downed off the alaska coast, again, about the size of a small car. it had been seen flying at approximately 40,000 feet and was deemed to pose a reasonable threat to aircraft and other civilian operations. still, there are few answers about the object, even as the white house attempts to draw distinctions between this episode and the episode i previously mentioned last saturday. now, we are told that the president based on the advice of the pentagon believed it posed enough of a concern that it needed to be shot down. he ordered it, and it was. asked about the intradiction, the president said simply it was a success. we re going to remain vigilant about the skies
jonathan, to you first. we ll get to the border in a little bit but i just have to talk about this air space issue, because we were told last week it was a bad idea to shoot down this chinese spy weather balloon in deep water or in frozen conditions and yet today, we shoot down this unidentified object in frozen conditions. there doesn t appear to be a set policy. what do you think? yeah, exactly. doesn t appear it appears to be the policy is reacting to the bad news coverage from last week which really isn t a sensible national security policy. and really this goes back to and i think you hit it on earlier with your other guest is are we being tested? is this weakness of this administration being shown to the world? i think unquestionably it is, and you know, we ll get to the border in a second but these are all interconnected. the weakness is evident. they re exploiting it and testing us. trace: i get it, horace. up in that area, i know the atc radar is limited.
38,000 feet that took eight minutes. but no distress call was made. what does that all tell you? very little rosemary. i really have difficulties with some of the speculation i m hearing [ inaudible ] they do believe that something catastrophic appeared on the flight deck and the aircraft started a descent. it clearly started a descent. that was obvious from the atc radar. whether the pilots initiated that voluntarily or involuntarily is a big question in my mind. if something catastrophic occurred where a panel you blew out some part of the aircraft and they had decompression, the first thing to do is get down to 10,000 feet or thereabouts. it does look like a controlled descent initially. but if it was a controlled descent, why didn t they say something? i think that point has been made before. we should advise air traffic control not only to let them