norad will continue to do their important work. secondly, we are consulting with allies and partners on the challenge of identified aerial phenomenon and how we can all work together to deal with that challenge. the president has directed the secretary of state, secretary of defense, and the director of national intelligence to engage with their relevant counterparts to share information and to try to gain their perspectives as well. again, this is an issue that affects everybody around the world. third, we will continue to brief members of congress and relevant state leadership on what we re doing and hot we learn. the predhas made this a very top priority. we have over the course of just the last few days and certainly over the course of last week reached out to inform and brief members of congress and relevant state governors of the operations we re conducting and the recovery operations under way. we have also kept congress briefed generally on the issue of chinese surveillance bal
as well, the scale of what they have been able to see up to this point is largely attributed to the flights or the fighters that buzzed these objects before they were shot down, which were going about 300 miles per hour. they don t have a good sense from that. that s why the recovery here is so critical. you re going to hear, obviously, from john kirby at the press briefing. there are still questions whether or not the president will come out and speak about this anytime soon. when you talk to officials inside the building, they make clear, we need to know more before we can send the president out, before we can speak definitively about what this is, because if not, any type of further finding could complicate what is said in that moment. i think to kylie s point here, there are a couple elements that are so critical, which is they have clearly widened the aperture in terms of their ability to see what s happening over territorial skies there. that s in part because of the chinese spy
fact that they saw this one coming in from china, the initial balloon from right at the time it was launched, tracked it along, and my own personal view is they probably learned more from tracking it across the u.s. than they ever would have had they shot it down early on. for the three others that we have seen over the weekend, at this point, they have turned their system up to be so sensitive that it s picking up lots of things. and it s well known in intelligence when you start looking for something, you find more of them. and so they re shooting down objects that i suspect a month ago they probably would not have. so the two things we have to get an adjustment here. first, fine tuning the radar systems and other sensors the way you would fine tune a metal detector going through the airport, so that a couple coins don t set it off in your pocket. and then the second thing is
america this weekend. kasie hunt picks up our coverage right now. good afternoon. i m kasie hunt here in washington. we re going to begin with the scramble for answers after a u.s. fighter jet were scrambled three days in a row this weekend, shooting down three separate aerial objects that were flying over north america. in just moments, the white house is going to take questions on this deepening national security mystery, as president biden faces increasing pressure to address the nation to explain what exactly is going on and who is behind these incursions. we re going to bring you that white house briefing as soon as it gets under way. but we want to get started right now with cnn s kylie atwood and phil mattingly, who are tracking all of this. kylie, let me start with you at the state department. so much of this is going to depend on what the government recovers from what is shot down. what is the status of this?
has there been a tweak in the threshold for the pentagon presenting to the president, the president signing off on military action related to anything over our air space? not sure i m following what you mean? the chinese spy balloon, the radars were tweaked which is why you think you re seeing so many of these things. has the decision about or has the threshold for the u.s. of fighters to take down objects also been tweaked? has it been lowered, changed? we have never seen this before. i m sorry, i didn t understand it at first. you heard the general talk about this last night. he s using established protocols to engage craft in the air, aircraft in the air that can be legitimately be brought down. as he said last night, the best way to do that certainly in a timely and efficient effective way was through fighter aircraft and through the sidewinder air to air missiles.