It was a mild, sunny winter afternoon when Tara Shannon learned all the airspace above her community in south-eastern Ontario had been closed.
Soon after, she and her neighbours began receiving scattered reports of a high-flying mystery object had been spotted in the area.
“I stepped outside and it was just silent. It was surreal,” said Shannon, a children’s author who lives near the community of Tobermory. “Normally you hear commercial aircraft. But there was nothing. The sky was clear and everything was silent.”
Soon, however, the rumbling engines of a fuelling tanker broke the silence and moments later, fighter jets roared overhead.
Shannon and others along the coast of Lake Huron have found themselves at the centre the search for unidentified flying objects, amid a flurry of incidents and broader geopolitical row between the US and China.
On Sunday, US military officials shot down the third flying object over North American airspace in as many days, prompting broader questions over national security as more mystery objects are detected by radar.
The high-altitude unidentified object, described as an “octagonal structure” with strings attached to it, was shot down on Sunday afternoon near Canada’s Manitoulin Island on Lake Huron.
Officials say the object is the same item that was picked up by radar over Montana on Saturday. It was shot down by an air-to-air missile launched from an F-16 fighter jet amid worries that its 20,000ft altitude could have posed a risk to civilian aircraft.
The mission to down the object came only a day after an object roughly the size of a small car was shot down down over a rugged section of Canada’s Yukon territory. Canadian crews are currently searching the vast and bitterly cold landscape for any debris.
Residents along the shores of Lake Huron say they have learned little in the past day about the mission to shoot down the object or the salvage efforts.
“We didn’t know what was happening. Was it going to land in our yard? What was it made of?” said Shannon. “And now we don’t know if they’ve found anything or where it might have ended up. We’re left with so many questions.”
Defence officials from both Canada and the United States have been hesitant to release details about the objects shot down in recent days. The first object, a Chinese surveillance balloon shot down off the South Carolina coast, is reported to have contained technology to monitor and intercept communications.
On a local Facebook group for Presque Isle, an American community on the north-western shore of Lake Huron, residents also reported hearing aircraft in the area on Sunday.
Some reached for conspiracy theories to explain the spate of balloons in recent days while others joked about extraterrestrial visitors. One resident in Presque Isle posted photos of a raccoon – “named Rocky of course” that has been deputized as a “gate guard” for the community.
“Since we now have unidentified balloons flying over our area … [w]e welcome the extra security,” he wrote.
On Monday, flight tracking sites showed planes travelling in loops around a swath of lake roughly 20km south of Manitoulin Island, including a low-flying US coast guard plane, in what appeared to be a largely water-based search. Canada’s fisheries and oceans minister, Joyce Murray, tweeted that a Canadian coast guard icebreaker would help locate and retrieve any debris from the waters of Lake Huron.
Military personnel equipped with cold weather diving gear were expected to be deployed to search the area for any debris that might be recovered.
“It certainly made for an interesting afternoon, because being up here, there’s not a lot happening in the winter,” said Shannon. “You’ve got snow, and you’ve got curling. And maybe some snow activities. And that’s about it.”
