Search operations for the wreckage of the Chinese balloon that was shot down off the coast of South Carolina, USA, have been successfully completed, the US Department of Defense announced yesterday, Friday.

“The final debris (collected) was taken to the FBI’s research lab in Virginia for counterintelligence testing,” the Pentagon said in a statement.

The US military on February 4 shot down this Chinese balloon off the coast of South Carolina, which the Pentagon believes was a spy aimed at gathering sensitive information.

Beijing, for its part, argued that it was a civilian balloon whose main purpose was to collect meteorological data and that it had inadvertently deviated from its course and thus found itself flying over US soil.

The balloon affair prompted US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to postpone a rarely scheduled visit to China.

The US Department of Defense also announced the end of investigations into two downed objects, one off the north coast of Alaska on February 10 and the other over Lake Huron on the Canadian border two days later.

These searches, which were conducted in cooperation with the Canadian authorities and were made using advanced technology, were fruitless, the Pentagon clarifies in its announcement.

In a press conference he gave on Thursday, US President Joe Biden noted that there is nothing at this stage to suggest that these two objects “were connected to the Chinese spy balloon program”.