Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says there is clearly a pattern with four aerial objects shot down over Canada and the United States in the last 10 days, but there is still much to learn from the debris recovery and analysis.

"I think obviously there is some sort of pattern in there. The fact that we are seeing this in a significant degree over the past week is a cause for interest and close attention, which is exactly what we're doing," Trudeau said during a media availability in Whitehorse about the unusual series of takedowns.

On Monday in Yukon, Trudeau met with the Canadian Armed Forces and RCMP officials who are leading the search efforts to recover the "unidentified object" shot down on his order on Saturday, as part of a North American Aerospace Defence Command (Norad) operation. Trudeau said it鈥檚 an "extraordinary" task being conducted with and in collaboration with Indigenous leaders.

"We've deployed significant resources here to be able to recover the object, as well as diplomatic and international engagements going on to find more information and get solutions on this," he said.

Trudeau described the ongoing Canadian-led effort to locate the downed object amid sparsely populated and rugged northern territory as "challenging" but vowed that the hunt will continue until debris is "hopefully" located.

"This is a very serious situation that we are taking incredibly seriously. The actions we're taking to protect North American airspace, the actions we're taking to recover and analyze these objects, the importance of defending our territorial integrity, our sovereignty, has rarely been as important as it is now," Trudeau said on Monday. "There is much analysis going on at the highest levels of Norad."

The search in Yukon is one of two recovery efforts Canada is involved with, after the object shot down over Lake Huron on Sunday landed in Canadian waters. According to military officials, the first contact had with this "suspected balloon" was over southern Alberta. 

Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard Joyce Murray said that a CCGS Griffon vessel equipped with a drone and drone operator would arrive at the core search area on Monday afternoon, and a pair of coast guard helicopters are on standby.

"We鈥檙e starting on the southern part鈥� And then we鈥檒l be moving north from there," Murray said. "We will do our very best to secure this material so that we can understand better what the purpose and the operations are about."

Here's a brief summary of the unmanned objects downed to date, a series of events Pentagon officials have said have no peacetime precedent: 

  • Feb. 4, on the order of U.S. President Joe Biden, a U.S. fighter jet shot down what previously had been identified as a Chinese surveillance balloon, off the coast of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina after it spent a week traversing Canada and the U.S.
  • Feb. 10, an F-22 fighter jet shot down an unmanned high-altitude cylindrical object the size of a small car, off the coast near Deadhorse, Alaska. It was heading towards Canadian airspace.
  • Feb. 11, on Trudeau's order, a U.S. fighter jet downed an unidentified "cylindrical object" over central Yukon about 100 miles from the Canada-U.S. border. Some have described this object as a balloon, though considerably smaller than the original Chinese balloon.
  • Feb. 12, over Lake Huron on the Canada-U.S. border, U.S. fighter jets shot down an octagonal object travelling at 20,000 feet that appeared to have dangling strings but no payload. It's believed to have landed in Canadian waters.

With searches still underway in the three most recent instances, the U.S. military has not yet identified what the objects are, how they stayed airborne, or where they originated, as Reuters has reported.

U.S. 'LASER-FOCUSED' ON ANALYSIS

Asked whether the U.S. agrees, as Trudeau suggested, that there is some sort of pattern to the objects, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said he wasn't aware of the prime minister's position and didn't want to speak for him. Though, he noted that all three of the latest objects did not appear to have any self-propulsion and were likely propelled by wind.

Kirby told reporters in Washington, D.C. on Monday that while the Biden administration has no specific reason to suspect that the objects shot down this weekend were conducting surveillance, it couldn't be ruled out. He said the U.S. is now "laser-focused" on confirming the nature and purpose of the trio of objects.

According to Kirby, the U.S. administration under Biden has been tracking a high-altitude balloon program that China has been using for intelligence collection for some time, and that it was operating undetected by former U.S. president Donald Trump's government.

Kirby said that in light of the recent Chinese incursion into North American airspace, Canada and the U.S. "have been more closely scrutinizing that airspace, including enhancing our radar capabilities, which鈥� may at least partially explain the increase in the objects that have been detected."

Over the weekend, Norad commander Gen. Glen VanHerck told reporters that after the Chinese balloon was first spotted, Norad made adjustments to its systems to better calibrate what slow-moving and high-altitude objects come on to its radar, and as of then Norad was not currently tracking any other objects. 

CANADA 'BEING VERY CAUTIOUS': FORMER CSIS HEAD

In a Monday morning interview on CNN, Defence Minister Anita Anand offered no new details about the objects downed in Canada or their origins.

"At this point, we are not able to speculate on the precise parameters of the object from the visual that we received," Anand said, declining to say if there was any indication that the object was from China. "It would be imprudent for me to speculate further at this time, until we gathered the debris and until we do the analysis. The FBI is involved in that analysis, as is the RCMP here in Canada."

In an interview on CTV's Question Period with Vassy Kapelos on Sunday, prior to the shooting down of the fourth aerial object, former national security adviser and past head of Canada's spy agency CSIS Richard Fadden said Anand is "being very cautious, particularly when her colleagues in the United States are not."

"I don't really understand why, except it falls into the Canadian tradition of being very reticent to comment on national security issues," he said.

Fadden said that if he was Trudeau's current national security adviser, he'd be "more worried" now that there have been multiple instances of unknown aerial objects in or around Canadian airspace.

"I would be rather more worried than I was when the first balloon appeared. I mean, once you can argue there was a mistake, even if it was intentional," said Fadden.

"If this is indeed the Chinese, they are being far more aggressive than they usually are鈥� they can be aggressive, but they're subtle. Whatever this is they are not subtle, so I would begin to worry a little bit."

The unprecedented series of events have prompted NATO Secretary General General Jens Stoltenberg to call on countries in that military alliance to stay vigilant, speculating that what's taking place is "part of a pattern" of increasing Chinese and Russian surveillance activities against NATO allies.

'SHOULD BE A WAKE-UP CALL': OPPOSITION

In Ottawa, the Official Opposition Conservative party was quick to raise questions about the recent "violations of Canadian sovereignty and Canadian airspace," and whether Canada's military is adequately equipped to handle these incursions should they persist.

While the Yukon takedown has been described as a first-of-its-kind Norad operation, Trudeau was defensive Monday about the role Canada played, given it was a U.S. jet that shot the object down. The prime minister said that Canada鈥檚 focus is "not on which side gets credit" but that the object posing "a threat" was shot down without incident.

Conservative MP and foreign affairs critic Michael Chong said that while he does not know the operational details, what transpired this weekend "should be a wake-up call for this government."

"They have failed to supply the Canadian Armed Forces, our intelligence agencies and other entities in the Government of Canada with the resources they need to defend this country's sovereignty and to protect our citizens. They've done so despite the advice they've received from Canada's military, from Canada's intelligence community, and from Canada's national security community," said Chong. "And as a result, we find Canadians vulnerable on the world stage鈥� Clearly there's a broader pattern here."

In an interview on 麻豆影视 Channel's Power Play, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino said that Canada is currently assessing what the pattern may be. 

"We are going to use every tool in our arsenal," Mendicino said. "I realize that there's a great curiosity about exactly what can be recovered and what these objects were. But, I would discourage over-speculation at this point, without allowing the forces and the RCMP and the coast guard... to do their job." 

With files from 麻豆影视' Parliamentary bureau, CTVNews.ca's Daniel Otis and Michael Lee, and The Associated Press