Two U.S. F-16s were scrambled over Nevada and northern California on 15 February after pilots and air-traffic controllers reported unidentified objects at high altitude, only for North American Aerospace Defense Command to later assess the items as benign meteorological balloons. The jets—launched from March Air Reserve Base—were sent twice that morning and spent several hours in the area to visually identify and track the contacts.
Flight data and air-traffic communications show a civilian cargo aircraft first reported a glowing object in controlled airspace before the fighters arrived, describing it as luminous and then dimming. The first intercept occurred at about 6:30 a.m. Pacific time, with the fighters remaining on station for roughly two and a half hours before returning; a second scramble took them back north around 10:45 a.m., after which they departed about 35 minutes later.
NORAD later reported it had detected and followed two high-altitude objects off the mid-northern California coast moving northeast. The command evaluated both as matching typical meteorological balloon characteristics—non-maneuvering, not posing a military threat and posing no known risk to civil aviation—so no kinetic action was taken.
The episode is the latest instance of heightened U.S. sensitivity to unexplained aerial contacts in the post-2023 environment. Since a high-profile Chinese surveillance balloon traversed U.S. airspace and was shot down in early 2023, American defence and aviation authorities have adopted a lower threshold for rapid interception and identification of unapproved high-altitude objects, particularly those in controlled airspace.
Operationally, such scrambles are precautionary: fighters are tasked to visually identify, deter any hazards to civilian aviation and evaluate potential intelligence value. But frequent intercepts impose costs in pilot hours, sortie tempo and air-reflex resources, while also creating public and diplomatic optics that can amplify routine phenomena into national-security stories.
That NORAD judged these two objects harmless removes an immediate safety or security concern, but it does not close the policy questions raised by repeated unidentified-air-object incidents. Authorities will likely continue to refine notification protocols for civilian agencies and consider better radar, optical and electronic means to discriminate between benign balloons and potential surveillance platforms without defaulting to costly fighter deployments.