From New York Times, I'm Michael Borrow. This is a daily.

The United States has now shot down four objects from the skies over North America,

in most cases without even knowing what they were.

Today, my colleague, Julian Barnes, on why the US is suddenly shooting first and asking later.

It's Tuesday, February 14th.

Julian, this was a very strange few days.

In one object, shot down out of a sky, two maybe.

By the time you get to four objects shot out of a sky by the US military,

it almost felt like we were in the territory of cinema. It just was surreal.

Yeah, it really had a sci-fi, espionage thriller feel to it once we got to the fourth shoot down.

Yeah, it just felt almost supernatural.

So I want to talk about how we got to this moment where all these things are being shot out of the sky.

So bring us back to last week when the US had just taken down the first of these objects,

this Chinese balloon, which we had understood despite vehement Chinese Stenials,

two very much B, a spying balloon.

So pick up the story from there.

So what happens after Air Force F-22 shoots down that very large Chinese surveillance balloon

is that the Pentagon and FBI go to the scene and start collecting parts of it.

And they start releasing information about it.

They decide that they're going to educate the public about what they learned over its multi-day journey across the United States.

They had learned that it could not just take images, but it also could collect what the US calls signals intelligence.

That means it could scoop up radio and cell phone communications.

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