Some have compared it to the silvery, chevron-shaped crafts first reported by pilot Kenneth Arnold in 1947 — the historic sighting that launched the modern era of ‘flying saucer’ cases.

Others have compared it ominously to the alien ‘engineer’ spacecraft in the Ridley Scott’s 2012 sci-fi horror film ‘Prometheus.’

But DailyMail.com has spoken to a former officer with the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), who has discussed the case with three active-duty members of the operational staff directly involved in this February 11, 2023 UFO shootdown.

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According to this source, retired RCAF warrant officer Rocky Swanson, the military officers involved said the object was difficult to track.

But once they got close, they could ‘very clearly’ see it was a balloon, similar to the Chinese spy craft sH๏τ down days before this encounter.

‘I’ve spoken to three different folks that were involved in that particular event,’ Swanson told DailyMail.com, ‘and their stories are all the same.’

‘For the most part, you’re staring at a white object in a white sky, right? And so they are looking for this thing — and it’s small — and they’re having a hard time tracking it, because there’s not a lot to track.’

‘They’re flying in an extraordinarily remote area,’ he continued, ‘trying to look for basically a needle in a stack of needles, you know?’

From his conversations with military personnel involved in the case, he believes that the image depicts the underside of a aerial platform not dissimilar from the larger Chinese spy balloon with its intelligence-collecting package hanging beneath it.

‘The round shape that you’re seeing, you know, if it was three dimensional, you would see that it’s a balloon,’ he said.

The apparent dark regions that give the UFO its ‘Pac-Man’-like shape, he said, were caused by this package and its ‘shadow.’

‘There’s nobody that got excited about that event within the military,’ Swanson said. ‘It’s not thought of as a big deal […] It’s legitimately a balloon.’

Two F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jets from US Air Force Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska had been dispatched to intercept the UFO last February.

Pentagon press secretary Brigadier General Pat Ryder said at the time: ‘As the object crossed into Canadian airspace, Canadian CF-18 and CP-140 aircraft [joined] the formation to further ᴀssess the object.’

At approximately 3:41 pm Eastern time, in the bitterly cold subarctic climate over Mayo, Yukon, one of these F-22 Raptors successfully blasted the UFO out of the sky with an an AIM 9X ‘sidewinder’ missile.

Curiously, redacted documents released by the Canadian government along with the new UFO image show that it was designated as ‘unclassified’ within just days of this now 19-month-old UFO incident.

And yet, Canada’s Department of National Defence (DND) did not release it until now.

Swanson believes that Canadian DND officials withheld the grainy images because the UFO it depicted looks more otherworldly than the object really was.

‘I can understand why they wouldn’t want to put that out, because I would be like, “Oh, God. What are we going to do with that?”‘ he said in a telephone interview.

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The episode was one of four UFO shootdowns that occurred in rapid succession that month, beginning with the confirmed downing of an authentic Chinese-government spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina’s Myrtle Beach on Feb. 4.

The new image depicts one of the three objects that met the same fate between Feb. 10 and 12 of that year over Alaska, Lake Huron on the border of Michigan, and Canada’s Yukon territory.

All three of these objects were reportedly much smaller than the Chinese spy balloon that splashed down near Myrtle Beach days earlier.

That object, the only confirmed Chinese spy balloon of the four sH๏τ down, per Pentagon reports, carried a payload of spy sensors approximately the size of a bus via a balloon that was bigger than Disney’s famous geodesic sphere at Epcot Center.

Swanson told DailyMail.com that his three military sources would not come forward publicly: ‘These are currently serving members of the military. So, they’re not going to be willing to come out. They can’t.’

‘What I’m willing to say is they’re operational staff,’ he added. ‘They are flight crew is what I’ll say.’

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But their anonymity will likely do little to dampen the speculation and mistrust of both the Canadian and US government’s official account of these UFO intercepts, which continues to pervade the general public.

The new UFO pH๏τo, obtained by CTVNews.ca reporter Daniel Otis via an open records law request, also included efforts by members of Canada’s own armed forces to better understand the craft that had been sH๏τ down.

Some of the Canadian military’s written descriptions of the UFO appear to be at odds with statements suggesting that it was a simple balloon.

One email from Canadian Brigadier-General Eric Laforest described the UFO as a ‘cylindrical object.’

‘Top quarter is metallic, remainder white. 20-foot wire hanging below with a package of some sort suspended,’ Brig. Gen. Laforest wrote. ‘Best description that we have.’