The Air Force sent fighter jets Friday to respond to a mysterious balloon that flew through Hawaii’s airspace, but officials say they don’t think the object poses a threat either to civilian aircraft or national security.

In an emailed statement the Oahu-based U.S. Indo-­Pacific Command said that it “responded to an unidentified radar signature Friday in the vicinity of the island of Hawaii. Pacific Air Forces launched three F-22s to assess the situation and visually identified a spherical object. We monitored the transit of the object and assessed that it posed no threat.”

The Federal Aviation Administration and the military detected the balloon moving off the coast of Hawaii floating at about 36,000 feet, a Department of Defense spokesman in Washington, D.C., told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

“Ownership of the balloon is unknown, but there is no indication that it was maneuvering or being controlled by a foreign or adversarial actor,” said the spokesperson. “The balloon did not transit directly over defense critical infrastructure or other U.S. Government sensitive sites, nor did it pose a military or physical threat to people on the ground.”

Earlier this year the Air Force shot down a large Chinese balloon that American officials say was a spy balloon but that Beijing insists was a weather balloon. An F-22 jet shot it down off the coast of South Carolina in February after it had transited the U.S. and Canada. Along the way it flew over several key military installations.

After shooting down the balloon, the U.S. and Canadian militaries shot down several other unidentified flying objects over Alaska and Canada. At the time officials said they did not know what those objects were. The White House now says some appear to have been either small weather balloons or balloons put in the air by hobbyists and were unlikely to belong to a foreign power. The military has since adopted new parameters for monitoring U.S. airspace.

The DOD spokesperson said that although the balloon spotted last weekend was flying at an elevation used by civil aviation, it didn’t pose any immediate threat to aircraft flying over Hawaii.

“Based on these observations, the Secretary of Defense concurred with the recommendation of his military commanders that no action need be taken against the balloon.” said the spokesperson. “The balloon is now out of Hawaii’s airspace and territorial waters. We will continue to track the balloon with the FAA.”

The military has tracked and responded to other strange balloons around Hawaii, sometimes as island residents and civilian aviators watched.

Last year on Valentine’s Day, Kauai residents watched as F-22 fighter jets responded to a mysterious object in the sky off the island. Two days later Hawaii National Guard commander Maj. Gen. Kenneth Hara tweeted that U.S. Indo-Pacific Command “detected a high-altitude object floating in air in the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands” and sent the aircraft to intercept it. Military officials described it as an “unmanned balloon without observable identification markings.”

In the following weeks all inquiries to INDOPACOM were answered with the response, “We continue to actively monitor the object via joint capabilities. We don’t have anything else to provide at this time.” The next month Oahu residents also spotted a pair of strange balloons over Hono­lulu, but they were confirmed to be part of a product test by balloon company Aerostar.

Shooting down the alleged spy balloon and other objects in February prompted a surge of interest in balloons and other unidentified objects.

The Pentagon said that at the time that as many as four known Chinese spy balloons had been in U.S. airspace during the administrations of Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, though they would not confirm whether the balloon spotted off Kauai in 2022 was one of them. Citing defense sources, Fox News reported that a suspected Chinese spy balloon crashed near Hawaii in late 2022.

CNN obtained an April 2022 U.S. Air Force report titled “People’s Republic of China High-Altitude Balloon,” which found that a Chinese spy balloon had “circumnavigated the globe” in 2019 at an altitude of roughly 65,000 feet and “drifted past Hawaii and across Florida before continuing its journey.” However, CNN reported it is not clear from the documents when U.S. officials first became aware of apparent Chinese balloon flights or what they thought was their purpose.

In late February the FAA notified pilots of a sighting of a “large white balloon” roughly 600 miles east of Hawaii at an altitude of 40,000 to 50,000 feet. When asked for details, the FAA responded with an email that said only, “We will keep you posted if we have anything to share,” and a military spokesperson said U.S. Indo-Pacific Command was “aware of the reports of a large white balloon by civilian aircraft” and that “we are looking into the reports and have nothing additional at this time.”