“The United States government has detected and is tracking a high-altitude surveillance balloon that is over the continental United States right now,” Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said in a statement. “We continue to track and monitor it closely. Once the balloon was detected, the U.S. government acted immediately to protect against the collection of sensitive information.”

A senior defense official told reporters they are confident the intelligence-gathering balloon belongs to China, saying, “I’m not going to go into all the ways in which we know that it’s a [People’s Republic of China] balloon. I will just say we have very high confidence that this is a PRC balloon, very high confidence. So we do not doubt that this is a PRC balloon.”

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin convened a meeting of senior military and defense leaders on Wednesday, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley, North American Aerospace Defense Command/U.S. Northern Command Commander Gen. Van Herck, and other combatant commanders.

The Pentagon opted not to shoot down the balloon when it was over sparsely populated areas in Montana, in part because officials’ assessment was that it doesn’t pose a physical threat to the U.S. or to civilian aviation. There is also the risk of civilian harm if they shot it down.

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“We assessed that the risk of downing it, even if the probability was low, in a sparsely populated area of debris falling and hurting somebody or damaging property, that it wasn’t worth it,” the official added. “And that was the recommendation of our military commanders.”

The intent of the balloon is for surveillance, the official noted, adding that its “current flight path does carry it over a number of sensitive sites,” but “it does not create significant value added over and above what the PRC is likely able to collect through things like satellites in low Earth orbit.”