A pair of strange objects recently spotted in the skies over Oahu were balloons developed by Raven Aerostar.

Company spokesperson Lisa McElrath said Raven Aerostar launched the two “unmanned stratospheric balloons” from its facility in South Dakota and navigated them to Hawaii using a mixture of machine learning and naturally occurring wind currents.

“Our stratospheric balloon systems are not typical weather balloons,” McElrath said. “They carry out a variety of missions, from providing mobile network coverage in the wake of a natural disaster to monitoring active wildfires.”

Raven Aerostar’s balloons have been used by Google, NASA and the U.S. Air Force to collect thermal imagery and scientific data, as well as communications and intelligence.

“Neither of the balloons over Hawaii are equipped with any cameras or sensors that can monitor ground activity,” McElrath said. “These are research and development flights purely for testing the endurance of our flight system. Both balloons are equipped with transponders, and we are in constant contact with the FAA throughout all flights.”

As of March 14 one of the balloons had traveled 24,100 nautical miles over 95 days, and the other had traveled 12,164 nautical miles over 45 days.

The arrival of the Raven Aerostar balloons in Hawaii comes after reports of another strange balloon that was spotted over Kauai in February and prompted Air Force jets to respond. The military described it as an “unmanned balloon without observable identification markings” days after the incident.

An Air Force spokesperson told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, “We continue to actively monitor the object via joint capabilities. We don’t have anything else to provide at this time.”

A spokesperson for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said the balloon had left Hawaii but continues to be monitored.

Military officials have declined to discuss whether they have any idea where it came from or what it was doing over the islands.

In 2021 the Pentagon released a report to Congress on what it calls an “unidentified aerial phenomenon,” or what the public more commonly calls “unidentified flying objects,” or UFOs. Military service members, particularly in the Navy, have reported several instances of unfamiliar objects in the sky near military facilities and training exercises.

An analysis of several of these sightings published in April by Tyler Rogoway, editor in chief of the defense news outlet The War Zone, argued that most known incidents point to a “very terrestrial adversary” using “relatively simple technologies — drones and balloons — and making off with what could be the biggest intelligence haul of a generation.”

Kauai is home to the Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility, where it tests new missile technology and is now a proposed site for the $1.9 billion Homeland Defense Radar-Hawaii.