It was a mild, sunny winter afternoon when Tara Shannon learned all of the airspace above her community in south-eastern Ontario had been closed.
She and her neighbours began to receive scattered reports of a high-flying mystery object in the area.
I stepped outside and it was quiet. It was surreal, said Shannon, a children author who lives near the community of Tobermory. There was nothing. Everything was silent and the sky was clear. The rumbling engines of a fuelling tanker broke the silence and moments later fighter jets roared overhead.
Shannon and others along the coast of Lake Huron have found themselves at the centre of the search for unidentified flying objects despite a flurry of incidents and broader geopolitical row between the US and China.
On Sunday, US military officials shot down the third flying object over North American airspace in as many days, prompting broader questions over national security as more mystery objects are detected by radar.
The high-altitude unidentified object was shot down on Sunday afternoon near Canada's Manitoulin Island on Lake Huron, described as an octagonal structure with strings attached to it.
The object was picked up by radar over Montana on Saturday, according to officials. It was shot down by an air-to-air missile launched from an F-16 fighter jet amid concerns that its 20,000 ft altitude could have posed a risk to civilian aircraft.
A day after an object about the size of a small car was shot down over a rugged section of Canada's Yukon territory, the mission came to a close. Canadian crews are currently searching the vast and bitterly cold landscape for debris.
The residents along the shores of Lake Huron say they have learned little about the mission to shoot down the object or salvage efforts in the past.
We didn't know what was going on. Was it going to land in our yard? What was it made of? We don't know if they've found anything or where it might have ended up. We are left with so many questions. Defence officials from Canada and the USA have been hesitant to release details about the objects shot down in recent days. A Chinese surveillance balloon shot down off the South Carolina coast has been reported to have contained technology to monitor and intercept communications.
On Sunday, residents reported hearing aircraft in the area, according to a Facebook group for Presque Isle, an American community on the north-western shore of Lake Huron.
Some reached for conspiracy theories to explain the spate of balloons in recent days while others joked about extraterrestrial visitors. One resident in Presque Isle posted pictures of a raccoon named Rocky of course, who has been deputized as a gate guard for the community.
Since we now have unidentified balloons flying over our area, we welcome the extra security, he wrote.
On Monday, flight tracking sites showed planes traveling in loops around a swath of lake roughly 20 km south of Manitoulin Island, including a low-flying US coast guard plane, in what appeared to be a largely water-based search. Canada's fisheries and oceans minister, Joyce Murray, said a Canadian coast guard icebreaker would help locate and retrieve debris from the waters of Lake Huron.
Military personnel equipped with cold weather diving gear were expected to be deployed to search the area for any debris that might be recovered.
It certainly made for an interesting afternoon because there is not a lot happening in the winter, said Shannon. You got snow, and you got curling.