NEW YORK POST
WASHINGTON — US intelligence officials do not believe the three UFOs shot down over the weekend were tied to China’s spy balloon program, a National Security Council spokesman told reporters Tuesday.
“Our initial assessments here, based on talking to civil authorities in the intelligence community, is that we don’t see anything that points right now to these being part of the PRC spying program or, in fact, intelligence collection against the United States of any kind,” John Kirby said, using the acronym for the People’s Republic of China.
The US Air Force downed airborne objects over Alaska on Friday, northwestern Canada on Saturday and Lake Huron on Sunday. None has been tied to China or any other country, but Kirby said more information will be gleaned once their remnants are retrieved.
“It will certainly help us home in on [the objects’ purpose and origin] if and when we can get the debris, but that’s where we are now,” he said. “… We’re still doing the best we can with the observations that were made by the pilots with the flight profile data that we have tried to collect.”
While intelligence officials don’t yet know what the mystery objects were, Kirby said they are confident they did not belong to the American government.
“In checking with the FAA, they do not appear to have been operated by the US government, so we’re pretty comfortable and ruling out that they were a US government objects,” Kirby said.
