NEW YORK, February 14. /TASS/. The situation around three unidentified flying objects that were shot down over North America is designed to distract reporters’ attention from the investigation into the sabotage on the Nord Stream gas pipelines, former NSA (National Security Agency) employee and whistleblower Edward Snowden said on Monday.
"I wish it were aliens, but it's not aliens," Snowden wrote on Twitter on Monday, commenting on the downing of balloons and UFOs in the United States and Canada. According to him, "it’s just the old engineered panic" to ensure that national security reporters "get assigned to investigate balloon" nonsense "rather than budgets or bombings (a la Nord Stream)."
On February 8, American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published an article alleging that "last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives" under the Russian gas pipelines with support from Norwegian experts. Hersh said that US President Joe "Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community." Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the National Security Council at the White House told TASS, replying to the news agency’s question, that the Hersh story was totally false and complete fiction.
Last week, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) recorded three more "unidentified objects," two of which were shot down by the US military in national airspace and another one over Canadian territory. It was noted that all three objects were much smaller than the Chinese balloon, were at a lower altitude, and were not similar in appearance. The last of them was destroyed on Sunday over Lake Huron on the US-Canada border, its debris presumably fell into Canadian territorial waters.
US Defense Department Press Secretary Patrick Ryder said on February 2 that US authorities had detected and were tracking a "reconnaissance balloon" over the continental United States. It was shot down on February 4 by the US military off the coast of South Carolina within US airspace.