On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) stated that he believes the object downed over Alaska “was unlikely to have been a threat of any kind, even of intelligence gathering,” and was probably something benign and “they just said, given what we just all went through for a week, better to just take this thing down.” He also stated that there was a risk to civilian aircraft from the object and that is a reason for the object being taken down.
Himes said, “I don’t know a lot. The briefing was pretty summary, my understanding, there have been some briefings in D.C. for various committee staff, we’re largely gone, the House and the Senate were out today. I can offer some informed speculation, which is that this was unlikely to have been a threat of any kind, even of intelligence gathering, we would have heard more, I think. It was almost certainly unmanned, if it had been manned, they would have said different things at the Pentagon. And my best guess is that, for the first time, because of the emergence of this balloon, a lot of eyes are trained — the first one, so I think this is probably a case of now we’re looking really hard. And you may remember when we did the big hearings around what people call UFOs, what we’re supposed to call unidentified aerial phenomenon, it turns out there’s an immense amount of junk floating around up there. There [are] weather balloons, there [are] private companies that put things up to try to provide Internet service. So my best speculative guess right now is that it was probably something like that, and they just said, given what we just all went through for a week, better to just take this thing down.”
He added that there was a threat to civilian aviation from the object and that’s why it was downed.
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