White House officials stated strongly during a virtual briefing with governors on Monday that the three flying objects the military recently shot down were not extraterrestrial in origin, although they are still studying the objects. 

"There are no UFOs. This is not an invasion of the aliens," White House Homeland Security Adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall said during the call, a recording of which was obtained by Fox News Digital. "I mean it's funny, but it's not funny, because people are communicating this on platforms that are widely viewed, and it's creating fear that is unnecessary."

People began to ask questions when Gen. Glen VanHerck, who leads NORAD and the U.S. Northern Command, said Sunday that he wasn't ruling anything out, including aliens, as the source of the objects.

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Monday that he doesn't think "the American people need to worry about aliens with respect to these craft," however.

"Thousands of them"

"We are dealing with a number of objects that are not well characterized," Sherwood-Randall said. "It's true that there are things that are being identified that don't resemble anything else, that largely don't present a threat, and we have to figure out what to do about them. And it turns out, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of them."

Of the ones that were shot down over the weekend, one was reported to be octagonal with strings hanging down from it, and another was reported to be cylindrical and silver in color. These objects were smaller than the Chinese spy balloon that was finally shot down on February 4 after flying across the country for over a week and hovering over military installations.

The Coast Guard is now attempting to recover the smaller objects, estimated to be about the size of a small car, so they can be studied.

Besides the alien theory, there has been speculation that the objects are just space junk and that President Joe Biden is just shooting down everything they see because they think they didn't shoot the initial spy balloon down soon enough.

A hazard

Initial announcements about the smaller objects said they were flying lower than the spy balloon, between 20,000 and 40,000 feet, which presented a hazard to commercial aircraft.

Sherwood-Randall said they could be objects as innocuous as "used car lot balloons" or objects that were launched by companies.

"Across all of the objects over the weekend, there are certain similarities in terms of characteristics or size but they are all unique and different in their own way," a senior U.S. defense official said Tuesday, describing them as potentially anything from "sky trash" to "weather experiments."

A distraction?

Some pundits have wondered whether shooting down the objects is meant to be a distraction from bigger problems in the country, such as a train derailment in Ohio near the Pennsylvania border that may have caused air contamination in the area.

Higher inflation numbers and a weakening economy is another potential situation the administration may want to distract the people from.

There is no shortage of failures the administration might like to camouflage by getting people talking about whether flying objects were of alien origin.