Washington uses downing of "UFOs" as diversion for Nord Stream investigation: Snowden

MOSCOW, Feb. 17 (Xinhua) -- Former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) employee and whistleblower Edward Snowden has said that the United States is wasting time and money to shoot down "unidentified flying objects" (UFOs) above U.S. and Canadian soil as a diversion for the Nord Stream investigation.

The White House spent "the month of February scrambling jets to fire 400,000-dollar missiles at the local hobby club's 12-dollar balloons," he tweeted Friday, following reports that the UFOs are likely to be just civilian balloons from local hobbyists.

The shooting down of the UFOs was just a political stunt to divert the public's attention from the investigation into the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, said Snowden Tuesday, who had exposed the NSA's extensive surveillance program over U.S. citizens and foreign leaders in 2013.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command said last week that it had discovered three UFOs, two of which were shot down by the U.S. military in U.S. airspace, while the third was discovered over Canadian soil.

"It's just the old engineered panic" to ensure that national security reporters get assigned to investigate balloon nonsense "rather than (U.S.) budgets or bombings (of Nord Stream)," said Snowden.

Earlier this month, American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh disclosed that the U.S. Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives last June in cooperation with Norway, which destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines three months later.

The White House has since denied the claims.