Legendary journalist Seymour Hersh says he knows what the United States ruling class shot down over Alaska. So far, the government has only said that it was a “mystery object.”

On Saturday, US officials oddly announced that the military was calling off the search for the balloon objects shot down by fighter jets over Alaska and Lake Huron. The announcement, The Guardian reported, came “days after balloon hobbyists in northern Illinois indicated that one of the stray unidentified flying objects could belong to their group.”

The ruling class has still not confirmed what the objects were, though we know that the one shot down near the US-Canada border was taken out by an F-22, which blasted the object with an AIM-9X Sidewinder missile at about 40,000 feet.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hersh says a source told him that the U.S. government took down one of its own aerial devices by mistake. Hersh recently appeared on Russell Brand’s YouTube show to discuss the Nord Stream pipeline explosion and said sources have told him the US military took out one of its own weather devices.

“Can I tell you about the balloons?” Hersh asked Brand after making a crack about the British comedian’s colorful stocking hat. “The federal government has a contract with the meteorology department, the weather department, at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks—that is one cold place, it’s way up there.”

Hersh, who said he’s visited the university campus there, said it’s so cold in Fairbanks that there’s no weather station there. So the university uses what Hersh describes as small aerial vehicles that collect weather data that is transmitted back to officials at the university, who can notify pilots flying over the Arctic Circle of any unusual weather activity.

“They are reporters of that information, and that was what was shot down,” Hersh told Brand. “One of those units…that is sent up by the university but paid by the government to go over the Arctic Circle and report on extreme [weather].” –The Foundation for Economic Education

While there is no shortage of state-sanctioned cover-ups and atrocities in human history, it’s easy to forget that governments are sometimes simply more incompetent than sinister, although they are obviously both at all times.

“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand,” the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman once quipped.