(Radio Iowa) – Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley says he’ll be attending a briefing today (Tuesday) as military and intelligence officials update members of Congress about the recent rash of unidentified flying objects being shot down by American warplanes. Grassley says he isn’t optimistic about the update, the second involving U-F-Os in two weeks. Grassley says, “Sometimes I walk away from a lot of briefings and think, ‘Well, I didn’t learn anything more than I read in The Washington Post or heard on television.'” Government officials say a Chinese spy balloon was shot down off the South Carolina coast ten days ago, after it overflew much of the U-S. Three more objects have been shot down in the past four days, two near Alaska and a third over Lake Huron. Grassley says we’re all in the dark and deserve answers.

“There’s too much classified as secret, and in the end, the public ought to know more than they know right now,” Grassley says. “The briefing is part of congressional oversight to see whether or not the administration is doing what the Constitution requires them to do, to have a top priority on national security.” Officials are saying very little about the three latest U-F-Os and it’s unclear if they’re also intelligence-gathering platforms like the first Chinese balloon. Grassley questions how many other devices have been overhead that we’ve missed — or that we weren’t told about.

Grassley says, “I think the most important thing is to assess what holes there are in our surveillance system that we don’t know about all these intrusions on our sovereignty and threats to our national security.” Chinese officials have issued statements saying the first object was a weather balloon that veered off course, but U-S officials say they’ve recovered most of the craft’s antenna array which they say was certainly used for surveillance.