Senators confirmed from the briefing that the objects have earth-bound explanations, but the briefing yielded little beyond that, according to Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, who sits on the Senate’s Intelligence and Armed Services committees.

“We learned nothing that I didn’t already know as a member of the Intelligence Committee and Armed Services Committee or, for that matter, that one could learn from reading your newspapers,” Cotton told the Daily Caller News Foundation. …

“They didn’t rule anything out other than they don’t think they are balloons on the order of the Chinese balloon,” Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley told Axios, referring to the briefers’ assessment of the three objects, “[and] they didn’t think they were aliens.”

[Should they have expected to learn anything from the incompetents that allowed China’s spy balloon to complete its mission before shooting it down — and then shooting down objects that turned out to be benign? — Ed]