(CNSNews.com) - National Security Council spokesman John Kirby is flatly refuting a Chinese accusation that the United States has flown spy balloons into its airspace ten times in the past year.

"Not true. Not doing it. Just absolutely not true," Kirby told "Morning Joe" on Monday.

Host Jonathan Lemire followed up: "The U.S. is not using these balloon technologies at all over China?" he asked.

"That is right," Kirby said. "We are not flying balloons over China. That is absolutely true."

Kirby also said the three relatively small "objects" shot down on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday may not have been spying at all:

"I mean, there could be completely benign and totally explainable reasons for why these objects are flying around up there. Certainly don't have to be nefarious at all.

“There are corporate entities that operate these kinds of things. There are academic research institutions that do this sort of thing. We just don't know. But as soon as we can find out, we can get the debris and we can find out, we'll absolutely share what we can."

Kirby said the U.S. government has discussed the Chinese spy balloon program with "dozens of other countries."

"We know that those balloons have traversed across many different countries, across many different continents. And we've been reaching out to our allies and partners to many of those countries to let them know what we have learned about that.

"As for rules of the road, I mean, clearly, we're going to continue to make sure that we are monitoring our air space as carefully as possible, and we are also communicating publicly and privately that we're going to defend that air space.

“And if there's an object in that air space that either poses a safety or flight risk, and these three certainly did; or poses a potential surveillance risk, we're going to take the action that we need to, to defend our national security interests."

Kirby noted that the U.S. still has diplomatic relations with China, even if military-to-military communications are frozen at the moment.

"But we do have the ability to communicate directly with the Chinese leaders, and we have in private settings about our concerns over that spy balloon," he said.