Spies in the sky – a load of balloons?

Is the balloons-in-the-sky phenomenon just a lot of hot air?  Maybe not. But it raises a number of obvious questions.

1. Given that I can use Google Earth to check out the state of my neigbhour’s driveway and front door, isn’t it likely that China (if China owned those balloons) would have chosen a less visible and obvious way of checking out US stuff? If you’re going to be a spy, you rely on being elusive, in the shadows, not sailing serenely and openly for all to see.
2. How do we know these were Chinese balloons? Is it the only country in the world capable of producing this terrifically hi-tech object? Or did it have “Hey down there – we’re China, yoh!’ written on its surface?
3. Why were sophisticated fighter planes used to shoot the balloons down? A few months ago, the US sent a rocket into space that nudged a meteor into a different trajectory. Couldn’t a version of that rocket have been used to strike the balloon? After all, most balloons are full of hot air and all they need is puncturing.
4. What were these Chinese balloons – if they were Chinese – looking for? Floating across the US, what would they have seen? Mountains, prairies, houses, people, cars – nothing wildly interesting. It’s a reasonable assumption that if the US is up to something new in armaments, they’d conduct their research away from the prying eyes of their own citizens. What chance, then, for a large Chinese balloon to see what is hidden from the general population.
5. Why haven’t the US people been told what was found in the balloons – besides hot air, that is? Every time you looked at a media headline, there was more coverage of the Balloons story. But why can’t the authorities tell their people just what these balloons contained? Is it that there was embarrassingly little to be seen? Maybe nothing to be seen?

As a child, I had a friend who, if he was about to be subjected to minor violence, would point over his attacker’s shoulder and shout “Oh crikey – look at that gorilla!” It was a reasonably reliable way to get his opponent distracted even momentarily, during which moment he put as much space between him and his opponent as he possibly could. Maybe with war in Ukraine, global inflation,  natural disasters like the earthquake in Turkey and Syria,  the US has decided it’s time to distract and has done all it can to dramatize a non-story, leaving the world’s real problems int he background, even though they are much closer to Earth and home.