My mundane, pointless thing is that these balloons have been flying over US airspace for years. I expect we will find that they will be mostly set adrift by people who want to see how high their balloon can go and get nice pictures of the earth from the attached cameras
Could be. I watched this bit of silliness from Mark Rober:
I learned there are over a thousand weather balloons aloft at a time.
looking like a real possibility
“The intelligence community’s current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research.”