The Balloon

[Thumpalumpacus]

Most of these lost balloons are never recovered even when there was a preexisting plan in place to recover them.  They'd be looking for a package that a roughly 10ft balloon could have lifted - assuming it survives the fall and they tracked it down and can reach it.  It had it's highest potential counter-intel value (just running with chinese ufo spy airship thing for shits and giggles) while it was still aloft.  When it could be surveilled, when it could be fed disinfo.

In 47' of water, and knowing pretty much precisely where it crashed, finding a 2 cubic-foot sensor package is not a big challenge. Sonar, shallow dive that allows long underwater times, close to shore for easy resupply ... it will be found and soon.

I suspect that we were doing bandwidth analysis on it while it was aloft to suss out what gear it was using to examine our systems, but even so, recovering the hardware would be of much additional value. Such recovery would also confirm the nature and purpose of the payload itself.