When I was in 4th or 5th grade, my elementary school brought in a weather balloon to show us what was causing a flap in our obedient news services. It all made good sense. At least to anyone with half a brain and little belief in government agitprop.
Here we are…all over again…with the same class of scumbags in charge. And equally gullible idjits messing their drawers over the goblins in the sky. 75 years later.
Eideard 
“In aesthetics, the uncanny valley (Japanese: 不気味の谷, romanized: bukimi no tani) is a hypothesized relation between an object’s degree of resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to the object. The concept suggests that humanoid objects that imperfectly resemble actual human beings provoke uncanny or strangely familiar feelings of uneasiness and revulsion in observers. “Valley” denotes a dip in the human observer’s affinity for the replica, a relation that otherwise increases with the replica’s human likeness.
Examples can be found in robotics, 3D computer animations and lifelike dolls. With the increasing prevalence of virtual reality, augmented reality, and photorealistic computer animation, the “valley” has been cited in reaction to the verisimilitude of the creation as it approaches indistinguishability from reality. The uncanny valley hypothesis predicts that an entity appearing almost human will risk eliciting cold, eerie feelings in viewers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
Why stratospheric balloons are used in era of space-based intelligence https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/space/2023/02/06/how-stratospheric-balloons-could-complement-space-based-intelligence/
The Pentagon has a history of using balloons for military operations. In the early 2000s, the department flew large tethered aerostats equipped with intelligence payloads over Iraq and Afghanistan. https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/ausa/2020/11/09/us-army-floats-the-option-of-fielding-high-altitude-balloons/
The U.S. Army also spent nearly $2.7 billion to develop the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System, or JLENS, which featured 70,000-pound tethered balloons used to warn against a missile attack. The program was canceled in 2017 after one of the aerostats broke free and floated from Maryland into Pennsylvania, causing power outages before it was downed in a field. https://www.defensenews.com/land/2016/03/08/in-step-to-keep-jlens-alive-army-asks-congress-for-more-money/
Politico reported last year that the Defense Department’s fiscal 2023 budget shows an uptick in funding for balloon projects, increasing from a combined $3.8 million in fiscal 2021 and fiscal 2022 to about $27 million. That doesn’t include funding for classified efforts like the Covert Long-Dwell Stratospheric Architecture program, which was reportedly created to identify drug trafficking activity. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/05/u-s-militarys-newest-weapon-against-china-and-russia-hot-air-00043860
7AM MST, tomorrow morning, 10th