The balloon question is not going to go away

So many unanswered questions over the Chinese spy balloon. Perhaps the most interesting one relates to an admission by the Pentagon that previous balloon flights over the US were put down as unidentified aerial phenomenon! So balloons or something like them had been detected before but absolutely no official recognition that they might be hostile spying machines. How on earth is this possible? The US has 300 satellites looking out for anything that might seem remotely in US air space with evil intent, ie rockets, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, nuclear-bomb-carrying long range aircraft, hypersonic glide vehicles etc. But no one seems to have considered the possibility that intelligence-gathering balloons might be on the way to the US to snoop. None of the satellites nor any of the myriad of radar devices around the gobe had picked up the latest balloon until it was too late, or any of the previous balloon trips from China. That's a very oops moment for the US and for the threat-monitoring command bunkers in the US. Unidentified aerial phenomina (UAPs) are going to have to be looked at with a helluva lot more attention and expertise in the future. Not just in case they might contain aliens dressed in space outfits but because the hand of China will be behind them.