I have no idea what was the nature of the “unidentified cylindrical object” shot down by one of our jets over Canada, and the “radar anomaly” that caused jets to be scrambled over Montana was doubtless just one of those random peculiarities that crop up from time to time. The balloons shot down over Alaska and the Yukon presumably belonged to the Chinese. And now we have the “object” shot down over Lake Huron. If any of the (so far) more mysterious flying objects have come from space, we’re probably in a lot of trouble.
Whatever happens next, we are almost certainly now in for what’s known in the UFO world as a “flap,” such as that in the late 1940s in (or over the U.S.). That means, whatever Beijing is up to, we can expect many more sightings. The first of these flaps in this country was probably the mysterious airship wave over the western U.S. in 1896–97. Details here. This steampunk sweep through our skies came complete with much of what we have come to expect: close encounters, an attempted abduction, the crash of one of these craft and, of course, a wave of hoaxes.
An eerie note comes from the fact that one important witness was a R. L. Lowery, clearly a time traveler who had not tried too hard with his alias.