The first one has been confirmed to be a Chinese balloon. Although of course the Chinese government says it was a weather balloon, not a spy balloon. Maybe it was a weather balloon.
One of the biggest benefits balloons have over satellites for spying is cost. One of the biggest disadvantages is ease of detection and interception. So any government who was doing it would be likely to use multiple balloons and an at least somewhat plausible excuse for public consumption. You could make and launch at least a couple of dozen spy balloons for less cost than making a single spy satellite and putting it into orbit, so why not? You're going to get noticed doing it, so your best bet is to launch a number of them at once to get as much data as possible in one go. Then say it was a project to gather data for weather something something. It doesn't matter if the government(s) of the country or countries you're spying on know they were spy balloons. What matters is whether they'll declare war over it. Which they won't unless they were already intending to declare war and were looking for an excuse. You spy on them, they spy on you, it's how international politics works. Maybe your diplomats in their country will be called in and told that your country has been naughty. Not for the spying. Not really. That's expected. For being so obvious about it that the spying has to be acknowledged publically.
The other alternative is that aliens with knowledge and technology so unimaginably in advance of ours that they have superluminal travel and comms came here in their spaceships and launched very obvious probes that were detected, intercepted and shot down by the tech we have. I think that's rather implausible. If they existed then their knowledge and tech would be as far above humanity's as humanity's is above that of chimpanzees poking a stick into a termite nest to get out some termites to eat. The mismatch in tech levels between the spaceships and comms and the spy equipment is too large to be at all likely. Why would their surveillance tech be so spectacularly inferior to their travel and communications tech? Maybe if the spaceships and comms gear wasn't theirs, with their own knowledge and tech level being about the same as ours and the spaceships and comms gear being from another civilisation that lost the ships somehow and those ships drifted into the alien's stellar system and they managed to salvage them and work out how to use them but not how to understand them. Which is a very contrived scenario. Maybe not impossible, but I think it's far, far less likely than mundane spying between human countries using human technology.
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