It seems right now the narrative is nobody knows what these were, and that the debris may never be located.
This is a conspiracy theorist's dream.
These objects are small, to get a good view requires flying a very fast jet very close to a small relatively stationary object of which you may only get a split second glance.
In the transcript I saw, the two F16 pilots can't really agree if the object they are dealing with is a balloon or not (this wasn't from the first shootdown of the Chinese balloon which was much larger and easier to identify), eventually one pilot just assumes it is as a best guess.
This could explain why we haven’t gotten more info from government. They don’t want to admit that shot down weather or scientific balloons. Smaller balloons are likely to not be Chinese. It could also be that government is equally confused and are waiting to find the wreckage.
I imagine there could be methods of confusing cameras, especially when there are no points of reference in the sky other than the object itself. Maybe some human tech cloaking methods are sufficient to obscure an object.
As for locating the debris, you would think that would be easy... but we're still finding bits of the Columbia space shuttle here and there.
Huh? Cameras turn lights into rgb, you can't confuse them, if not paint your balloons blue.
See also how we can get crisp images of distant galaxies, but getting images of the equipment at the Apollo landing sites is elusive from anywhere farther away than lunar orbit.
I definitely wouldn’t assume we can immediately get detailed photos of a drone-sized object flying at high altitude.
The big Chinese balloon was ~300ft across (and the equipment ~100ft) at 60kft would be almost half the size of the moon... 0.25deg or easily visible by eye. And you can get shots of that with a hand held mobile phone at night. Any amateur astronomical camera set up is capable of 1-4 arc sec (better than 0.0001deg) and daytime exposures would be <10msec.
So it's pretty easy to get 1ft resolution at that altitude. Getting 1inch is harder, but doable especially with multiple images, which is possible now even for amateurs. If it was moving at 100mph (closer to 30-50) that's only <1ft during the exposure time (still 50x faster than the moon). The gov can do much better, but I wouldn't count on mm resolution.
For any territory that a camera can get detailed photos of something, there is much greater area (volume) which over which it can get poor photos. So the more cameras you have getting better photos, the (many times) more bad photos you'll have.
This obviously does leave room for speculation and thus conspiracy theorists, but what justification do conspiracy theorists need anyway? The crux of most conspiracy theories is making a mountain out of a mole hill.
Also, there's no reason to assume that the goal of revealing all this information is to put the public at ease. Maybe the goal is to drum up public support for war, or at least, some adventure in brinksmanship. Or to make the administration look more hawkish than it is. Or there's some weird funding/ego/prestige power struggle between departments and generals. Or someone is playing a public game of cover-your-ass. Or is making his enemies in the organization look bad, by airing the dirty laundry.
Figuring out which is which when it comes to the military leaking secret information is an exercise in Kremlinology.
https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1493641714363478016
He doesn't know shit when it comes to this topic.