Yes, hectoPascals. Sorry, my friend, the rest of the world uses metric, and so does the scientific community and large swaths of the manufacturing industry in the CONUS.
Seems to be a total of 3, now. Two objects are now being salvaged. The first balloon's payload is being compared to a "jetliner" in size and it had propellers allowing it to change its course, making it properly an "airship".
There's a
balloon somewhere over Latin America This balloon seems to be similar to the first, and may have eluded tracking for now. (or just eluded the media's short attention span) Giving credit where it's due, tracking from country to country, passing over the Andes and/or Amazon basin leaves huge areas with very little surveillance, is difficult. Some of it has to be visual, so the balloon can't be tracked at night. That balloon probably can change course, too, so predictions based on a passive balloon trajectory will not point in the right direction. They have to search again every morning.
And there was
another of these balloons over Alaska until it got shot down. What was actually shot down will be unclear until the Navy reports on what they found (I assume it's the US Navy doing the recovery, like they are in South Carolina). This one seems to have been smaller and not steerable, according to the article above. It was also lower, at an altitude that could interfere with civilian aircraft, and likely to drift in random directions over North America. That's a threat to aviation safety, since civil aircraft do not have radar of a kind that can see-and-avoid something like a balloon.
