This article starts with talking about the spy balloon that wasn't a spy balloon: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-bizarre-secret-behind-chinas-spy-balloon/

"The intelligence community, their assessment – and it's a high-confidence assessment – [is] that there was no intelligence collection by that balloon,"

After the Navy raised the wreckage from the bottom of the Atlantic, technical experts discovered the balloon's sensors had never been activated while over the Continental United States.

So, why was it over the United States? There are various theories, with at least one leading theory that it was blown off-track.

So... The only reason people even consider this a spy balloon is because some guy in China launched it? Wonderful.