The press conference yesterday, the WH spokesman explicitly corrected someone who called the second object a balloon. They're being a bit cagey about whatever it actually is

They didn’t say they weren’t balloons, just that they were calling them “objects” and not balloons. Sure, that could be because they definitely want to emphasize the “we don’t know who owned them” aspect and calling it a balloon would immediately evoke China associations, or maybe they already know they’re not balloons. Either way, they also didn’t say “it wasn’t a balloon”