Spoiler alert: Was a balloon, and it was sealed off by the bomb squad to see what is was (they happened to be from a near by military base).
Events like these will likely continue to rise as the barrier to get to near space lowers. There have been several stories in recent years about students who have used these High-altitude balloons [1, 2] and there are even sites which teach you [3].
As soon as I saw the picture of it on their linked sites (see rangibaby's comment) I was like "that looks like every homemade space camera I've seen on youtube."
May have been a "weather monitoring device" rather than a homemade space camera, same difference. Definitely human-made (polystyrene, circuit boards, string.)
We don't actually know that though, considering how quickly government forces swept it away. The information came from the government.
I'm not trying to say anything, I'm not a believer and I really don't care about this stuff.
All I want to point out is that there is no way for anyone here on HN to know what it was for sure. There is only trust in the media, who trust in a press release, from the government.
They're "legitimate" in that they don't tend to outright lie or write stuff they should know is wrong, but their overall style and tone is always halfway between serious newspaper and The Onion. E.g. they for years ended "everything" in all articles about Yahoo! with exclamation marks to mock Yahoo's use of exclamation marks in their name. Unless you appreciate British humour in general and sarcasm in particular, you might find them.. odd.
While I wouldn't rank el Reg as one of the most respectable of online publications, they're usually better than this. I suspect this article was written partly as a joke (to be ironic or just "tongue in cheek").
I always just assume these things are pieces of space junk that lost orbit. Is that even viable? Or is the junk all small enough to completely burn up on re-entry?
Almost all of it is small enough. And orbiting junk is monitored really closely (so we can time rocket launches to avoid it), so when anything large enough to reach the ground comes down (most prominently Mir: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deorbit_of_Mir), people know in advance.
Events like these will likely continue to rise as the barrier to get to near space lowers. There have been several stories in recent years about students who have used these High-altitude balloons [1, 2] and there are even sites which teach you [3].
UPDATED: bomb squad from bomb squid ;)
[1] http://www.space.com/14397-teens-lego-man-space-stratosphere...
[2] http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/09/the-150-space-camera-...
[3] http://android.hibal.org/