• Balloons have been used for spying and bombing since World War I, and German zeppelins regularly crossed the English Channel to drop hand grenades or small bombs on London.
• During World War II, Japan lofted about 9,000 balloon bombs toward the West Coast in 1944 and 1945, hoping to spread fear, ignite forest fires, and bring the war to America’s homeland.
• At the end of World War II, the arrival of the nuclear bomb meant that an entire city could be vaporized by a lone attacker arriving out of the blue sky.
• In 1947, reports of a mysterious flight of objects over the Cascades in the Pacific Northwest touched off a summer of excited, panicked UFO sightings.
• In 1952, the Air Force’s UFO-investigation program, Project Blue Book, figured out that Captain Thomas F. Mantell had most likely been chasing a Navy weather balloon when he crashed his plane.
• In the postwar era, balloons represented cutting-edge military technology, and the U.S. had multiple secret balloon projects under way.
• On Saturday, the U.S. military deployed an F-22 to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon, and the pilot who flew the plane is known as FRANK01, honoring Frank Luke, the balloon-busting ace of 1918.
Published February 8, 2023
Visit The Atlantic to read Garrett M. Graff’s original post A History of Confusing Stuff in the Sky
