• 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, a World War II pilot, had most likely been chasing a Navy weather balloon when he crashed.
• In the postwar era, balloons represented cutting-edge military technology, and the U.S. had multiple secret balloon projects under way.
• Today, sophisticated surveillance systems have failed to spot the forays of other Chinese balloons, and the U.S. military deployed an F-22 to shoot down the modern version of the first aerial weapon the country ever faced.
Published February 8, 2023
Visit The Atlantic to read Garrett M. Graff’s original post The History Behind the Chinese Spy Balloon
