Fire balloon
en.wikipedia.org
Fire balloon
1–10 of 18 posts
Re: Fire balloon
#2The Japanese fire balloons pale in comparison to the American fire balloons[1][2] that ostensibly ended the war.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Man [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy
Re: Fire balloon
#3So here's a weird idea: Could Roswell 1947 simply have been one of these balloons? Maybe the US was trying to improve those balloons with some, at the time, experimental material.
Re: Fire balloon
#4> On March 10, 1945, one of the last paper balloons descended in the vicinity of the Manhattan Project's production facility at the Hanford Site. This balloon caused a short circuit in the power lines supplying electricity for the nuclear reactor cooling pumps, but backup safety devices restored power almost immediately.
Re: Fire balloon
#5This was the test subject for trying to prove any conflict situation could be turned into a wargame:
Re: Fire balloon
#6There's a really great Radiolab episode on this topic: http://www.radiolab.org/story/fu-go/
Re: Fire balloon
#7So here's a weird idea: Could Roswell 1947 simply have been one of these balloons? Maybe the US was trying to improve those balloons with some, at the time, experimental material.
The Roswell incident was a balloon, but it's highly unlikely that it was a fire balloon. Most contemporary analysis points to the Roswell incident being caused by one of the Project Mogul balloons [1]. Project Mogul was a top-secret (at the time) project to detect Soviet atomic bomb tests by listening for their shock waves with very sensitive microphones. These microphones were mounted on large hexagonal discs, which, when viewed by an untrained eye, looked like a flying craft of some sort.
Re: Fire balloon
#8Less well known is Operation Outward, England's cheap, scrappy balloon program that actually got results:
Re: Fire balloon
#9If you remember the old show Ripley's Believe it Or Not hosted by Jack Palance they did an episode on the Fire balloon. There were cases where unknowing hikers happened upon them in the west coast and some with horrible consequences as mentioned in the article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ripley%27s_Believe_It_...
Re: Fire balloon
#10Eventually, an Army fighter managed to push one of the balloons around in the air and force it to ground intact, where it was examined and filmed.
Wait, what, how??