Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech
Speaker 1: are you? So I've been teasing this topic for a while,
Speaker 1: but I figured today we would finally dive into the
Speaker 1: history of spy and surveillance balloons. We've heard a lot
Speaker 1: of talk about this in the news here in the
Speaker 1: United States this month, as the US military is shot
Speaker 1: down a couple of objects that were thought to be
Speaker 1: surveillance devices built by China, or perhaps, in at least
Speaker 1: one case, an unidentified object that could have been a
Speaker 1: surveillance or spy balloon. But so we shot it down
Speaker 1: just to be on the safe side. But we're going
Speaker 1: to get to all of that now. Before we talk
Speaker 1: about China, we need to talk about the history of
Speaker 1: using balloons and stuff like espionage and warfare, and that
Speaker 1: brings us to beans. It brings us back to China.
Speaker 1: So the story goes that a Chinese military genius named
Speaker 1: Ju Liang, and I apologize for my terrible pronunciation. However,
Speaker 1: he was known as Kong Ming, used a paper lantern
Speaker 1: with a message written on it in order to call
Speaker 1: for help when enemy troops were surrounding his forces. This
Speaker 1: was one of the tactics he would use, and essentially
Speaker 1: this sky lantern was a small hot air balloon. In fact,
Speaker 1: I should probably talk about how a hot air balloon works.
Speaker 1: Now you've probably heard that hot air rises, but from
Speaker 1: another point of view, you really should say that, you know,
Speaker 1: colder air sinks. This is because warmer air is less
Speaker 1: dense than colder air. Cold air is more dense, so
Speaker 1: it settles and the warm air gets pushed up. The
Speaker 1: dense cold air sinks down, the warmer air is pushed
Speaker 1: upward to float on top, and it just kind of
Speaker 1: acts like that. It's a fluid, just as any fluids
Speaker 1: where you would deal with different densities would do the
Speaker 1: same sort of thing. Right. Well, if you have yourself
Speaker 1: a container that's light enough, and you fill it with
Speaker 1: air that is warm enough, the whole of that container
Speaker 1: will become lighter than the air surrounding it and it
Speaker 1: will rise. This is just a basic feature of fluid dynamics, y'all. So,
Speaker 1: with a paper lantern made of thin material and a
Speaker 1: heat source that can be suspended inside the lantern, preferably
Speaker 1: held away from the walls of the lantern, or else
Speaker 1: you're just going to set fire to the lantern. You
Speaker 1: would have yourself a sky lantern. It needs to be
Speaker 1: closed off obviously. If it's not, then the heat air
Speaker 1: is just going to rise straight through the lantern, so
Speaker 1: it needs to have a cap on the top. Lighting
Speaker 1: the lantern means a small fire heats the air inside
Speaker 1: the lantern to the point where the whole thing can
Speaker 1: rise up into the sky and voila. You got yourself
Speaker 1: a potential signaling device. You can see it, it's lit
Speaker 1: up in the sky, and you know generally where it's
Speaker 1: rising from. Assuming that is that the folks that you
Speaker 1: want to signal can actually see the lantern from their
Speaker 1: perspective or their downwind of the lanterns, so that they
Speaker 1: have a chance to spot and or retrieve it if
Speaker 1: it has drifted away from where you released it. If
Speaker 1: the lantern floats in the wrong direction, you might find
Speaker 1: yourself without the benefit of reinforcements. Kong Ming lived around
Speaker 1: two hundred Common Era, and to this day, sky lanterns
Speaker 1: are also known as Kongming lanterns. In China, they have
Speaker 1: been popular in various festivals and celebrations, as can be
Speaker 1: seen in the documentary Tangled when Rapunzel dreams of seeing
Speaker 1: them in person. Also, just a quick shout out to
Speaker 1: any tech stuff listeners who have been with this show
Speaker 1: long enough to remember when I would refer to work
Speaker 1: of fiction as documentaries. It has been quite some time,
Speaker 1: all right. But sky lanterns are a long way from
Speaker 1: spy balloons, right, I mean they would take centuries a
Speaker 1: bunch of them to get to a point where humans
Speaker 1: could turn to balloons for the purposes of observing others.
Speaker 1: That's because early uses of balloons for the purposes of
Speaker 1: seeing what the heck is going on over the hill
Speaker 1: over yonder would require a real human being to be
Speaker 1: lifted up into the sky, because it's not like we
Speaker 1: had wireless sensors that could collect data and then beam
Speaker 1: information down to us. We didn't even have wired sensors
Speaker 1: that could do that. The sensors that we relied upon
Speaker 1: were mostly connected to one of the five traditionally associated
Speaker 1: with human beings. Heck, even the earliest weather balloon observations
Speaker 1: involved humans going up with basic stuff like thermometers and
Speaker 1: barometers to see what it's like up there in the
Speaker 1: wild blue yonder. According to the US National Parks Service,
Speaker 1: the earliest recorded example of an observation balloon dates back
Speaker 1: to seventeen ninety four, during the French Revolution. That's just
Speaker 1: a touch more than a decade after the Montgolfier Brothers
Speaker 1: first wild France with their experiments with hot air balloons.
Speaker 1: So the Montgolfier's built larger and larger balloons while experimenting
Speaker 1: with hot air as a means to achieve flight. Their
Speaker 1: earliest experiments just involved inflating a balloon and there was
Speaker 1: no payload. That was probably a good thing, because one
Speaker 1: of those earlier experiments saw the anchor strings on the
Speaker 1: balloon break and the balloon rose to around six hundred
Speaker 1: feet in altitude and there was no way to get
Speaker 1: down apart from it cooling off enough to descend, because
Speaker 1: once the air cools down, it gets more dense, and
Speaker 1: if it gets dense enough, then it's no longer going
Speaker 1: to be bulliant in the surrounding atmosphere. It's going to
Speaker 1: come back down, right. So, in seventeen eighty three, three
Speaker 1: important actual living beings took the very first hot air
Speaker 1: balloon flight to carry a living payload. Now, earlier experiments
Speaker 1: did include moments where strapping men who were holding on
Speaker 1: to anchor lines were lifted off their feet, but those
Speaker 1: don't really count like they weren't intended to go on
Speaker 1: a flight. They were intended to hold the balloon down
Speaker 1: while experiments were conducted, and occasionally they would be lifted
Speaker 1: up like a foot or two before they would either
Speaker 1: let go or the balloon would be pulled back down.
Speaker 1: The three critters that actually went on this maiden voyage
Speaker 1: were a sheep, a duck, and a rooster, which sounds
Speaker 1: like the beginning of a joke, but no, these were
Speaker 1: suggested by King Louis the sixteenth himself. Now why he
Speaker 1: chose those particular three animals, I have no idea. I
Speaker 1: also don't know if lou thought he was giving these
Speaker 1: animals a real treat, or if he wanted to punish
Speaker 1: them for some reason. There's so many unanswered quest stents
Speaker 1: in history. This balloon ascended to around fifteen hundred feet
Speaker 1: or so. It traveled about ten thousand feet until the
Speaker 1: air inside the balloon had cooled enough for the balloon
Speaker 1: to descend. It landed. The animals were all safe inside
Speaker 1: the wicker basket that was attached to the balloon, so
Speaker 1: they got out none the worse for wear. I don't
Speaker 1: know how they felt during the flight, but they were
Speaker 1: fine afterward. And not long after that, some brave pioneers
Speaker 1: and ballooning decided they would become the first humans to
Speaker 1: take flight in such a contraption. Now, at this stage,
Speaker 1: the balloons featured a sort of container that had portholes
Speaker 1: through which one could insert fuel into a brazier that
Speaker 1: was suspended above the wicker basket that could hold people.
Speaker 1: You know, that would be at the very base of
Speaker 1: the balloon, and it would be right at the very
Speaker 1: bottom of the opening for the balloon itself. Right, So
Speaker 1: you filled this brazier up with fuel and you fire
Speaker 1: to it. Heats up the air, the balloon inflates and
Speaker 1: eventually becomes light enough to take flight. If you wanted
Speaker 1: to go higher, you put more fuel into the brazier,
Speaker 1: or if you just wanted to stay in the air,
Speaker 1: you would put more fuel in because otherwise the fire
Speaker 1: would burn down and the balloon would lose bullyancy and
Speaker 1: it would come down. Right, you could also cause the
Speaker 1: balloon to come down on purpose by introducing something that
Speaker 1: would slow down or stop the combustion, like pouring water
Speaker 1: through the porthole into the brazier to help extinguish the fire.
Speaker 1: This would allow the air to cool and again the
Speaker 1: balloon would come back down. These balloons were pretty risky.
Speaker 1: You know, a quick change in wind could potentially cause
Speaker 1: flames from this brazier to come into contact with the
Speaker 1: inner wall of the balloon itself, which could potentially mean
Speaker 1: that the balloon catches fire. Obviously that would be disastrous.
Speaker 1: You would have an uncontrolled descent, ak a crash. And
Speaker 1: there was also no way to steer these balloons, so
Speaker 1: you were just subjected to the whims of the wind itself.
Speaker 1: So you might think, oh, we're gonna go up, we'll
Speaker 1: travel a few thousand feet and we'll come down in
Speaker 1: that field over there, But because of the wind, you're like, nope,
Speaker 1: we're coming down the louver. Move over, Louis. It marked
Speaker 1: an incredible advance in science and technology. Even old Benjamin Franklin,
Speaker 1: fresh off his hardened glass Armonica tour, took note of
Speaker 1: the first hot air balloon flight while he was in France.
Speaker 1: Around this same time, other scientists and daredevils had come
Speaker 1: up with an alternative to hot air balloons because some
Speaker 1: gases are pretty light, right like, they're lighter than the
Speaker 1: surrounding atmosphere. Hydrogen, for example, is lighter than the air
Speaker 1: that we're walking around in, and so thought the physicists.
Speaker 1: If you were to fill a balloon with a very
Speaker 1: light gas like hydrogen that could also float on air,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't need a source of heat to heat up
Speaker 1: the gas. You would just need enough hydrogen to overcome
Speaker 1: the weight of the balloon itself. But hydrogen comes with
Speaker 1: a couple of drawbacks. The big one is that it's very,
Speaker 1: very flammable see also the tragedy of the Hindenburg disaster.
Speaker 1: But you wouldn't need or want an open flame anyway,
Speaker 1: because again, the gas you're using is lighter than air.
Speaker 1: There's no need to have a heat source to heat
Speaker 1: the air inside the balloon. Now, the same year that
Speaker 1: the Montgolfiers were launching hot air balloons, we got the
Speaker 1: first flight of a hydrogen balloon and it carried a
Speaker 1: payload of about twenty pounds or around nine kilograms. And
Speaker 1: you might wonder where the heck did they get hydrogen gas?
Speaker 1: Because hydrogen, while it is the most plentiful element in
Speaker 1: the galaxy, is also notorious for bonding with other elements
Speaker 1: like hydrogen and oxygen makes water, so you have to
Speaker 1: put forth real effort to break those molecular bonds to
Speaker 1: release hydrogen gas, and then you have to collect it. Well.
Speaker 1: The researchers were using scrap iron and then they were
Speaker 1: pouring sulfuric acid onto the iron. One of the byproducts
Speaker 1: of the chemical reaction that would follow is hydrogen gas.
Speaker 1: They captured this with a system of lead pipes that
Speaker 1: fed into the interior of the balloon, and this allowed
Speaker 1: them to inflate the gosh darn thing. At the end
Speaker 1: of seventeen eighty three, the Fringies successfully flew a hydrogen
Speaker 1: based balloon just a few days after the first successful
Speaker 1: hot air balloon flights. So these things are progressing in tandem.
Speaker 1: You know, it's really amazing how quickly this took off.
Speaker 1: That was a terrible, unintentional pun which I'm sure I'm
Speaker 1: going to repeat throughout this episode. Anyway, Unlike a hot
Speaker 1: air balloon, a lighter than air gas balloon doesn't need
Speaker 1: to constantly be refueled, so it just will stay up
Speaker 1: there for as long as the balloon is able to
Speaker 1: contain this lighter than air gas, so to be able
Speaker 1: to control things like altitude, the balloon would have ballast.
Speaker 1: That's bags of stuff that's used to weigh it down.
Speaker 1: So if you wanted to go higher, you had to
Speaker 1: ditch some ballast. You have to throw some weight overboard,
Speaker 1: like a sand bag or something. This would decrease the
Speaker 1: weight of the balloon and allow it to fly higher
Speaker 1: in altitude. But in order to come down, you would
Speaker 1: have to have a release valve that would let you
Speaker 1: have a controlled release. Controlled is the important part of hydrogen.
Speaker 1: You let out a little hydrogen, you lose some buoyancy,
Speaker 1: you start to come down. The more hydrogen you release,
Speaker 1: the more you come down. And if you're very careful,
Speaker 1: you're able to have a controlled descent and land without crashing.
Speaker 1: But you know, when you have that flammable true goal
Speaker 1: where you've got fuel and oxidizer and heat, things get dangerous.
Speaker 1: So hydrogen is fuel with a big, big f And
Speaker 1: if the hydrogen were to catch fire, believe me, you
Speaker 1: would be well and truly ft. It wouldn't be so
Speaker 1: much a fire as it would be an explosion. We
Speaker 1: get back to the Hendenburg disaster there, but there were
Speaker 1: also other factors that contributed to that particular tragedy. Interestingly,
Speaker 1: the Hindenburg was not designed to use hydrogen gas in
Speaker 1: the first place. It was meant to use helium. Helium
Speaker 1: is also lighter than air. You know, we're all familiar
Speaker 1: with helium balloons, but unlike hydrogen, helium is not flammable,
Speaker 1: so it's safe to have in areas where you've got
Speaker 1: things like internal combustion engines and such. However, in the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties, the Hendenburg, which originated in Germany, wasn't able
Speaker 1: to import heli because well, it's nineteen thirties, it's Germany.
Speaker 1: Nazis were in power, and even though World War Two
Speaker 1: had not really started yet and the United States certainly
Speaker 1: wasn't pulled into it, the US was already let's say,
Speaker 1: concerned about Germany and refused to export helium to the Germans,
Speaker 1: so instead they used hydrogen, and thus the die was
Speaker 1: cast for the Hendenburg. The use of the hydrogen balloon
Speaker 1: also taught us that if you go to a high
Speaker 1: enough altitude, your ears go pop and that can hurt. Also,
Speaker 1: researchers started to carry meteorological instruments like thermometers and barometers
Speaker 1: aboard the hydrogen balloons. So these became the first weather
Speaker 1: balloons of a sort, but they were manned. Unmanned weather
Speaker 1: balloons would have to wait nearly a century. So by
Speaker 1: seventeen ninety four, balloons were a known thing. And during
Speaker 1: the French Revolution wars in which countries like Britain and
Speaker 1: Austria would to war against France, largely because it's pretty
Speaker 1: scary to see these common French peasants overthrow the previously
Speaker 1: unassailable monarchy and the noble classes, the French military would
Speaker 1: use balloons to get a bird's eye view of the battlefield.
Speaker 1: I'll explain more when we come back from this quick break. Okay,
Speaker 1: So we had French military officials using balloons in order
Speaker 1: to get a high altitude view of areas like potential
Speaker 1: battlefields or even actual battlefield conditions like active conditions during combat.
Speaker 1: It turned out that these uses were at best distractions.
Speaker 1: They were not providing really useful info. Apparently, the reports
Speaker 1: of the time said that they had no impact whatsoever
Speaker 1: on the course of battles. So early on they had
Speaker 1: hardly any impact. But flash forward a little more than
Speaker 1: half a century and head on over to the United
Speaker 1: States and we would see another use of observation balloons,
Speaker 1: this time during the US Civil War. So you had
Speaker 1: the Union and you had the Confederates, and both sides
Speaker 1: of the conflict used balloons to gather observations of the
Speaker 1: enemy and to map out battlefields. So in this case
Speaker 1: it wasn't necessarily during an actual battle, but sometimes it
Speaker 1: was just to get a really good bird's eye view
Speaker 1: of a battlefield, map out where units could take position,
Speaker 1: places that they should avoid, just conditions they need to
Speaker 1: be aware of before they go into battles so that
Speaker 1: they're not finding out while you know, warfare is breaking
Speaker 1: out all around them, and it starts to make a
Speaker 1: little sense. And this was all in an effort to
Speaker 1: just provide intelligence to military units on the ground. Now,
Speaker 1: the Confederates had their share of military balloons, but the
Speaker 1: Union side historically made better use of this technology. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the Confederates were experimenting with submarines. It was a really
Speaker 1: scary time for military innovation because these were all in
Speaker 1: many cases unproven technologies where people were being put at
Speaker 1: risk in order to test them. Now, both sides used
Speaker 1: gas balloons for this purpose. They weren't using hot air balloons,
Speaker 1: They're using gas balloons. They tried using balloons to extend
Speaker 1: communication lines, but they found that the actual use of
Speaker 1: this was tricky. It was hard to read signals that
Speaker 1: were sent by balloonists. They were relying on things like
Speaker 1: signal flags, which could be difficult to see. Some of
Speaker 1: them were even outfitted with telegraph wires that extended down
Speaker 1: to the ground, but those ended up being a little
Speaker 1: fiddly as well. However, the idea was sound, even though
Speaker 1: the implementation was a bit lack Again, like, this was
Speaker 1: all unfolding in the middle of a war, so it
Speaker 1: was tricky to get things to work just right while
Speaker 1: you're out in the field while it's all happening. The
Speaker 1: first weather balloons to carry instruments but not people, would
Speaker 1: arrive in the eighteen nineties back in France, where this
Speaker 1: whole business got started, essentially a century after balloons were
Speaker 1: first being used for surveillance in wartime conditions. These weather
Speaker 1: balloons had an open bottom and they were gas balloons,
Speaker 1: and so when they would be released during the day,
Speaker 1: the lighter than air balloon would rise up into the sky.
Speaker 1: They would carry all these instruments that would record measurements.
Speaker 1: At night, the gases would cool down enough for the
Speaker 1: balloon to start deflating. You had air pressure that was
Speaker 1: forcing gases out, and the balloon would start to come down,
Speaker 1: and the idea was to retrieve the instruments and record
Speaker 1: the readings as quickly as possible in order to track
Speaker 1: weather conditions. This was not always easy because the balloons
Speaker 1: had a tendency to drift, sometimes by hundreds of miles,
Speaker 1: so sometimes the data you got back wasn't necessarily the
Speaker 1: most useful. But not long after this, early meteorologists came
Speaker 1: up with a better plan. So instead of using an
Speaker 1: open ended balloon, where you know, you're essentially releasing a
Speaker 1: bag filled with light gas up into the sky, they
Speaker 1: would use a sealed balloon that was filled with lighter
Speaker 1: than air gas. They would release this balloon into the air.
Speaker 1: It would ascend up into the sky, and as the
Speaker 1: air around the balloon would get thinner at higher altitudes,
Speaker 1: the balloon would swell because there was less air pressure
Speaker 1: on the outside of the balloon than there was on
Speaker 1: the inside of the balloon at that altitude. You've probably
Speaker 1: seen pictures of balloons that looked incredibly spherical way up
Speaker 1: in altitude, but when they were first launched they and
Speaker 1: look like that at all. Now, the material on these
Speaker 1: balloons was also really thin. These days we make them
Speaker 1: out of latex, and because they're thin, this material is
Speaker 1: so thin at higher altitudes. As the balloon stretches and
Speaker 1: stretches and stretches, as it swells up, it begins to tear.
Speaker 1: And when it tears, then the gas escapes the balloon
Speaker 1: and it starts to come tumbling down. Now, the meteorologists,
Speaker 1: they knew this was going to happen, so what they
Speaker 1: did was they attached a small parachute to the payload
Speaker 1: to the instrument bundle, so that the parachute would deploy
Speaker 1: as the bundle was falling, and then the payload could
Speaker 1: float down rather than crash down. And we still use
Speaker 1: weather balloons that use this method today, though obviously now
Speaker 1: we can include devices that send out a radio signal
Speaker 1: that make it way easier to track down where those
Speaker 1: instruments have landed once they do. So, by the time
Speaker 1: you get to the early twentieth century, balloons have become
Speaker 1: a common tool the militaries. They were in fact in
Speaker 1: heavy use in World War One among pretty much all
Speaker 1: the countries involved in the conflict. The potential for spies
Speaker 1: to use balloons to uncover enemy positions and battlefield conditions
Speaker 1: were enough to prompt the various militaries to target balloons
Speaker 1: with high priority. They became important targets for the military.
Speaker 1: This is also in balloons, often in the form of
Speaker 1: dirigibles like the Hindenburg, were used as weaponized vehicles. Some
Speaker 1: dirigibles had machine guns mounted within the cabin, or they
Speaker 1: carried a payload of bombs. But that starts to get
Speaker 1: outside the surveillance and spy stuff, so I'm not going
Speaker 1: to spend any real time talking about that. That's a
Speaker 1: separate episode. Also in World War One and into World
Speaker 1: War Two, some countries started to use what we're called
Speaker 1: barrage balloons. Now, these were a defensive measure, So essentially
Speaker 1: the idea was to attach steel cables to unmanned balloons,
Speaker 1: and if there was an incoming attack by a you
Speaker 1: could release the balloons and they would go up into
Speaker 1: the air, lifting these cables up in the air, and
Speaker 1: the cables would serve as obstacles for enemy aircraft. Like
Speaker 1: you would just have these balloons holding taut cables still
Speaker 1: attached to the ground, and aircraft if they were to
Speaker 1: try and fly through the area could get tangled up.
Speaker 1: They could foul the aircraft and cause them to crash,
Speaker 1: or it would force pilots to climb at a higher
Speaker 1: altitude to fly over these barrage balloons, but that would
Speaker 1: bring them within range of anti aircraft weaponry. So it
Speaker 1: was all meant to dissuade aerial attacks, all right. But
Speaker 1: back to observation balloons. In the nineteen forties, General Mills yep,
Speaker 1: the food company, the one famous for cereal, created balloons
Speaker 1: designed to ascend all the way up into the stratosphere.
Speaker 1: The aeronautical arm of General Mills, which is wild to
Speaker 1: think about, would use these balloons to lift instrumentation way
Speaker 1: way up in the sky, typically to do stuff like
Speaker 1: study weather conditions and also detect radiation in the upper atmosphere.
Speaker 1: They used essentially what was the similar to a photographic plate,
Speaker 1: where instead of using light to create an image, it
Speaker 1: was there to detect nuclear radiation that could hit the
Speaker 1: plate and create an image that we could then see
Speaker 1: once we retrieved this when it came back to the ground.
Speaker 1: So these balloons were not meant to spy on people.
Speaker 1: They were meant to make observations about weather and science,
Speaker 1: potentially detecting nuclear radiation which could be related to espionage
Speaker 1: or at least intelligence gathering. This whole thing was called
Speaker 1: Project Skyhook, and it fell under the administration of the
Speaker 1: Office of Naval Research in the United States, with the
Speaker 1: Atomic Energy Commission joining in a little bit later. These
Speaker 1: balloons would typically jettison their payload, which would then descend
Speaker 1: via parachute for retrieval by a ground team or a
Speaker 1: water team, as the case may be, and the work
Speaker 1: done there would then inform later espionage efforts. See if
Speaker 1: you could send balloons way, way, way up into the sky,
Speaker 1: maybe you could do that so that they could potentially
Speaker 1: take photographs or film of the land that was beneath,
Speaker 1: so that, you know, you could get an idea where
Speaker 1: someone might be, I don't know, trying to hide nuclear
Speaker 1: silos in their country, or military bases or whatnot. And
Speaker 1: so in the late nineteen forties and into the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: the US began to rely on balloons to lift surveillance
Speaker 1: payloads into high altitudes, expressly for the purpose of photographing
Speaker 1: the then Soviet Union as well as China. The two
Speaker 1: massive communist powers that the US was convinced served as
Speaker 1: existential threats to truth, justice, and the American way, so
Speaker 1: the only way to really defend yourself is to snoop
Speaker 1: on them. Now. One early example of this was called
Speaker 1: Project Mogul, which technically started before Projects Skyhook did with
Speaker 1: General Mills. But Mogul's purpose was to carry equipment designed
Speaker 1: to detect sound, but not just any sound. Instead, it
Speaker 1: was designed to detect sound that would come in the
Speaker 1: wake of the detonation of atomic bombs. The thought was
Speaker 1: an atomic bomb detonation would create sound that would travel
Speaker 1: in a channel, high, high, high up in the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: So the US was concerned that the Soviet Union was
Speaker 1: testing atomic weapons and they wanted to keep an ear
Speaker 1: out for that. And the US had already demonstrated atomic
Speaker 1: weapons being extremely effective if you wanted to wipe out
Speaker 1: an entire city, because they had done it twice already.
Speaker 1: By the way, balloons like the ones the US released
Speaker 1: and the ones that China has released have a pretty
Speaker 1: huge overlap. In the ven diagram that has balloons in
Speaker 1: one circle and UFOs in the other circle like a
Speaker 1: really big overlap. UFO stands for unidentified flying object, and
Speaker 1: that's all that UFO actually means, right Like, it literally
Speaker 1: means you see something that's in the air and you
Speaker 1: can't figure out what it is. So it's a UFO.
Speaker 1: It's unidentified, it is flying, and it's something an object.
Speaker 1: What UFO does not mean, at least it doesn't intrinsically mean,
Speaker 1: is that it's an extra terrestrial object. That is, that
Speaker 1: it's something that's not from Earth. But over the years,
Speaker 1: we've kind of conflated these two things that UFOs and
Speaker 1: aliens are one and the same, or rather that UFOs
Speaker 1: are what aliens used to tool around in our solar system.
Speaker 1: But no, UFOs are just stuff what's up in the sky,
Speaker 1: but we ain't sure what it is yet. And when
Speaker 1: you look at balloons, especially weather or surveillance balloons, you
Speaker 1: can really understand how this can happen because I think
Speaker 1: a lot of people think, well, of course I know
Speaker 1: what a balloon looks like. I'm not going to mistake
Speaker 1: a balloon for something else. But at lower altitudes, these
Speaker 1: balloons are tear drop sheepd right with the bulbous part
Speaker 1: of the tear at the top of the balloon. They
Speaker 1: look like they've been released prematurely, like ah, you let
Speaker 1: go before you've finished filling it up. It's not full
Speaker 1: of gas. This, however, is done on purpose, because, as
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier, as these balloons rise in altitude, they
Speaker 1: move into areas of lower air pressure and they expand.
Speaker 1: The balloons get bigger and bigger. So a balloon that's
Speaker 1: tear drop shaped at a low altitude turns into this
Speaker 1: enormous sphere as it climbs to upper altitudes, and like
Speaker 1: I said, it eventually can pop or rather the material again.
Speaker 1: Typically latex will tear and then release gas and cause
Speaker 1: the balloon to deflate quickly, or sometimes they'll just completely
Speaker 1: rip apart and the stuff what the balloon was carrying
Speaker 1: comes crashing down. In nineteen forty seven, a rancher named
Speaker 1: WW mac Brazil was driving across his land with his
Speaker 1: son Vernon, and the two encountered something weird. They found
Speaker 1: a mass of fabric, rubber, metallic foil, and some other
Speaker 1: stuff that was heaped on the ground. So the rancher
Speaker 1: collected as much of this stuff as he could, and
Speaker 1: then a few days later he drove it down to Roswell,
Speaker 1: New Mexico, to hand it over to the local sheriff.
Speaker 1: This innocent chain of events would eventually be reported as
Speaker 1: a rancher having salvaged the wreckage of a flying saucer. Now,
Speaker 1: the US military thought maybe it was best to just
Speaker 1: let the flying saucer story go unchallenged, because the truth
Speaker 1: of the matter was the balloon was part of the
Speaker 1: aforementioned Project Mogul. But you were entering into an era
Speaker 1: of observations by balloon, and so there were a lot
Speaker 1: of UFOs that were out there, not extraterrestrial, but unidentified
Speaker 1: by the people on the ground. And because the US
Speaker 1: military didn't want to talk about espionage, because despite what
Speaker 1: a certain James Bond would have you believe, it's best
Speaker 1: not to walk into a room and introduce yourself as
Speaker 1: a spy to everybody, folks were left to fill in
Speaker 1: the gaps of their understanding with all sorts of speculation
Speaker 1: and nonsense. They weren't told that the US was using
Speaker 1: balloons to try and keep tabs on the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: because the US didn't want the Soviet Union to know that,
Speaker 1: So they were left to just kind of figure out
Speaker 1: what the heck this stuff was. Even when a Kentucky
Speaker 1: National Guard pilot and military pilot died in an accident
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty seven while he was trying to identify
Speaker 1: an object in the sky that was very likely an
Speaker 1: observation balloon, the military states silent on this because that
Speaker 1: was classified. Not even pilots were told that there were
Speaker 1: this there was a surveillance balloon program that was active.
Speaker 1: That kind of silence continues to this very day. All Right,
Speaker 1: we're gonna take another break. When we come back, we'll
Speaker 1: continue the history of spy balloons, all right, So we
Speaker 1: talked about Project Mogul, which was designed to listen in
Speaker 1: for the evidence of atomic weapon detonations, but for more
Speaker 1: direct observation, the US created a couple of projects, one
Speaker 1: called Project moby Dick and another one called Project Genetrics.
Speaker 1: These were balloons that carried cameras that were meant to
Speaker 1: gather intels, specifically on the Soviet Union and on China,
Speaker 1: and they would float at altitudes of more than fifty
Speaker 1: thousand feet, which put them out of range of fighter
Speaker 1: aircraft at the time. Because it's pretty common for these
Speaker 1: aircraft not to have sort of oxygen equipment, so they
Speaker 1: couldn't go and higher altitudes pilots would pass out they
Speaker 1: wouldn't be able to breathe. So the idea was that
Speaker 1: these balloons would remain out of reach of Soviet forces,
Speaker 1: but they would still be able to take detailed photographs
Speaker 1: and film of the ground below. But she still had
Speaker 1: to retrieve the darned things. By the way. They would
Speaker 1: release these in various places around the world, like in Turkey, Norway, Scotland,
Speaker 1: and they would just let the air currents carry the
Speaker 1: balloons across the Eastern Asian continent. Well, there were a
Speaker 1: couple of ways that the US would try to retrieve
Speaker 1: these payloads once they had drifted across the USSR and China.
Speaker 1: One was just to wait until payload released from its
Speaker 1: balloon parachuted into the Sea of Japan, whereupon a US
Speaker 1: Navy vessel would rendezvous and pick up the payload. But
Speaker 1: the other was to use an aircraft to catch the
Speaker 1: payload as it was falling in midair. This aircraft was
Speaker 1: the C one nineteen flying box car. This aircraft was
Speaker 1: used for tons of different stuff, including deploying airborne troops.
Speaker 1: So like parachute corps would jump out of C one nineteens.
Speaker 1: But this aircraft could also go long for a hail
Speaker 1: merry pass, which is my dumb way of saying. They
Speaker 1: could be outfitted with equipment designed to snag a descending payload.
Speaker 1: But the Soviets caught on to the Shenanigans for one thing.
Speaker 1: In the early morning hours, these balloons would drift at
Speaker 1: a significantly lower altitude. Again, this is because the gas
Speaker 1: inside the balloons would cool down overnight. Then as they cooled,
Speaker 1: they became more dense and they lost some of the
Speaker 1: balloons buoyancy. Then they would float low enough for some
Speaker 1: Soviet aircraft to fire upon these surveillance balloons. And so
Speaker 1: really just a fraction of the balloons launched were ever retrieved.
Speaker 1: I think they launched more than five hundred of one
Speaker 1: of these, and I think around fifty were finally retrieved.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it was not great odds. The Soviets managed
Speaker 1: to get hold of some of the payloads and they said, hey,
Speaker 1: United States, stop violating our sovereignty by sending these spy
Speaker 1: balloons over our country. And the US responded in a
Speaker 1: couple of different ways. One was to say, hey, easy comrade,
Speaker 1: these are just weather balloons. We're just studying the weather,
Speaker 1: you know, all over the world to get a better
Speaker 1: idea how weather and climate patterns happened. No big deal,
Speaker 1: we can't even control where these things go. The other
Speaker 1: strategy was to say, hey, nobody owns the upper atmosphere.
Speaker 1: Airspace only extends as far up as you can use it,
Speaker 1: and you don't have any aircraft that can go that high,
Speaker 1: so go pound sand. As you can imagine. The Soviets
Speaker 1: didn't they guy. These responses had very much merit to them,
Speaker 1: But the US would end up migrating away from balloons
Speaker 1: as a main method of spying, not necessarily because balloons
Speaker 1: were ineffective, but because the United States had secretly developed
Speaker 1: aircraft like fixed wing aircraft that could fly at extreme altitudes,
Speaker 1: namely the U two spy plane. And for those of
Speaker 1: y'all interested in that story, I recommend searching the Tech
Speaker 1: Stuff archives for our old episodes about the U two,
Speaker 1: because that story is crazy all on its own. Also,
Speaker 1: by the late nineteen fifties we started getting into the
Speaker 1: space age. Spootnick was the first man made satellite to
Speaker 1: go into orbit. It was launched on October fourth, nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty seven. It essentially just went beep, sent out a
Speaker 1: little radio signal as it moved through its orbital pattern.
Speaker 1: But this still had an enormous impact around the world.
Speaker 1: For one thing, folks in the United States became terrified
Speaker 1: because if the USSR could launch a payload into space,
Speaker 1: then they potentially launch a nuclear weapon at the United
Speaker 1: States aboard an intercontinental ballistic missile. Then America suddenly felt
Speaker 1: a threat that earlier had been hard for them to
Speaker 1: really imagine, because otherwise the thought was they would have
Speaker 1: to fly nuclear payloads over in bomber aircraft which could
Speaker 1: be intercepted between the USSR the United States. Now there
Speaker 1: was this very real threat of things being delivered via missile.
Speaker 1: But in addition to this fun source of existential dread,
Speaker 1: there was also the concern that should you create a
Speaker 1: satellite that was capable of maintaining orbit for a while,
Speaker 1: and you outfit it with the right kinds of equipment,
Speaker 1: it would pass over the Earth in arcs that could
Speaker 1: gather information using stuff like powerful cameras, you could spy
Speaker 1: on other countries well beyond even the stratosphere. And sure,
Speaker 1: at first we would need to be able to retrieve
Speaker 1: the payloads of these dallites. They wouldn't be designed to
Speaker 1: stay up there Perpetually, they would come down and we
Speaker 1: would have to retrieve them in order to get the
Speaker 1: information that was captured. But over time we'd be able
Speaker 1: to maintain a live connection with these satellites. So we
Speaker 1: were entering the era of satellite surveillance. However, balloons would
Speaker 1: continue to remain useful. For one thing, you could deploy
Speaker 1: balloons pretty quickly, whereas with satellites there's a whole lot
Speaker 1: of prep work that goes into it. Even if you
Speaker 1: want to divert a satellite, that's not always possible, and
Speaker 1: when it is, it's not always easy, So sometimes you
Speaker 1: need to have an alternative that you can use quickly. Also,
Speaker 1: balloons remain useful because folks expect higher tech approaches to surveillance.
Speaker 1: America used helium balloons carrying cameras both infrared and visible
Speaker 1: light video cameras to surveil a rock nearly twenty years ago,
Speaker 1: around two thousand and four. The US also made similar
Speaker 1: use of observation balloons over Afghanistan during that extremely long war. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we get to the point now where surveillance balloons
Speaker 1: can be more sophisticated. Right, you can have a surveillance
Speaker 1: balloon that has a perpetual radio connection back to a
Speaker 1: control point, so you can get real time data from
Speaker 1: these surveillance balloons. It's no longer let it go hope
Speaker 1: that you can retrieve it later and then get to
Speaker 1: the data. Then now we can have a perpetual signal.
Speaker 1: When you can pair it with stuff like solar panels,
Speaker 1: then the balloons payload can continue to draw a power
Speaker 1: from solar power and be an action longer. These are
Speaker 1: things that were not possible, you know, obviously early on
Speaker 1: in the use of spy balloons. But now let's get
Speaker 1: to the Chinese balloon that got us started on this
Speaker 1: whole topic. On January twenty eighth, twenty twenty three, the
Speaker 1: North American Aerospace Defense Command, which is a part of
Speaker 1: a US military organization, detects and begins to track a
Speaker 1: balloon that's drifting over Alaska, which is in the northwest
Speaker 1: of the United States. It borders Canada, it is not
Speaker 1: part of the contiguous US At the time. The agency
Speaker 1: determined that there was no risk from the balloon, either
Speaker 1: from physical threats or from surveillance, so the agency decided
Speaker 1: to just continue tracking it there was Since it didn't
Speaker 1: stand as a threat, there was no reason to intervene
Speaker 1: at that moment. On January thirtieth, the balloon drifted over
Speaker 1: into Canadian airspace. Nor Rad kept eyes on the balloon,
Speaker 1: and experts determined that, based upon the fact the balloon
Speaker 1: had solar panels to power its payload, the balloon's purpose
Speaker 1: was likely to gather intelligence. It was most likely a
Speaker 1: spy balloon. They also saw that the balloon appeared to
Speaker 1: be outfitted with propellers and motors, indicating that it could
Speaker 1: be radio controlled to direct its flight, so it could
Speaker 1: at least move in areas that we're not just determined
Speaker 1: by air currents. On January thirty first, twenty twenty three,
Speaker 1: the balloon passed out of Canadian airspace and back over
Speaker 1: into US airspace. This time it was over Idaho, and
Speaker 1: it's at this point that the US President, Joe Biden,
Speaker 1: ordered the military to shoot down the balloon. The military
Speaker 1: decided it was best to shoot down the balloon when
Speaker 1: it wasn't over a populated area, both to minimize the
Speaker 1: chance for damage to citizens and citizen property, as well
Speaker 1: as to increase the chances that the military would be
Speaker 1: able to retrieve the payload. Plus, at the time, the
Speaker 1: balloon was not passing over any really secret bases or
Speaker 1: anything or military operations, so they were thinking, if it's
Speaker 1: over Idaho and it's not over something sensitive, we can
Speaker 1: let it be for now and wait for it to
Speaker 1: move over to a place where we can take it
Speaker 1: down safely. In the time, the military continued to track
Speaker 1: the progress of the balloon and started to make proactive
Speaker 1: decisions to prevent it from being able to gather any
Speaker 1: useful intelligence. They would postpone or cancel things that would
Speaker 1: potentially get picked up by the balloon. They curtailed all
Speaker 1: unencrypted communication so that the balloon wouldn't be able to
Speaker 1: pick up on radio communications between military units that might
Speaker 1: give some sensitive information to the Chinese. They were minimizing
Speaker 1: the amount of information that this balloon could potentially snoop
Speaker 1: in on and send back to China. The next couple
Speaker 1: of days had the US tracking the balloon. Some folks
Speaker 1: on the conservative side of the political spectrum began to
Speaker 1: criticize the Biden administration for not taking action already they
Speaker 1: didn't have all the information, though personally, I think trying
Speaker 1: to avoid having debris hit citizens as a worthwhile endeavor,
Speaker 1: but then what do I know? Anyway, By Friday, February third,
Speaker 1: China had actually owned up to having launched this balloon.
Speaker 1: But China was claiming that it was essentially a weather
Speaker 1: balloon that just got blown off course, that this was
Speaker 1: not intended to fly into US airspace and in fact
Speaker 1: was part of a scientific operation, and the fact that
Speaker 1: it was outfitted with propellers and motors kind of contradicted
Speaker 1: that claim a bit. And the US said, we are
Speaker 1: not buying it because we use that same excuse with
Speaker 1: the Soviets back in the fifties, and we know it's
Speaker 1: a lie because we lied back then. And further, the
Speaker 1: US said this was a violation of its sovereignty. Also
Speaker 1: interesting side note, when it comes to airspace, we actually
Speaker 1: do not have a firm international agreement on the vertical
Speaker 1: limitations of airspace, Like we know how far out it
Speaker 1: extends from a country, but we don't know how far
Speaker 1: up it extends. At least we don't agree on that.
Speaker 1: And this gets complicated because stuff like satellites obviously can
Speaker 1: cross the entire planet many times in a day, like
Speaker 1: some do a full orbit in like ninety minutes, so
Speaker 1: if you had to quest permission to cross over the
Speaker 1: areas that a satellite was traveling around, that would be impractical.
Speaker 1: So we're kind of in a murky area here. Well.
Speaker 1: On Saturday, February fourth and f twenty two, Stealth Fighter,
Speaker 1: one of the most advanced fighter jets in the world,
Speaker 1: takes off from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, flies
Speaker 1: to an area off the coast of South Carolina, and
Speaker 1: it fires an AIM nine X sidewinder air to air
Speaker 1: missile at this balloon, which at that point was at
Speaker 1: an altitude of between sixty thousand and sixty five thousand feet.
Speaker 1: Needless to say, the balloon did not survive this encounter
Speaker 1: with a missile. The wreckage fell into an area that's
Speaker 1: about six miles off the coast of South Carolina. This
Speaker 1: is well within the twelve miles of territorial waters, so
Speaker 1: this still makes it a US based operation. The US
Speaker 1: still has sovereignty over that water. The Department of Defense
Speaker 1: issues a statement that reassures US citizens that the balloon
Speaker 1: never posed any sort of physical threat, so it wasn't
Speaker 1: carrying a weapons payload, but that it did violate US sovereignty.
Speaker 1: Further review of earlier intelligence then revealed that China had
Speaker 1: flown balloons over the US at least four times in
Speaker 1: the recent past that were not intercepted or taken down.
Speaker 1: Three of those incidents happened while Trump was president. One
Speaker 1: happened earlier in Biden's presidency. On February tenth, twenty twenty three,
Speaker 1: the US shot down a quote unquote high altitude object
Speaker 1: off the coast of Alaska. Not at the time, the
Speaker 1: US wasn't sure if it was in fact a balloon,
Speaker 1: let alone where it came from. Further investigation indicated that
Speaker 1: this particular object was from quote commercial or research entities
Speaker 1: and therefore totally benign end quote that's according to the
Speaker 1: White House. So in other words, they shot down a
Speaker 1: balloon that was not intended to be used for surveillance,
Speaker 1: but was for some other purpose. And you might, I'd say,
Speaker 1: this whole balloon thing is kind of taken off, and
Speaker 1: that the military reaction has similarly been on an upward trajectory.
Speaker 1: Dad jokes. The Northern Illinois Bottle Cap Balloon Brigade a
Speaker 1: hobbyist group that sends up helium balloons with small payloads,
Speaker 1: the sort of pico balloon approach just to do stuff
Speaker 1: like gathered data, which can end up being things like
Speaker 1: to help with weather models. They can take photos, high
Speaker 1: altitude photos. It's really meant to be a science based hobby,
Speaker 1: and there are like websites out there that will sell
Speaker 1: you the kits and the and the balloons that you
Speaker 1: can use to launch these sorts of things. Anyway, this
Speaker 1: hobbyist group reported that one of its balloons was quote
Speaker 1: unquote missing in action. Further, it reported that the last
Speaker 1: known location was over Alaska, and that on February eleventh
Speaker 1: and F twenty two jets shot down an unidentified airborne
Speaker 1: object in that ural vicinity. So the implication is that
Speaker 1: the US military and what is perhaps an overabundance of
Speaker 1: caution or you could argue paranoia, shot down a hobbyist
Speaker 1: weather balloon. Now, according to weatherboy dot com, the balloon
Speaker 1: probably costs somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve bucks, and
Speaker 1: the payload was also probably around that same amount of money. Now,
Speaker 1: I do not know what the F twenty two used
Speaker 1: to take down this particular unidentified object, nor can I
Speaker 1: even say that the F twenty two actually shot down
Speaker 1: the hobbyist balloon. These could be two separate events that
Speaker 1: they may not be the hobbyist balloon that this F
Speaker 1: twenty two took down. It could just be coincidence. However,
Speaker 1: what I can say is that a single sidewinder missile
Speaker 1: costs nearly four hundred thousand dollars. So it's tempting for
Speaker 1: me to joke that the United States wasted a four
Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars weapon to take down a twelve dollar
Speaker 1: helium balloon carrying a similarly priced hobbyist payload. But we
Speaker 1: do not know that for certain. I do not know
Speaker 1: that the object that the F twenty two shot down
Speaker 1: was this hobbyist balloon. I don't know what method the
Speaker 1: pilot used to take down the object. Maybe they didn't
Speaker 1: use a sidewinder missile at all. So I cannot really
Speaker 1: be as irresponsible as to joke about it, But boy
Speaker 1: do I really want to. So. Surveillance balloons are still
Speaker 1: very much a thing, But so our balloons meant to
Speaker 1: make scientific observations and to increase our understanding of how
Speaker 1: the world and beyond works. This creates a complicated issue, right,
Speaker 1: how do you determine if a balloon stands as a
Speaker 1: threat to intelligence or is just there to further our knowledge.
Speaker 1: There aren't really easy answers to this. The more you
Speaker 1: know about the origins of the balloon, the more the
Speaker 1: more you can guess at the intent for that balloon.
Speaker 1: And I think that's really what you have to rely upon.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, if you don't act well,
Speaker 1: then you get criticized, right because we saw that happen
Speaker 1: with the first balloon back earlier in February, that if
Speaker 1: you don't act, you stand at risk of being criticized
Speaker 1: by the opposition for failing to take the safety of
Speaker 1: the United States seriously. However, if you act prematurely, then
Speaker 1: you get criticized of being trigger happy and shooting down
Speaker 1: legitimate scientific oriented equipment. It turns into a no win situation,
Speaker 1: right You act too quickly and you're seen as being
Speaker 1: irresponsible and paranoid. You don't act quickly enough, you're criticized
Speaker 1: of not taking security seriously. I don't really have an
Speaker 1: answer for how we solve this issue. It is a
Speaker 1: really difficult one to do. It might even be one
Speaker 1: of China's objectives, right, like not just to gather surveillance
Speaker 1: but to create this kind of environment where the current
Speaker 1: administration really has a no win situation on their hands.
Speaker 1: They get criticized no matter what they do or don't
Speaker 1: do in the case of waiting. So yeah, complicated thing.
Speaker 1: I don't think we're going to see surveillance balloons go
Speaker 1: away too soon, because again, they can be effective even
Speaker 1: if it's just a form of psychological warfare. But I
Speaker 1: thought this would be an interesting topic. Hope you agree.
Speaker 1: If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in
Speaker 1: the future of this show, reach out to me and
Speaker 1: let me know. You can go on Twitter, tweet at me.
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