HELP! HELP! THE BALLOON IS HERE!
In the spring of 1945, Japan was on its last legs in the Pacific War. Desperate times called for desperate measures. One of those desperate measures was an attempt to firebomb the western forests of the United States with balloons.
At the time, very little was known about the jet stream; B-29 crews were struggling on a bomb run into the wind at 35,000 feet - where no one had regularly flown before - and finding their ground speed sometimes wasn’t 100mph as they bucked the headwinds of the unknown jet stream.
Some Japanese weather scientists knew that there was a wind across the Pacific; they didn’t know more, but they thought it might be used to launch balloons that could be carried into the western United States, where an ignition device the balloon carried could start a forest fire in the vast western forests. The attack began in April 1945, and went on to July.
The reason most of you don’t know what I’m talking about, have never heard of such a thing, is that the attack was a bust. Literally. One balloon set a small fire east of Portland in May that was quickly contained, and several balloons were finally found hanging in trees, where their ignition device had failed. Two were shot down, one west of Portland and the other west of Vancouver.
Since then, a lot has been learned about the jet stream, but much of it is still mysterious. Why it changes course, why lowers and raises the altitudes at which it blows. Those midwestern ice storms that extend as far south a Texas are the result of the jet stream suddenly turning left and heading up north as it crosses the west coast of North America somewhere over Oregon and Washington, and getting far enough north that when it turns right and heads south, it’s picked up a lot of arctic air; how much of the country will be affected is a function of how far south it goes before it executes another turn.
A good friend of mine used to be a backseater in the SR-71 supersonic airplane that regularly flew at 60-80,000 feet. He told me that at that altitude, there is no “weather.” Everything happens at lower altitudes. But on occasion, at around 60,000 feet, SR-71s did encounter “buffeting” that was an indication of wind. So, the jet stream - which is normally encountered between 30-40,000 feet altitude - apparently can get higher. Nobody knows.
I point all this out because this is one of a few things that have stood out to me in The Great Balloon Alert. If you chart where the balloon has been spotted, it’s been in the areas over which the jet stream may be running. Also, in my experience of flying in hot air balloons, balloons do not “maneuver;” the wind comes along and says “we’re going over there,” and the balloon says “fine by me.” The “maneuvers” the balloon is supposedly making are not out of line with the twists and turns of the jet stream when they are able to map it. How do they map it? They release weather balloons with tracking gear and follow where the wind blows them. And for those reports of the balloon “hovering” over something, the jet stream can raise and lower.
But remember this: Balloons. Do. Not. Maneuver. Independently. Ever.
The Chinese say that the balloon is not a military threat, that it is a weather balloon with scientific gear aboard, that got blown off course. That could easily be a cover story, but it is equally possible that’s the truth. That kind of thing happens with weather balloons all the time, because 80 years later we still don’t know all that much about the jet stream. And the fact it is at 60,000 feet where “there is no weather” -except when buffeting and turbulence are infrequently experienced, indicating something is going on - could be explained by the phenomenon my SR-71 crewman experienced. That the Chinese would have launched a balloon set to float at 60,000 feet (where there is no weather) for a scientific purpose, and that it got caught up in an unexpected wind event, is a story that “holds water,” as they say.
Unfortunately, the hysteria currently going on 60,000 feet below the balloon also makes sense, if you think about all the agendas that can be served by the presence of a DFO (Dangerous Flying Object) over “the homeland.” In case you haven’t noticed, there’s an “anti-Chinese” atmosphere now - ranging from those of us (I am one) who look at the things the Chinese government is doing in the areas around China and say “they’re flexing their power and we need to watch that,” to those screaming “Oh my God! The sky is falling!” Most of whom can be found in the Compleat Idiot branch of the Right.
Buttressing the “accident” explanation is that, if the balloon does harbor bad things, launching it has to be the result of a deliberate act, approved by someone in the authority chain. And that someone did it despite the fact there was an important diplomatic meeting approaching, and that such a provocative action could negatively affect that meeting. Or maybe they did it and didn’t care because “nothing will go wrong.”
Not that such things have never happened before. In May 1960, Francis Gary Powers launched from Peshawar, Pakistan, for a U-2 flight across the central Soviet Union, one of the last planned U-2 overflight missions, while the Chair Farce (old Navy term for the USAF) desperately continued their search for “all them bombers” they just knew the Russkies were hiding someplace there in that riddle wrapped in an enigma, despite the fact that every mission flown since 1955 had failed to find a damn thing. There was a Bomber Gap! They knew it! Keep digging! But all was well! U-2s couldn’t be shot down, so let’s try again and what did you say about Eisenhower meeting Krushchev in Paris next week?
A mistake had been made. A mistake that was only discovered when they found out the hard way that the Soviets had developed the SA-2 surface-to-air missile, that could get all the way up to 70,000 feet where Powers was tooling along over Svedlovsk.
And the result was that a summit between the US and the USSR that had held a lot of promise of being able to stabilize a relationship stuck in the coldest part of the Cold War didn’t happen. Eisenhower was so damn mad at the CIA and the Air Force for doing that - for looking for what hadn’t been found because the Russki bomber fleet never existed - that he was still mad enough to warn about the military-industrial complex seven months later in his farewell address.
Mistakes happen.
On June 28, 1914, Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife visited Sarajevo, on the front line of the border between the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. Gavrilo Princip, a member of a six-man assassination squad sent by Serbia, saw the Archduke and his party drive past his location, but there were too many police and the crowd was too big and discretion overcame patriotic fervor and he didn’t even try to shoot. Dejected, he turned away, thinking himself a failure.
In the meantime, the driver of the Archduke’s limousine got lost. He drove around and was unable to figure out where they were, so he pulled to the curb by the Latin Bridge, to pull out a map and see if he could make sense of things.
The dejected Gavrilo Princip was at the bridge, where he was considering he might throw himself into the river out of his shame over his cowardice. And then he looked over and what did he see? His target’s limousine pulling to a stop, 20 feet away on an otherwise-deserted street. The rest, as they say, is History.
Nobody really realized that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the pretext used by Kaiser Wilhelm II to start World War I, was the result of happenstance until several years after the end of a war that killed 30 percent of the male population of Europe between the ages of 18-35.
Mistakes happen. And World War I wasn’t the only war that began as the result of one.
My point is, I am personally glad that the Pentagon is trying to steer clear of the hysteria that now ranges from MSNBC to Faux Snooze over what might actually be a weather balloon - the 24/7 Anger & Upset Entertainment Complex is giddy to have a reason to attract eyeballs on a weekend, since they’re normally slow, news-wise. Take note of the fact that all the speculation (a nice word for spitballing) taking place is coming from people who only recently learned that balloons are actually round. One could probably take the hot air the pompous know-it-alls (who don’t) are producing and launch a similar-size balloon that could go to 100,000 feet.
I am certain of two things:
I wouldn’t want to be the mid-level Chinese bureaucrat who okayed the weather balloon mission, when he’s brought before Emperor Xi for the crime of Embarrassing The Throne Of Heaven.
And I am also certain that there will be calls in the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Complex for Steps To Be Taken to end this dangerous Balloon Gap we have just discovered.
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TC, I am a long-time subscriber to your newsletter, and I thank you for your hard work; I get a great deal of enlightenment and enjoyment from reading you. That said, I need to offer some corrective information to today's post about the Japanese firebomb endeavors during WWII. Unfortunately, there were fatalities caused by the bombs, and the military along with the media at the time, suppressed the information. One of the saddest events took place near tiny Bly, Oregon, when a minister, his pregnant wife, and five other children from their close-knit community went to Gearhart Mountain for a picnic on May 5, 1945. While the minister parked the car, his wife and the children scampered into the forest, where they found a strange object, and before the minister could warn them, there was an explosion. His wife, his unborn child, and the five Sunday school children had died. Information not released until more than 40 years later, identified several hundred incidents involving the balloons. After the above-mentioned incident, the military "reconsidered" its policies regarding information about the balloons, and started to warn people of the possible dangers still lurking in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, but the residents of Bly were nevertheless regarded with skepticism for decades. A self-imposed grieving silence lasted until the late 1980's. There is a stunning irony to this story, which provides another view of the tragedy of war. In Japan, during the war, young schoolgirls were conscripted to make the balloons, but were unaware of their purpose and the results. In the late 1980's, a University of Michigan professor Yuzuru "John" Takeshita, who as a child during the war, was interned at Tule Lake Internment Camp, which was barely 60 miles from Bly, Oregon. As an adult, he was committed to making healing efforts, when he discovered that a childhood friend's wife had been part of the bomb-making in Japan. It is a long story, but his efforts resulted in a group of the schoolgirls (now adults who were devastated to learn of their part in the bombs), sent 1,000 paper cranes to the people of Bly to express their regret, and years later, met face-to-face with the people of Bly, including surviving family members of the tragedy. Healing can happen, even years later. There is a helpful article in the Smithsonian Magazine, written by Francine Uenuma, May 22, 2019, Within the article, there are several links to related stories and documentaries, where one can go down rabbit holes! As a postscript to this, I personally was interested in these stories, having grown up in Salem, Oregon, in the 1950's and 60's, where I was not given any information in my schooling about the Japanese internment issue. In hindsight, I guess it makes a kind of sense, given the censorship by the military and the media. Years later, in the 1990's, when I was teaching a unit about the internment, using "Farewell to Manzanar" and other first-person accounts, I was told by a librarian aide that she was disappointed I was using those materials. When I asked "Why?" she told me that since I was not even born then and didn't know what it was like, I would not understand how frightened people were of the "Japanese threat." No amount of discussion would persuade her to think otherwise, sadly.
I laughed: "Take note of the fact that all the speculation (a nice word for spitballing) taking place is coming from people who only recently learned that balloons are actually round. "