July 4, 2026 • 34 mins
Picture this: It's late 1944, and you, like thousands of other people on the west coast of North America, have noticed bizarre, jellyfish-like objects floating through the sky. You call the local authorities, maybe even the Air Force, only to be ignored. You don't see anything about this in the papers or on the radio. You are in the midst of a real-world conspiracy of silence -- until, that is, the bombs begin to explode. Listen in to learn more about the attack of the Japanese balloon bombs in this week's Classic episode. (Also: Happy Birthday, America!)
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow Ridiculous Historians, Welcome to this week's classic episode. Noel,
have you ever been into balloons?
Speaker 2 (00:07):
You know, Ben, I do love balloons. They're just a
delightful thing to behold. They like it when they float,
I like it when they bounce. I just like them.
I like them when they're shaped like things. I like
them when they're wielded by clowns. I don't really like
them as delivery mechanisms for bombs, though.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Ah yeah, yeah, that's why you and I should have
been in the meeting in late nineteen forty four, probably
a few years before that, when thousands of people on
the West coast of the United States noticed bizarre what
they call jellyfish like objects floating in the sky.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Yeah. And this episode is called the Attack of the
Japanese Balloon Bombs. And let's roll the tape.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome to the show,
(01:19):
Ridiculous Historians. Quick Peak behind the Curtain. It is Friday
as we record this, and all three of us are
really looking forward to the weekends. Hi.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
I'm Ben, Hi, I'm Nolan. Double Peak behind the Curtain.
This is take two of starting this episode. The first
time around, I said that my name was Ben, and
you had said that we were very excited to be here.
I was going to say, I'm very exhausted but still
excited to be here, but then I called myself you.
I don't know if that's some kind of like Freudian
thing or what, but I am happy to be here
(01:49):
and happy to see you.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
I'm happy, I'm happy to be here, and I'm happy
to see you as well, Nola. The same goes for
our super producer, Casey Pegram.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Quick question for.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
You, Casey, have you ever been in a hot air balloon?
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Never? No? What about you, Nol? No, it seems utterly
terrifying to me. I am.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
I have also never, as far as I know, been
in a hot air balloon, so if I ever was,
I must have been a wei wei tyke. But there
are one of my favorite of ridiculous human inventions. Can
you just imagine the cartoonish audacity of it. Someone said, well,
we'll just you know, get up there and see how
it goes from there. Hot air balloons, aside from being
(02:34):
you know, visually stunning and inspiring, are also a passion
of many many people. In fact, we before we went
on the air today. We're looking into this and I
found no less than three hot air balloon festivals going
on here in our fair state of Georgia. So this
(02:56):
is my pitch, Noel Casey, do you guys want to
go on a hot air balloon with me?
Speaker 2 (03:00):
We could become ridiculous history, the podcast of the air.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
There we go, and some people, perhaps Chryl Crow included,
would say that we have enough hot air already.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Eh, she is just the worst. Man. She's really dogging us. Man,
Why dude, I don't know what do we ever do
to Cheryl.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Just complimented the bongos, you know I always do.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
I really do think that's a very important moment in
American music. Agreed. Agreed, my friend.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
We want to hear about the hot air balloon experiences
in your life, where the festivals in your neck of
the global woods.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
And we'll keep you guys updated over.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
The summer if any of us or all of us
make it to one of those. But today's story is
not about the fun, high altitude hijinks of touring the
air in a hot air balloon. No, it is about
balloons as weapons.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Yeah, I mean, when we think of aerial attacks against
the United States. The first thing, obviously that comes to mind,
and for many the only thing that comes to mind,
are the tragic events of Pearl Harbor on December seventh
of nineteen forty one, when Japanese forces mounted a bombing
raid on Pearl Harbor, kicking off the events of World
War II on September ninth of nineteen forty two. But
(04:15):
it turns out, Ben, that is not the only air
attack on American soil.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
You're absolutely right. It turns out that one of the
most unusual attacks on American soil occurred during World War Two,
and it was a balloon attack, or it would be
more accurate to say a balloon bombing. You see, the
Japanese army employed balloon bombs, or as they were called
(04:42):
fugos fugs. Starting in nineteen forty four, the Japanese military
constructed and launched over nine thousand high altitude balloons, and
these each were loaded with fifty pounds of explosives.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
That's right, Ben, So the Japanese Military Scientific Laboratory actually
came up with the idea of what they referred to
as fusen bakuden or balloon bombs, back in nineteen thirty
three and the FuGO that you mentioned, ben Or These
balloon bombs were just one of several ideas that were
proposed by this research unit, and there's a fantastic scholarly
(05:23):
report in the Smithsonian Annals of Flight by Robert C. Mikis.
It's kind of the definitive work on this, and it's
pretty crazy. Some of the ideas they didn't go with
are even more ridiculous. There's one called a death ray,
and the idea there was it was going to be
balloon driven. It would shoot like electric rays or like
(05:45):
you know, electric bolts at people on the ground. It
would like hover low. And then there were several other
versions of what became the fugos. Lieutenant General Raikichi Tada
of the Japanese Military Scientific Laboratory is the one who
was assigned to this program, and he developed several pretty
out there ideas that were already in the worst. One
(06:06):
of them was the i Go weapon, which was a
wire controlled tank that could attack enemy positions. And then
there was the Rogo weapon, which was a rocket propelled weapon.
And then you had what I mentioned earlier, the death
ray that would kill enemies up close with this electric charge.
But the one that seemed like it was going to
(06:27):
be a winner out of these, the one they wanted
to take all the way was the FuGO weapon, which
was an altitude controlled balloon. In terms of my say
out toude controlled, I mean there was a barometric valve
that would act according to the elevation according to how
the altitude of the of the balloon, and it would
(06:47):
drop sandbags if it went too high, and then it
would change the amount of air that was in the
balloon when it went too low. And the idea was
it had a fuse that would ignite once the wind
currents carried the balloon close to the American coast, and
the idea was to wreak havoc and chaos on America's
(07:12):
Pacific Northwest region, specifically by causing forest fires. These incendiary
devices would deploy when the fuse would burn up, and
it was meant to not necessarily cause any kind of
real infrastructure dam would just kind of cause chaos and
mass confusion.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Yeah, and you know, we can totally understand how this
pitch sounds crazy at first, blush, but a little bit
of a historical context will help us realize that this
is this is kind of a brilliant idea. This is
not the first time balloons were weaponized. During the Italian
War of Independence from eighteen forty eight to eighteen forty nine,
(07:52):
Austrian lieutenant Yukitus undertook the technical development of balloons that
could be used as bombs. So there was historical precedent,
and the thing was, no one had quite pulled it
off as successfully as the Japanese military would hope. Let's
(08:12):
talk just a little bit about these balloons, as described
by Jay David Rogers of the Missouri University of Science
and Technology. These balloon bombs were thirty three feet in
diameter and they could lift about one thousand pounds. But
the deadly portion of the cargo again was this thirty
three pounds anti personnel frag bomb, fragmentation bomb, and it
(08:34):
was attached to that fuse you mentioned NOLA, sixty four
foot long fuse that was intended to burn for exactly
eighty two minutes before detonating. And despite the fact that
these are weapons of war, you have to appreciate the esthetic.
These balloons were made of rubber eyed silk or paper,
and they were handmade. These were glued together. Now one
(08:59):
of the things that we not being hot air balloon experts,
have always wondered alone and together here on the show,
is how exactly you steer a hot air balloon, Because
on the offset it seems tough. You would want like
a fan up there, maybe to provide some sort of
propulsion or to function more or less as a rudder.
(09:22):
For the Japanese military. The goal here was kind of
a spaghetti At the wall approached, they decided that quantity
was a quality all its own, and so they released
and estimated nine thousand of these balloons. So far as
we know, at least three hundred and forty two reach
the US and some even got as far as Nebraska.
(09:46):
But what was their attrition rate? Were they actually causing harm?
Speaker 2 (09:51):
No? No, because they couldn't be steered and the technology
or the idea behind them as they would travel on
these winter jet streams for an average of sixty hours
to reach America, And like you said, they greenlit through
this project after realizing that there was a potential for success.
About ten thousand, between nine and ten thousand these balloons,
(10:11):
and they were handmade ben by school children, by young
schoolgirls from a neighboring school to the site of this project,
and it took thirty men about thirty minutes to an
hour to prepare each of these balloons for flight. And
let's remember these were unmanned balloons. These were meant to
(10:32):
be autonomous and to behave in certain ways depending on
the altitude, and just hope that they would get to
their target. And the fact of the matter is they
were launched on the birthday of the former Emperor Meiji,
and that is when the first series of launches took place.
And despite the project being top secret, they were not
(10:55):
very inconspicuous. They were spotted. They were described as looking
like clusters of jellyfish in the sky.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Absolutely, because if you look at the picture, you've got
this thirty three foot diameter balloon, right, and then you've
got this fuse going down and the stuff that it's carrying.
It looks like a large version of snap and pops.
Do you guys remember those the little paper bags that
you would throw and they would have a.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Pop, Yeah, with a tiny little you know the top.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Yeah, it looks it looks very similar to that, or
maybe tea bags wrapped in twine. The thing is that
although they launched thousands and thousands of these balloons. They
didn't cause the level of havoc that the Japanese military
hoped they would create. They did have some damaging psychological
(11:50):
effects because you look up in the sky and there's
this balloon invasion that's unexplained. And the amazing thing is
that they made it across the Pacific at all. They
were launched from Japan to the US and into Canada,
and that trip took several days, again with no one
on board, no one steering. And here's one of the problems.
(12:12):
The US reacted in a very strange way. Two days
after the initial launch, there's a Navy patrol off the
coast of California and they see some tattered cloth in
the sea. They retrieve it and they noticed that as
Japanese characters on it. They alert the FBI. And then
two weeks later more c debris of balloons that didn't
(12:34):
make the journey or found, and the military started putting
together the puzzle pieces. They said, something is up. And
then over the next four weeks, reports of balloons started
coming in from all across the western half of North America,
and every day American citizens began seeing these tattered pieces
(12:55):
of cloth or hearing explosions in the distance.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
In nineteen forty four. December nineteen forty four, workers at
a coal mine that was near Thermopolis, Wyoming described seeing
a quote parachute in the air with lighted flares and
after hearing a whistling noise, that's when they heard the
sound of an explosion and they saw smoke very near
the mine.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
And the military immediately freaks out about this, but initially
they are not worried about explosives being carried by balloons.
Some of the folks in the military on the US
side are concerned that these balloons may carry something potentially
far more dangerous than explosives. They are concerned that these
balloons may carry biological weapons, and they thought maybe the
(13:46):
balloons were being launched from the Japanese relocation or internment
camps that existed at the time, or German pow camps.
And it wasn't until later in December of nineteen forty
four military intelligence project was put together to evaluate and
collect various evidence of these balloon sites and they figured
(14:08):
out they were coming from Japan, not just made by
Japanese forces, but coming from Japan. When they looked into
a ballast and found that the sand inside the ballast
was from a beach in the south of Japan, and
they realized that these were meant to carry explosives. And
the problem with those explosives is that they could pose
(14:30):
a huge danger to the forest of the Pacific Northwest.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Yeah, that's right, because it's very dry in the winter
and these forest fires could really spread and cause some
serious havoc. And that was exactly what the Japanese had
in mind. Again, they weren't thinking this is going to,
you know, put a real dent militarily in the US forces,
but it would cause some panic and be pretty inconvenient.
(14:55):
But the military pretty quickly realized that these war very
precision targeted, that they were pretty aimless. And even though
they realized that they were not going to be very successful,
as we heard from the folks that reported from the
coal mine, it kind of blew up in mid air
(15:15):
and didn't actually cause any damage. It just kind of
freaked them out. They still the military did not warn
the public. They kept it very top secret and they
did their investigation into it, like you described it, They
didn't put out any kind of notice. So people were
still seeing these clusters of weird floating jellyfish and didn't
know what the hell was going on.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
Was it a UFO, Was it an errant domestic hobbyist?
What was that smoke in the distance? Did you also
hear that explosion?
Speaker 2 (15:43):
It was.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
With the benefit of retrospect, we can say the US
military took the wrong course of action when they decided
to stay silent, because in the latter when there's no transparency,
speculation thrives. But their logic did make sense at the time,
because they didn't want the Japanese forces to get a
morale boost from hearing anything about this operation being a success.
(16:11):
The Office of Censorship went so far as to instruct
newspapers and radio stations not to discuss the balloon's in
print or on air, and they made that decree on
January fourth of nineteen forty five, and the Japanese only
heard about one balloon incident on the North American continent,
(16:32):
and that was through a Chinese newspaper. Now, as innovative
and unsuccessful as this plan may sound, the unfortunate truth
is that they did cause some fatalities.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Yeah, that's the thing they kept. The US military kept
this thing under pretty tight wraps. Until an incident occurred
that actually did cause some casualties. Now, Japanese Ome News
Agency was reporting on February seventeenth of nineteen forty five
that this had been a success, since this is a
(17:08):
propaganda paper, and it was really, really, really inflating the numbers,
standing that between five hundred and ten thousand casualties occurred.
But here's the reality. It was actually six six casualties
and they were historically the only casualties on American soil
for World War two, which is crazy because you think
(17:30):
you would have heard of this, and I had never
heard of this until he looked into it. So what happened?
Speaker 1 (17:35):
So this takes place in Bly, Oregon. It was a
Sunday school picnic. They approached the mysterious debris of one
of these balloons. A fellow named Reverend Archie Mitchell was
about to yell a warning to the kids when the
balloon exploded. Sherman Shoemaker, Edward Ingen, Jay Gifford, Joan Patskey,
(17:58):
and Dick Patsky were all killed. And these were children.
They were eleven to fourteen years old. The reverend's wife,
Elsie Mitchell, also died, and she was five months pregnant.
This tragedy is what caused the US military to finally
break its silence and its suppression of the story. And
(18:21):
so they began issuing warnings not to tamper with anything
that looked remotely like one of these balloons.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Because let's just backstrack slightly. This balloon wasn't deployed properly.
It's not like it fell on them. It was already
on the ground, on the ground. And like basically, this
woman when she pulled the family car, pulled over because
she was feeling some morning sickness, and she discovered this
bundle of stuff that looked kind of like paper, likes
(18:47):
almost like wrigami paper or something like that, and thought
it was neat looking, and they started poking at it
or something, right.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Yeah, yeah, and she said, look what I found deer.
According to the Male Tribune newspaper in southern Oregon, there's
a great article you can read about this from David
Kravitz writing on Wired May fifth, nineteen forty five. Japanese
balloon bomb kills six in Oregon. So it left these
innocent people dead in a horrific scene. They didn't all
(19:18):
die immediately. Joan Patsky died minutes after being seriously injured.
There was a one foot hole in the ground. And
although they were, as you said, nol the only known
casualties of this operation, the US government didn't want to
take any chances, so they issued, you know, they started
(19:40):
warning people not to mess with these things. They also,
at the same time, somewhat counterintuitively or paradoxically, emphasized that
the balloons did not represent a serious threat, and they said,
just report these, just let us know if you see them,
we'll send someone to take care of them. And that
led to, you know, as we said, three hundred to
(20:02):
three hundred and forty two incidents being recorded, with various
parts recovered, but no lives lost. They did, however, have
a very close call with infrastructure.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Yeah, one of them hit a power line and caused
a blackout at a weapons facility in Hanford, Washington, a
nuclear weapons facility that could have gone a lot worse
than it did.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
According to Colonel Franklin Matthias, the Hanford plant did lose
about two days of production, but he thought he as
he recalls, at least, he says, we were all tickled
to death that this happened, because it proved our backup
system worked as far as keeping everything stable when they
lose the power. And another guy there, Vincent Budd Whitehead,
(20:47):
who is a counterintelligence agency at Hanford, recalled chasing and
bringing down another balloon and he was chasing it from
a small airplane. This this is crazy. This is what
he literally did. He says, I threw a brick at it,
I put a hole in it, and it went down.
I got out there and I started trumping all over
that thing and got all the gas out of it.
A radioed in that I have found it and got it.
(21:09):
They sent a bus up with all the specially trained
personnel gloves full of contamination suits mask. I had been
walking around on that stuff and they had not told
me that they were afraid of bacterial warfare.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Yees, I know. I want to do a quick correction.
It wasn't. The balloon didn't hit the Hanford site. It
hit the Bonneville Power Administration in Washington, which supplied power
to the Hanford site. That was one of the biggest
consumers of power from that particular grid, and so that
could have caused some major problems.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
And so balloon sightings continued throughout the years. It's interesting
because you know how these kind of things can take
over a country's collective attention span. Right just after the war,
reports continued to come in from far and wide about
balloon incidents. The Beatrice Daily Sun reports them over set
(22:00):
in different towns in Nebraska, including Omaha. The Winnipeg Tribune
notes that there's a balloon bomb found ten miles from
Detroit one near Grand Rapids. They were still finding balloon
bombs as far as like the mid nineteen fifties.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, these were like artifacts
at this point, right, they were exploded already, or maybe
they didn't go off properly, and they were scattered, because
I mean that's ten thousand that were deployed with various
that ended up scattered all over the country. I think
they made it as far as Michigan, I want.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
To say, right, yeah, they made as far as Michigan, Hawaii,
and Alaska. I believe it was in January of nineteen
fifty five. The Albuquerque Journal reports that the US Air
Force discovered a balloon in Alaska in nineteen fifty five,
and then in nineteen forty four. Looking back enough, it
(22:53):
called the Santa Cruz Sentinel noted that a fellow named
Bert Webber, who was an author and researcher, had found
forty five different balloon bombs in Oregon, thirty seven in Alaska,
twenty eight in Washington, and twenty five in California, and
reports still continued to pour in. There was one found
in October of twenty fourteen, really yeah, yeah, in British Columbia.
(23:19):
According to Henry Pros of the RCMP, or Royal Canadian
Mounted Police, this balloon had been in the dirt for
seventy years, and he said it would have been way
too dangerous to move it. So it's possible that someone
found it in the intervening decades and just decided to
let sleeping dogs lie.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
So in other words, they didn't work. They were duds, right,
like the fuse didn't ignite properly, and then they just
went down and there was no boom.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
But still if you mess with it, you know what
I mean, you could cause it to explode.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
I don't think we found this ben but what was
the material. I know the balloons were hydrogen balloons, so
that could have even aided in the spreading of the
fire because that's highly flammable. In Hindenberg and all that.
But what was the material the explosives were made of.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Incendiary bomb is kind of a genre of bomb. It
can include stuff like napalm, magnesium powder, white phosphorus. These
used thermite and thermite is uh, how did you say?
Did it occur in Breaking Back?
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Yeah, there's there's one of those Mageiver kind of moments
in Breaking Back where I think he uses an Etcha
sketch or like the iron filings in an etch a
sketch to create thermite or to make a reaction that
produceds this explosion. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
Thermite is a mixture of finely powdered aluminum and iron oxide.
It creates a really high temperature on combustion, and it's
often used in welding and for incendiary bombs. So this
is this is dangerous stuff. And in twenty fourteen when
(24:58):
the RCMP you found this, you know, this ancient bomb,
they handled it by putting C four explosives on either
side of the thing and blowing it to smitherings and therm.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
I've burned so hot that it can as it was
used in that scene Breaking Bad melt metal. Yeah, oh yeah,
I mean it's it's a it's a biggie. It's nothing
to play with. Uh.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
So it's interesting because we have to consider how much
of this plan and how much of the fallout of
it hinged purely on chance, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
Well, that's the thing we talked about earlier at the
top of the show. There's really no way even if
you're manning a balloon or you're piloting a balloon, you're
kind of just able to go up and down. I mean,
we talked off air about how a zeppelin or a
blimp is a more or less a steerable hot air
balloon because it's more streamlined, and it moves in a
forward direction, right, and it's got like a fan system.
(25:50):
But this kind of balloon really can only go up
and down. And as we described earlier, it was a
kind of altitude controlled system. I believe I said it
the other way around earlier in the show, so I
just want to correct myself there. If it was going
too high, then hydrogen would be released from the balloon,
and if it was going too low, then sandbags would
(26:12):
be deployed. And it was all this kind of valve
that was controlled like barometrically to keep it at a
more or less consistent altitude in order to have the
most consistent path because it was being pushed along by
these these winter jet streams. But once you let them go,
there's just no precision. It's like the episode we did
on the bat bombs, remember that, ben Yeah, very similar
(26:34):
where they had to be deployed automatically using very similar
mechanisms I imagine or I believe. And those were a
big old mess too, And didn't we We used those
against the Japanese, remember, Yeah, because we dropped them on
Japanese villages because the houses were made of wood and
paper and stuff, and they would potentially burn the houses, right, yeah,
well not you and I specifically, No, the bats would.
(26:56):
The bats would nest in the eves and then they
had time that would then eventually set off the devices.
But that was a big flop too.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
That's the thing about innovation, it's always risky. Let's talk
a little bit about the nuts and bolts of how
this thing actually exploded, Like what triggers the bomb.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Well, they were a couple of different types of ordinance
or payload is the military term that they used. I
think most of them used thermite, but they were just
different sizes, and there were different ones that had slightly
different mechanisms.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
Yeah, anti personnel and in syndiata, that's right exactly.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
But the incendiary device that I think was most common
had a fuse that gets armed during flight, and then
when it's dropped on impact, there's a magazine that's fired,
which then ignites a black powder charge. It's much like
the way a pistol works, right, And then that in
turn ignites a central channel that contains another charge and
(27:53):
then the incendiary material, and there are these different pots
that have more black powder charge, and then the explosive
force of those reactions, that chain reaction that triggers the thermite,
and then the body of the bomb actually erupts. It's
enough to because it's made of metal, right.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
And so we see the logic, we see how this
could work, and we see the primary flaw on the
plan the reliance on chance, right on who fortune favors
that day. And this speaks to the desperate state of
the war, you know, and the desperate state of the
Japanese military at the time. While weaponized balloons did not
(28:35):
work out for the Japanese military World War two, that
doesn't mean that our species has given up all hope
of weaponizing balloons. In fact, we're still as a species
developing weaponized balloons today. The United States Department of Defense
Missile Defense Agency contracted Lacky Martin to construct what they
(28:58):
called a high Altitude air Ship or HA for short
a case for part of its ballistic Missile Defense system.
This thing is unmanned. It is supposed to operate at
a height of over sixty thousand feet or eighteen thousand
meters in a quasi geostationary position, to be a surveillance aircraft,
(29:24):
to relay telecommunications, and to observe weather. Pretty pretty crazy stuff,
you know.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
Yeah, for sure. And I think that, you know, the
way balloons are used mostly today is for observing weather.
And then I think there was there was a remember
the Google Loon project. I love the name. Yeah, it
was a way to deploy wireless Internet connectivity in rural
rural areas and it was literally like, you know, some
sort of broadcast device that was attached to a balloon
(29:54):
that could then hover over like these areas and they
could like get Wi Fi that way.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
Man, I love blimps in balloon so much. I get
that there's silly. A few years ago, our pal Scott
Benjamin and I got really close to getting into a
good Year blimp. And the more I think about it,
you know, the only reason we don't have more blimps
now is because someone would be a jerk and attack
(30:18):
them or blow them up.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
Why can't we have nice things? Why can't I have
a blimp? I know, I know, and I'll tell you this.
I tell you I would not want to ride in
a basket on a hot air balloon, but I'd be
totally cool with riding in a blimp and style.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Right.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
It's just a bigger bask first class for me, baby, right.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
Like in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Remember he
hops on an airship.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
Oh yeah. Airships are so cool because they're so ominous
and so slow moving and they have this kind of
like doom Bringer kind of quality to them, you know,
and they make me think of like sky Captain in
the World of Tomorrow, or that this kind of like
idea of like a weird steam punky kind of future,
you know.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Angeline and Julie with an eyepatch. Oh yeah, eye patches
are so cool.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Her eyepatch didn't have a string though, it just kind
of like stuck there.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
Yeah, it was just the patch because of the future,
because of the because of the retro future. Well, no,
while I am while I'm candidly a little bit let down,
poor choice of words that you don't want to go
in a hot air balloon, I totally understand where you're
coming from. And I would ride in a blimp with you,
(31:24):
Casey Pegrim. Would you ride in a hot air balloon?
You know, if I had a hot air balloon handy
and we could be like up and back down pretty soon,
would you would you hop on?
Speaker 2 (31:35):
I'll consider it. I'll consider it. What if there was
a guarantee that we would take you to the land
of oz Uh, I'll consider it. Okay, okay, by which
we mean Australia.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
So let us know what you think, let us know
about your balloon experiences. Let us know if you would
be in a hot air balloon and you know, honestly,
we just have to shoot our shot at some point.
There's no harm in ask skiing. Do you have a blimp?
Do you have access to a blimp? Because we would
love to hang out with you on your blimp.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
That would be a pretty baller vehicle to own. Only
the elitist of the elite can own a blimp.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
It's such a it's such a toy, like unless it's
one of those high altitude surveillance platforms. It feels like
any private citizen who just says I want to blimp
is buying this billionaire's toy.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
So I'm saying, if you have a blimp, you also
have to have like a hangar, a blimp sized hangar,
or some way to tether it to like the top
of your you know, skyscraper or whatever. It would be
so cool to be at a blimp. It would be
pretty cool. We did an episode on blimps on like
that was it was like made of pig skin or
something like that, or it was made of you know,
some organic material. And I believe there was a time
(32:44):
where they were infrastructure was being put in place to
like stow blimps and they were literally tethered to the
tops of buildings. Yes, that is correct, and they could
get into them that way like they would like lower
down ladders. I don't remember exactly how it worked.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
And if you want to learn more about airships, dirigibles,
hot air balloons, and blimps, you can check out You
can check out some old car stuff episodes early in
our respective careers, so so do be kind, but yes,
please let us know about your airship and balloon adventures.
You can find us on our Facebook group Ridiculous Historians,
(33:20):
where you can meet our favorite part of the show,
your fellow listeners. You can also find us on Twitter
and Instagram, either as our show or Dramatic Pause, as
ourselves individually.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
I am at embryonic insider, I.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
Am at Ben Bolin. Also massive things as always to
super producer Casey Pegrim.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
As always big thanks to our research associate Gabe Lozier,
Alex Williams who composed our theme, our dear friend in
spirit here with us now, Christopher Hasiotis, and you Ben,
I'd like to thank you for just being such a
dapper young lad with a of gold and a fine
head of hair.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
Well, thank you, Nol. I appreciate that. And likewise to you,
you've got a killer hat on and I you know
I've been admiring your gorilla hat for anyone who doesn't know.
My friend here is a big fan of ball caps
and has quite a collection, and I gotta tell you, man,
I appreciate that compliment because I'm feeling a little, a
little under the weather today. I'm kind of slumming it.
(34:24):
I'm wearing jeans.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
Oh, I can't see him because theyre underneath the table
from where I set. You look like a fine strapping
young lad. Thank you, thank you. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
I wonder where the free strapping came from to describe
someone as capable.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
Story for another time, I think so. I think we
should explore it on another episode of Ridiculous History. We'll
see you next time. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Fellow Ridiculous Historians, Welcome to this week's classic episode. Noel,
have you ever been into balloons?
Speaker 2 (00:07):
You know, Ben, I do love balloons. They're just a
delightful thing to behold. They like it when they float,
I like it when they bounce. I just like them.
I like them when they're shaped like things. I like
them when they're wielded by clowns. I don't really like
them as delivery mechanisms for bombs, though.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Ah yeah, yeah, that's why you and I should have
been in the meeting in late nineteen forty four, probably
a few years before that, when thousands of people on
the West coast of the United States noticed bizarre what
they call jellyfish like objects floating in the sky.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Yeah. And this episode is called the Attack of the
Japanese Balloon Bombs. And let's roll the tape.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome to the show,
(01:19):
Ridiculous Historians. Quick Peak behind the Curtain. It is Friday
as we record this, and all three of us are
really looking forward to the weekends. Hi.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
I'm Ben, Hi, I'm Nolan. Double Peak behind the Curtain.
This is take two of starting this episode. The first
time around, I said that my name was Ben, and
you had said that we were very excited to be here.
I was going to say, I'm very exhausted but still
excited to be here, but then I called myself you.
I don't know if that's some kind of like Freudian
thing or what, but I am happy to be here
(01:49):
and happy to see you.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
I'm happy, I'm happy to be here, and I'm happy
to see you as well, Nola. The same goes for
our super producer, Casey Pegram.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Quick question for.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
You, Casey, have you ever been in a hot air balloon?
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Never? No? What about you, Nol? No, it seems utterly
terrifying to me. I am.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
I have also never, as far as I know, been
in a hot air balloon, so if I ever was,
I must have been a wei wei tyke. But there
are one of my favorite of ridiculous human inventions. Can
you just imagine the cartoonish audacity of it. Someone said, well,
we'll just you know, get up there and see how
it goes from there. Hot air balloons, aside from being
(02:34):
you know, visually stunning and inspiring, are also a passion
of many many people. In fact, we before we went
on the air today. We're looking into this and I
found no less than three hot air balloon festivals going
on here in our fair state of Georgia. So this
(02:56):
is my pitch, Noel Casey, do you guys want to
go on a hot air balloon with me?
Speaker 2 (03:00):
We could become ridiculous history, the podcast of the air.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
There we go, and some people, perhaps Chryl Crow included,
would say that we have enough hot air already.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Eh, she is just the worst. Man. She's really dogging us. Man,
Why dude, I don't know what do we ever do
to Cheryl.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Just complimented the bongos, you know I always do.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
I really do think that's a very important moment in
American music. Agreed. Agreed, my friend.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
We want to hear about the hot air balloon experiences
in your life, where the festivals in your neck of
the global woods.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
And we'll keep you guys updated over.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
The summer if any of us or all of us
make it to one of those. But today's story is
not about the fun, high altitude hijinks of touring the
air in a hot air balloon. No, it is about
balloons as weapons.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Yeah, I mean, when we think of aerial attacks against
the United States. The first thing, obviously that comes to mind,
and for many the only thing that comes to mind,
are the tragic events of Pearl Harbor on December seventh
of nineteen forty one, when Japanese forces mounted a bombing
raid on Pearl Harbor, kicking off the events of World
War II on September ninth of nineteen forty two. But
(04:15):
it turns out, Ben, that is not the only air
attack on American soil.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
You're absolutely right. It turns out that one of the
most unusual attacks on American soil occurred during World War Two,
and it was a balloon attack, or it would be
more accurate to say a balloon bombing. You see, the
Japanese army employed balloon bombs, or as they were called
(04:42):
fugos fugs. Starting in nineteen forty four, the Japanese military
constructed and launched over nine thousand high altitude balloons, and
these each were loaded with fifty pounds of explosives.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
That's right, Ben, So the Japanese Military Scientific Laboratory actually
came up with the idea of what they referred to
as fusen bakuden or balloon bombs, back in nineteen thirty
three and the FuGO that you mentioned, ben Or These
balloon bombs were just one of several ideas that were
proposed by this research unit, and there's a fantastic scholarly
(05:23):
report in the Smithsonian Annals of Flight by Robert C. Mikis.
It's kind of the definitive work on this, and it's
pretty crazy. Some of the ideas they didn't go with
are even more ridiculous. There's one called a death ray,
and the idea there was it was going to be
balloon driven. It would shoot like electric rays or like
(05:45):
you know, electric bolts at people on the ground. It
would like hover low. And then there were several other
versions of what became the fugos. Lieutenant General Raikichi Tada
of the Japanese Military Scientific Laboratory is the one who
was assigned to this program, and he developed several pretty
out there ideas that were already in the worst. One
(06:06):
of them was the i Go weapon, which was a
wire controlled tank that could attack enemy positions. And then
there was the Rogo weapon, which was a rocket propelled weapon.
And then you had what I mentioned earlier, the death
ray that would kill enemies up close with this electric charge.
But the one that seemed like it was going to
(06:27):
be a winner out of these, the one they wanted
to take all the way was the FuGO weapon, which
was an altitude controlled balloon. In terms of my say
out toude controlled, I mean there was a barometric valve
that would act according to the elevation according to how
the altitude of the of the balloon, and it would
(06:47):
drop sandbags if it went too high, and then it
would change the amount of air that was in the
balloon when it went too low. And the idea was
it had a fuse that would ignite once the wind
currents carried the balloon close to the American coast, and
the idea was to wreak havoc and chaos on America's
(07:12):
Pacific Northwest region, specifically by causing forest fires. These incendiary
devices would deploy when the fuse would burn up, and
it was meant to not necessarily cause any kind of
real infrastructure dam would just kind of cause chaos and
mass confusion.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Yeah, and you know, we can totally understand how this
pitch sounds crazy at first, blush, but a little bit
of a historical context will help us realize that this
is this is kind of a brilliant idea. This is
not the first time balloons were weaponized. During the Italian
War of Independence from eighteen forty eight to eighteen forty nine,
(07:52):
Austrian lieutenant Yukitus undertook the technical development of balloons that
could be used as bombs. So there was historical precedent,
and the thing was, no one had quite pulled it
off as successfully as the Japanese military would hope. Let's
(08:12):
talk just a little bit about these balloons, as described
by Jay David Rogers of the Missouri University of Science
and Technology. These balloon bombs were thirty three feet in
diameter and they could lift about one thousand pounds. But
the deadly portion of the cargo again was this thirty
three pounds anti personnel frag bomb, fragmentation bomb, and it
(08:34):
was attached to that fuse you mentioned NOLA, sixty four
foot long fuse that was intended to burn for exactly
eighty two minutes before detonating. And despite the fact that
these are weapons of war, you have to appreciate the esthetic.
These balloons were made of rubber eyed silk or paper,
and they were handmade. These were glued together. Now one
(08:59):
of the things that we not being hot air balloon experts,
have always wondered alone and together here on the show,
is how exactly you steer a hot air balloon, Because
on the offset it seems tough. You would want like
a fan up there, maybe to provide some sort of
propulsion or to function more or less as a rudder.
(09:22):
For the Japanese military. The goal here was kind of
a spaghetti At the wall approached, they decided that quantity
was a quality all its own, and so they released
and estimated nine thousand of these balloons. So far as
we know, at least three hundred and forty two reach
the US and some even got as far as Nebraska.
(09:46):
But what was their attrition rate? Were they actually causing harm?
Speaker 2 (09:51):
No? No, because they couldn't be steered and the technology
or the idea behind them as they would travel on
these winter jet streams for an average of sixty hours
to reach America, And like you said, they greenlit through
this project after realizing that there was a potential for success.
About ten thousand, between nine and ten thousand these balloons,
(10:11):
and they were handmade ben by school children, by young
schoolgirls from a neighboring school to the site of this project,
and it took thirty men about thirty minutes to an
hour to prepare each of these balloons for flight. And
let's remember these were unmanned balloons. These were meant to
(10:32):
be autonomous and to behave in certain ways depending on
the altitude, and just hope that they would get to
their target. And the fact of the matter is they
were launched on the birthday of the former Emperor Meiji,
and that is when the first series of launches took place.
And despite the project being top secret, they were not
(10:55):
very inconspicuous. They were spotted. They were described as looking
like clusters of jellyfish in the sky.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Absolutely, because if you look at the picture, you've got
this thirty three foot diameter balloon, right, and then you've
got this fuse going down and the stuff that it's carrying.
It looks like a large version of snap and pops.
Do you guys remember those the little paper bags that
you would throw and they would have a.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Pop, Yeah, with a tiny little you know the top.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Yeah, it looks it looks very similar to that, or
maybe tea bags wrapped in twine. The thing is that
although they launched thousands and thousands of these balloons. They
didn't cause the level of havoc that the Japanese military
hoped they would create. They did have some damaging psychological
(11:50):
effects because you look up in the sky and there's
this balloon invasion that's unexplained. And the amazing thing is
that they made it across the Pacific at all. They
were launched from Japan to the US and into Canada,
and that trip took several days, again with no one
on board, no one steering. And here's one of the problems.
(12:12):
The US reacted in a very strange way. Two days
after the initial launch, there's a Navy patrol off the
coast of California and they see some tattered cloth in
the sea. They retrieve it and they noticed that as
Japanese characters on it. They alert the FBI. And then
two weeks later more c debris of balloons that didn't
(12:34):
make the journey or found, and the military started putting
together the puzzle pieces. They said, something is up. And
then over the next four weeks, reports of balloons started
coming in from all across the western half of North America,
and every day American citizens began seeing these tattered pieces
(12:55):
of cloth or hearing explosions in the distance.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
In nineteen forty four. December nineteen forty four, workers at
a coal mine that was near Thermopolis, Wyoming described seeing
a quote parachute in the air with lighted flares and
after hearing a whistling noise, that's when they heard the
sound of an explosion and they saw smoke very near
the mine.
Speaker 1 (13:21):
And the military immediately freaks out about this, but initially
they are not worried about explosives being carried by balloons.
Some of the folks in the military on the US
side are concerned that these balloons may carry something potentially
far more dangerous than explosives. They are concerned that these
balloons may carry biological weapons, and they thought maybe the
(13:46):
balloons were being launched from the Japanese relocation or internment
camps that existed at the time, or German pow camps.
And it wasn't until later in December of nineteen forty
four military intelligence project was put together to evaluate and
collect various evidence of these balloon sites and they figured
(14:08):
out they were coming from Japan, not just made by
Japanese forces, but coming from Japan. When they looked into
a ballast and found that the sand inside the ballast
was from a beach in the south of Japan, and
they realized that these were meant to carry explosives. And
the problem with those explosives is that they could pose
(14:30):
a huge danger to the forest of the Pacific Northwest.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Yeah, that's right, because it's very dry in the winter
and these forest fires could really spread and cause some
serious havoc. And that was exactly what the Japanese had
in mind. Again, they weren't thinking this is going to,
you know, put a real dent militarily in the US forces,
but it would cause some panic and be pretty inconvenient.
(14:55):
But the military pretty quickly realized that these war very
precision targeted, that they were pretty aimless. And even though
they realized that they were not going to be very successful,
as we heard from the folks that reported from the
coal mine, it kind of blew up in mid air
(15:15):
and didn't actually cause any damage. It just kind of
freaked them out. They still the military did not warn
the public. They kept it very top secret and they
did their investigation into it, like you described it, They
didn't put out any kind of notice. So people were
still seeing these clusters of weird floating jellyfish and didn't
know what the hell was going on.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
Was it a UFO, Was it an errant domestic hobbyist?
What was that smoke in the distance? Did you also
hear that explosion?
Speaker 2 (15:43):
It was.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
With the benefit of retrospect, we can say the US
military took the wrong course of action when they decided
to stay silent, because in the latter when there's no transparency,
speculation thrives. But their logic did make sense at the time,
because they didn't want the Japanese forces to get a
morale boost from hearing anything about this operation being a success.
(16:11):
The Office of Censorship went so far as to instruct
newspapers and radio stations not to discuss the balloon's in
print or on air, and they made that decree on
January fourth of nineteen forty five, and the Japanese only
heard about one balloon incident on the North American continent,
(16:32):
and that was through a Chinese newspaper. Now, as innovative
and unsuccessful as this plan may sound, the unfortunate truth
is that they did cause some fatalities.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Yeah, that's the thing they kept. The US military kept
this thing under pretty tight wraps. Until an incident occurred
that actually did cause some casualties. Now, Japanese Ome News
Agency was reporting on February seventeenth of nineteen forty five
that this had been a success, since this is a
(17:08):
propaganda paper, and it was really, really, really inflating the numbers,
standing that between five hundred and ten thousand casualties occurred.
But here's the reality. It was actually six six casualties
and they were historically the only casualties on American soil
for World War two, which is crazy because you think
(17:30):
you would have heard of this, and I had never
heard of this until he looked into it. So what happened?
Speaker 1 (17:35):
So this takes place in Bly, Oregon. It was a
Sunday school picnic. They approached the mysterious debris of one
of these balloons. A fellow named Reverend Archie Mitchell was
about to yell a warning to the kids when the
balloon exploded. Sherman Shoemaker, Edward Ingen, Jay Gifford, Joan Patskey,
(17:58):
and Dick Patsky were all killed. And these were children.
They were eleven to fourteen years old. The reverend's wife,
Elsie Mitchell, also died, and she was five months pregnant.
This tragedy is what caused the US military to finally
break its silence and its suppression of the story. And
(18:21):
so they began issuing warnings not to tamper with anything
that looked remotely like one of these balloons.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Because let's just backstrack slightly. This balloon wasn't deployed properly.
It's not like it fell on them. It was already
on the ground, on the ground. And like basically, this
woman when she pulled the family car, pulled over because
she was feeling some morning sickness, and she discovered this
bundle of stuff that looked kind of like paper, likes
(18:47):
almost like wrigami paper or something like that, and thought
it was neat looking, and they started poking at it
or something, right.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Yeah, yeah, and she said, look what I found deer.
According to the Male Tribune newspaper in southern Oregon, there's
a great article you can read about this from David
Kravitz writing on Wired May fifth, nineteen forty five. Japanese
balloon bomb kills six in Oregon. So it left these
innocent people dead in a horrific scene. They didn't all
(19:18):
die immediately. Joan Patsky died minutes after being seriously injured.
There was a one foot hole in the ground. And
although they were, as you said, nol the only known
casualties of this operation, the US government didn't want to
take any chances, so they issued, you know, they started
(19:40):
warning people not to mess with these things. They also,
at the same time, somewhat counterintuitively or paradoxically, emphasized that
the balloons did not represent a serious threat, and they said,
just report these, just let us know if you see them,
we'll send someone to take care of them. And that
led to, you know, as we said, three hundred to
(20:02):
three hundred and forty two incidents being recorded, with various
parts recovered, but no lives lost. They did, however, have
a very close call with infrastructure.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Yeah, one of them hit a power line and caused
a blackout at a weapons facility in Hanford, Washington, a
nuclear weapons facility that could have gone a lot worse
than it did.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
According to Colonel Franklin Matthias, the Hanford plant did lose
about two days of production, but he thought he as
he recalls, at least, he says, we were all tickled
to death that this happened, because it proved our backup
system worked as far as keeping everything stable when they
lose the power. And another guy there, Vincent Budd Whitehead,
(20:47):
who is a counterintelligence agency at Hanford, recalled chasing and
bringing down another balloon and he was chasing it from
a small airplane. This this is crazy. This is what
he literally did. He says, I threw a brick at it,
I put a hole in it, and it went down.
I got out there and I started trumping all over
that thing and got all the gas out of it.
A radioed in that I have found it and got it.
(21:09):
They sent a bus up with all the specially trained
personnel gloves full of contamination suits mask. I had been
walking around on that stuff and they had not told
me that they were afraid of bacterial warfare.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Yees, I know. I want to do a quick correction.
It wasn't. The balloon didn't hit the Hanford site. It
hit the Bonneville Power Administration in Washington, which supplied power
to the Hanford site. That was one of the biggest
consumers of power from that particular grid, and so that
could have caused some major problems.
Speaker 1 (21:37):
And so balloon sightings continued throughout the years. It's interesting
because you know how these kind of things can take
over a country's collective attention span. Right just after the war,
reports continued to come in from far and wide about
balloon incidents. The Beatrice Daily Sun reports them over set
(22:00):
in different towns in Nebraska, including Omaha. The Winnipeg Tribune
notes that there's a balloon bomb found ten miles from
Detroit one near Grand Rapids. They were still finding balloon
bombs as far as like the mid nineteen fifties.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, these were like artifacts
at this point, right, they were exploded already, or maybe
they didn't go off properly, and they were scattered, because
I mean that's ten thousand that were deployed with various
that ended up scattered all over the country. I think
they made it as far as Michigan, I want.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
To say, right, yeah, they made as far as Michigan, Hawaii,
and Alaska. I believe it was in January of nineteen
fifty five. The Albuquerque Journal reports that the US Air
Force discovered a balloon in Alaska in nineteen fifty five,
and then in nineteen forty four. Looking back enough, it
(22:53):
called the Santa Cruz Sentinel noted that a fellow named
Bert Webber, who was an author and researcher, had found
forty five different balloon bombs in Oregon, thirty seven in Alaska,
twenty eight in Washington, and twenty five in California, and
reports still continued to pour in. There was one found
in October of twenty fourteen, really yeah, yeah, in British Columbia.
(23:19):
According to Henry Pros of the RCMP, or Royal Canadian
Mounted Police, this balloon had been in the dirt for
seventy years, and he said it would have been way
too dangerous to move it. So it's possible that someone
found it in the intervening decades and just decided to
let sleeping dogs lie.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
So in other words, they didn't work. They were duds, right,
like the fuse didn't ignite properly, and then they just
went down and there was no boom.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
But still if you mess with it, you know what
I mean, you could cause it to explode.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
I don't think we found this ben but what was
the material. I know the balloons were hydrogen balloons, so
that could have even aided in the spreading of the
fire because that's highly flammable. In Hindenberg and all that.
But what was the material the explosives were made of.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Incendiary bomb is kind of a genre of bomb. It
can include stuff like napalm, magnesium powder, white phosphorus. These
used thermite and thermite is uh, how did you say?
Did it occur in Breaking Back?
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Yeah, there's there's one of those Mageiver kind of moments
in Breaking Back where I think he uses an Etcha
sketch or like the iron filings in an etch a
sketch to create thermite or to make a reaction that
produceds this explosion. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
Thermite is a mixture of finely powdered aluminum and iron oxide.
It creates a really high temperature on combustion, and it's
often used in welding and for incendiary bombs. So this
is this is dangerous stuff. And in twenty fourteen when
(24:58):
the RCMP you found this, you know, this ancient bomb,
they handled it by putting C four explosives on either
side of the thing and blowing it to smitherings and therm.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
I've burned so hot that it can as it was
used in that scene Breaking Bad melt metal. Yeah, oh yeah,
I mean it's it's a it's a biggie. It's nothing
to play with. Uh.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
So it's interesting because we have to consider how much
of this plan and how much of the fallout of
it hinged purely on chance, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
Well, that's the thing we talked about earlier at the
top of the show. There's really no way even if
you're manning a balloon or you're piloting a balloon, you're
kind of just able to go up and down. I mean,
we talked off air about how a zeppelin or a
blimp is a more or less a steerable hot air
balloon because it's more streamlined, and it moves in a
forward direction, right, and it's got like a fan system.
(25:50):
But this kind of balloon really can only go up
and down. And as we described earlier, it was a
kind of altitude controlled system. I believe I said it
the other way around earlier in the show, so I
just want to correct myself there. If it was going
too high, then hydrogen would be released from the balloon,
and if it was going too low, then sandbags would
(26:12):
be deployed. And it was all this kind of valve
that was controlled like barometrically to keep it at a
more or less consistent altitude in order to have the
most consistent path because it was being pushed along by
these these winter jet streams. But once you let them go,
there's just no precision. It's like the episode we did
on the bat bombs, remember that, ben Yeah, very similar
(26:34):
where they had to be deployed automatically using very similar
mechanisms I imagine or I believe. And those were a
big old mess too, And didn't we We used those
against the Japanese, remember, Yeah, because we dropped them on
Japanese villages because the houses were made of wood and
paper and stuff, and they would potentially burn the houses, right, yeah,
well not you and I specifically, No, the bats would.
(26:56):
The bats would nest in the eves and then they
had time that would then eventually set off the devices.
But that was a big flop too.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
That's the thing about innovation, it's always risky. Let's talk
a little bit about the nuts and bolts of how
this thing actually exploded, Like what triggers the bomb.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Well, they were a couple of different types of ordinance
or payload is the military term that they used. I
think most of them used thermite, but they were just
different sizes, and there were different ones that had slightly
different mechanisms.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
Yeah, anti personnel and in syndiata, that's right exactly.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
But the incendiary device that I think was most common
had a fuse that gets armed during flight, and then
when it's dropped on impact, there's a magazine that's fired,
which then ignites a black powder charge. It's much like
the way a pistol works, right, And then that in
turn ignites a central channel that contains another charge and
(27:53):
then the incendiary material, and there are these different pots
that have more black powder charge, and then the explosive
force of those reactions, that chain reaction that triggers the thermite,
and then the body of the bomb actually erupts. It's
enough to because it's made of metal, right.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
And so we see the logic, we see how this
could work, and we see the primary flaw on the
plan the reliance on chance, right on who fortune favors
that day. And this speaks to the desperate state of
the war, you know, and the desperate state of the
Japanese military at the time. While weaponized balloons did not
(28:35):
work out for the Japanese military World War two, that
doesn't mean that our species has given up all hope
of weaponizing balloons. In fact, we're still as a species
developing weaponized balloons today. The United States Department of Defense
Missile Defense Agency contracted Lacky Martin to construct what they
(28:58):
called a high Altitude air Ship or HA for short
a case for part of its ballistic Missile Defense system.
This thing is unmanned. It is supposed to operate at
a height of over sixty thousand feet or eighteen thousand
meters in a quasi geostationary position, to be a surveillance aircraft,
(29:24):
to relay telecommunications, and to observe weather. Pretty pretty crazy stuff,
you know.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
Yeah, for sure. And I think that, you know, the
way balloons are used mostly today is for observing weather.
And then I think there was there was a remember
the Google Loon project. I love the name. Yeah, it
was a way to deploy wireless Internet connectivity in rural
rural areas and it was literally like, you know, some
sort of broadcast device that was attached to a balloon
(29:54):
that could then hover over like these areas and they
could like get Wi Fi that way.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
Man, I love blimps in balloon so much. I get
that there's silly. A few years ago, our pal Scott
Benjamin and I got really close to getting into a
good Year blimp. And the more I think about it,
you know, the only reason we don't have more blimps
now is because someone would be a jerk and attack
(30:18):
them or blow them up.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
Why can't we have nice things? Why can't I have
a blimp? I know, I know, and I'll tell you this.
I tell you I would not want to ride in
a basket on a hot air balloon, but I'd be
totally cool with riding in a blimp and style.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Right.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
It's just a bigger bask first class for me, baby, right.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
Like in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Remember he
hops on an airship.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
Oh yeah. Airships are so cool because they're so ominous
and so slow moving and they have this kind of
like doom Bringer kind of quality to them, you know,
and they make me think of like sky Captain in
the World of Tomorrow, or that this kind of like
idea of like a weird steam punky kind of future,
you know.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Angeline and Julie with an eyepatch. Oh yeah, eye patches
are so cool.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Her eyepatch didn't have a string though, it just kind
of like stuck there.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
Yeah, it was just the patch because of the future,
because of the because of the retro future. Well, no,
while I am while I'm candidly a little bit let down,
poor choice of words that you don't want to go
in a hot air balloon, I totally understand where you're
coming from. And I would ride in a blimp with you,
(31:24):
Casey Pegrim. Would you ride in a hot air balloon?
You know, if I had a hot air balloon handy
and we could be like up and back down pretty soon,
would you would you hop on?
Speaker 2 (31:35):
I'll consider it. I'll consider it. What if there was
a guarantee that we would take you to the land
of oz Uh, I'll consider it. Okay, okay, by which
we mean Australia.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
So let us know what you think, let us know
about your balloon experiences. Let us know if you would
be in a hot air balloon and you know, honestly,
we just have to shoot our shot at some point.
There's no harm in ask skiing. Do you have a blimp?
Do you have access to a blimp? Because we would
love to hang out with you on your blimp.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
That would be a pretty baller vehicle to own. Only
the elitist of the elite can own a blimp.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
It's such a it's such a toy, like unless it's
one of those high altitude surveillance platforms. It feels like
any private citizen who just says I want to blimp
is buying this billionaire's toy.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
So I'm saying, if you have a blimp, you also
have to have like a hangar, a blimp sized hangar,
or some way to tether it to like the top
of your you know, skyscraper or whatever. It would be
so cool to be at a blimp. It would be
pretty cool. We did an episode on blimps on like
that was it was like made of pig skin or
something like that, or it was made of you know,
some organic material. And I believe there was a time
(32:44):
where they were infrastructure was being put in place to
like stow blimps and they were literally tethered to the
tops of buildings. Yes, that is correct, and they could
get into them that way like they would like lower
down ladders. I don't remember exactly how it worked.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
And if you want to learn more about airships, dirigibles,
hot air balloons, and blimps, you can check out You
can check out some old car stuff episodes early in
our respective careers, so so do be kind, but yes,
please let us know about your airship and balloon adventures.
You can find us on our Facebook group Ridiculous Historians,
(33:20):
where you can meet our favorite part of the show,
your fellow listeners. You can also find us on Twitter
and Instagram, either as our show or Dramatic Pause, as
ourselves individually.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
I am at embryonic insider, I.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
Am at Ben Bolin. Also massive things as always to
super producer Casey Pegrim.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
As always big thanks to our research associate Gabe Lozier,
Alex Williams who composed our theme, our dear friend in
spirit here with us now, Christopher Hasiotis, and you Ben,
I'd like to thank you for just being such a
dapper young lad with a of gold and a fine
head of hair.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
Well, thank you, Nol. I appreciate that. And likewise to you,
you've got a killer hat on and I you know
I've been admiring your gorilla hat for anyone who doesn't know.
My friend here is a big fan of ball caps
and has quite a collection, and I gotta tell you, man,
I appreciate that compliment because I'm feeling a little, a
little under the weather today. I'm kind of slumming it.
(34:24):
I'm wearing jeans.
Speaker 2 (34:25):
Oh, I can't see him because theyre underneath the table
from where I set. You look like a fine strapping
young lad. Thank you, thank you. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
I wonder where the free strapping came from to describe
someone as capable.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
Story for another time, I think so. I think we
should explore it on another episode of Ridiculous History. We'll
see you next time. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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