February 27, 2023 • 49 mins
In early February, 2023, the US shot down a Chinese balloon. The US says the balloon was gathering intelligence while the Chinese claimed it was a weather balloon. We look at the history of spy balloons and how they've evolved over time, as well as the dilemma these balloons put leaders in.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech
are you? So I've been teasing this topic for a while,
but I figured today we would finally dive into the
(00:26):
history of spy and surveillance balloons. We've heard a lot
of talk about this in the news here in the
United States this month, as the US military is shot
down a couple of objects that were thought to be
surveillance devices built by China, or perhaps, in at least
one case, an unidentified object that could have been a
(00:48):
surveillance or spy balloon. But so we shot it down
just to be on the safe side. But we're going
to get to all of that now. Before we talk
about China, we need to talk about the history of
using balloons and stuff like espionage and warfare, and that
brings us to beans. It brings us back to China.
(01:08):
So the story goes that a Chinese military genius named
Ju Liang, and I apologize for my terrible pronunciation. However,
he was known as Kong Ming, used a paper lantern
with a message written on it in order to call
for help when enemy troops were surrounding his forces. This
(01:28):
was one of the tactics he would use, and essentially
this sky lantern was a small hot air balloon. In fact,
I should probably talk about how a hot air balloon works.
Now you've probably heard that hot air rises, but from
another point of view, you really should say that, you know,
colder air sinks. This is because warmer air is less
(01:53):
dense than colder air. Cold air is more dense, so
it settles and the warm air gets pushed up. The
dense cold air sinks down, the warmer air is pushed
upward to float on top, and it just kind of
acts like that. It's a fluid, just as any fluids
where you would deal with different densities would do the
(02:14):
same sort of thing. Right. Well, if you have yourself
a container that's light enough, and you fill it with
air that is warm enough, the whole of that container
will become lighter than the air surrounding it and it
will rise. This is just a basic feature of fluid dynamics, y'all. So,
with a paper lantern made of thin material and a
(02:37):
heat source that can be suspended inside the lantern, preferably
held away from the walls of the lantern, or else
you're just going to set fire to the lantern. You
would have yourself a sky lantern. It needs to be
closed off obviously. If it's not, then the heat air
is just going to rise straight through the lantern, so
it needs to have a cap on the top. Lighting
the lantern means a small fire heats the air inside
(03:00):
the lantern to the point where the whole thing can
rise up into the sky and voila. You got yourself
a potential signaling device. You can see it, it's lit
up in the sky, and you know generally where it's
rising from. Assuming that is that the folks that you
want to signal can actually see the lantern from their
perspective or their downwind of the lanterns, so that they
(03:21):
have a chance to spot and or retrieve it if
it has drifted away from where you released it. If
the lantern floats in the wrong direction, you might find
yourself without the benefit of reinforcements. Kong Ming lived around
two hundred Common Era, and to this day, sky lanterns
are also known as Kongming lanterns. In China, they have
(03:44):
been popular in various festivals and celebrations, as can be
seen in the documentary Tangled when Rapunzel dreams of seeing
them in person. Also, just a quick shout out to
any tech stuff listeners who have been with this show
long enough to remember when I would refer to work
of fiction as documentaries. It has been quite some time,
(04:04):
all right. But sky lanterns are a long way from
spy balloons, right, I mean they would take centuries a
bunch of them to get to a point where humans
could turn to balloons for the purposes of observing others.
That's because early uses of balloons for the purposes of
seeing what the heck is going on over the hill
over yonder would require a real human being to be
(04:27):
lifted up into the sky, because it's not like we
had wireless sensors that could collect data and then beam
information down to us. We didn't even have wired sensors
that could do that. The sensors that we relied upon
were mostly connected to one of the five traditionally associated
with human beings. Heck, even the earliest weather balloon observations
(04:50):
involved humans going up with basic stuff like thermometers and
barometers to see what it's like up there in the
wild blue yonder. According to the US National Parks Service,
the earliest recorded example of an observation balloon dates back
to seventeen ninety four, during the French Revolution. That's just
(05:11):
a touch more than a decade after the Montgolfier Brothers
first wild France with their experiments with hot air balloons.
So the Montgolfier's built larger and larger balloons while experimenting
with hot air as a means to achieve flight. Their
earliest experiments just involved inflating a balloon and there was
no payload. That was probably a good thing, because one
(05:33):
of those earlier experiments saw the anchor strings on the
balloon break and the balloon rose to around six hundred
feet in altitude and there was no way to get
down apart from it cooling off enough to descend, because
once the air cools down, it gets more dense, and
if it gets dense enough, then it's no longer going
to be bulliant in the surrounding atmosphere. It's going to
(05:54):
come back down, right. So, in seventeen eighty three, three
important actual living beings took the very first hot air
balloon flight to carry a living payload. Now, earlier experiments
did include moments where strapping men who were holding on
to anchor lines were lifted off their feet, but those
(06:16):
don't really count like they weren't intended to go on
a flight. They were intended to hold the balloon down
while experiments were conducted, and occasionally they would be lifted
up like a foot or two before they would either
let go or the balloon would be pulled back down.
The three critters that actually went on this maiden voyage
were a sheep, a duck, and a rooster, which sounds
(06:40):
like the beginning of a joke, but no, these were
suggested by King Louis the sixteenth himself. Now why he
chose those particular three animals, I have no idea. I
also don't know if lou thought he was giving these
animals a real treat, or if he wanted to punish
them for some reason. There's so many unanswered quest stents
in history. This balloon ascended to around fifteen hundred feet
(07:04):
or so. It traveled about ten thousand feet until the
air inside the balloon had cooled enough for the balloon
to descend. It landed. The animals were all safe inside
the wicker basket that was attached to the balloon, so
they got out none the worse for wear. I don't
know how they felt during the flight, but they were
fine afterward. And not long after that, some brave pioneers
(07:26):
and ballooning decided they would become the first humans to
take flight in such a contraption. Now, at this stage,
the balloons featured a sort of container that had portholes
through which one could insert fuel into a brazier that
was suspended above the wicker basket that could hold people.
(07:47):
You know, that would be at the very base of
the balloon, and it would be right at the very
bottom of the opening for the balloon itself. Right, So
you filled this brazier up with fuel and you fire
to it. Heats up the air, the balloon inflates and
eventually becomes light enough to take flight. If you wanted
to go higher, you put more fuel into the brazier,
(08:10):
or if you just wanted to stay in the air,
you would put more fuel in because otherwise the fire
would burn down and the balloon would lose bullyancy and
it would come down. Right, you could also cause the
balloon to come down on purpose by introducing something that
would slow down or stop the combustion, like pouring water
(08:31):
through the porthole into the brazier to help extinguish the fire.
This would allow the air to cool and again the
balloon would come back down. These balloons were pretty risky.
You know, a quick change in wind could potentially cause
flames from this brazier to come into contact with the
inner wall of the balloon itself, which could potentially mean
(08:54):
that the balloon catches fire. Obviously that would be disastrous.
You would have an uncontrolled descent, ak a crash. And
there was also no way to steer these balloons, so
you were just subjected to the whims of the wind itself.
So you might think, oh, we're gonna go up, we'll
travel a few thousand feet and we'll come down in
that field over there, But because of the wind, you're like, nope,
(09:15):
we're coming down the louver. Move over, Louis. It marked
an incredible advance in science and technology. Even old Benjamin Franklin,
fresh off his hardened glass Armonica tour, took note of
the first hot air balloon flight while he was in France.
Around this same time, other scientists and daredevils had come
(09:36):
up with an alternative to hot air balloons because some
gases are pretty light, right like, they're lighter than the
surrounding atmosphere. Hydrogen, for example, is lighter than the air
that we're walking around in, and so thought the physicists.
If you were to fill a balloon with a very
(09:57):
light gas like hydrogen that could also float on air,
you wouldn't need a source of heat to heat up
the gas. You would just need enough hydrogen to overcome
the weight of the balloon itself. But hydrogen comes with
a couple of drawbacks. The big one is that it's very,
very flammable see also the tragedy of the Hindenburg disaster.
(10:20):
But you wouldn't need or want an open flame anyway,
because again, the gas you're using is lighter than air.
There's no need to have a heat source to heat
the air inside the balloon. Now, the same year that
the Montgolfiers were launching hot air balloons, we got the
first flight of a hydrogen balloon and it carried a
payload of about twenty pounds or around nine kilograms. And
(10:42):
you might wonder where the heck did they get hydrogen gas?
Because hydrogen, while it is the most plentiful element in
the galaxy, is also notorious for bonding with other elements
like hydrogen and oxygen makes water, so you have to
put forth real effort to break those molecular bonds to
(11:03):
release hydrogen gas, and then you have to collect it. Well.
The researchers were using scrap iron and then they were
pouring sulfuric acid onto the iron. One of the byproducts
of the chemical reaction that would follow is hydrogen gas.
They captured this with a system of lead pipes that
fed into the interior of the balloon, and this allowed
(11:24):
them to inflate the gosh darn thing. At the end
of seventeen eighty three, the Fringies successfully flew a hydrogen
based balloon just a few days after the first successful
hot air balloon flights. So these things are progressing in tandem.
You know, it's really amazing how quickly this took off.
(11:48):
That was a terrible, unintentional pun which I'm sure I'm
going to repeat throughout this episode. Anyway, Unlike a hot
air balloon, a lighter than air gas balloon doesn't need
to constantly be refueled, so it just will stay up
there for as long as the balloon is able to
contain this lighter than air gas, so to be able
(12:11):
to control things like altitude, the balloon would have ballast.
That's bags of stuff that's used to weigh it down.
So if you wanted to go higher, you had to
ditch some ballast. You have to throw some weight overboard,
like a sand bag or something. This would decrease the
weight of the balloon and allow it to fly higher
in altitude. But in order to come down, you would
(12:33):
have to have a release valve that would let you
have a controlled release. Controlled is the important part of hydrogen.
You let out a little hydrogen, you lose some buoyancy,
you start to come down. The more hydrogen you release,
the more you come down. And if you're very careful,
you're able to have a controlled descent and land without crashing.
(12:55):
But you know, when you have that flammable true goal
where you've got fuel and oxidizer and heat, things get dangerous.
So hydrogen is fuel with a big, big f And
if the hydrogen were to catch fire, believe me, you
(13:15):
would be well and truly ft. It wouldn't be so
much a fire as it would be an explosion. We
get back to the Hendenburg disaster there, but there were
also other factors that contributed to that particular tragedy. Interestingly,
the Hindenburg was not designed to use hydrogen gas in
the first place. It was meant to use helium. Helium
(13:39):
is also lighter than air. You know, we're all familiar
with helium balloons, but unlike hydrogen, helium is not flammable,
so it's safe to have in areas where you've got
things like internal combustion engines and such. However, in the
nineteen thirties, the Hendenburg, which originated in Germany, wasn't able
to import heli because well, it's nineteen thirties, it's Germany.
(14:05):
Nazis were in power, and even though World War Two
had not really started yet and the United States certainly
wasn't pulled into it, the US was already let's say,
concerned about Germany and refused to export helium to the Germans,
so instead they used hydrogen, and thus the die was
(14:26):
cast for the Hendenburg. The use of the hydrogen balloon
also taught us that if you go to a high
enough altitude, your ears go pop and that can hurt. Also,
researchers started to carry meteorological instruments like thermometers and barometers
aboard the hydrogen balloons. So these became the first weather
(14:46):
balloons of a sort, but they were manned. Unmanned weather
balloons would have to wait nearly a century. So by
seventeen ninety four, balloons were a known thing. And during
the French Revolution wars in which countries like Britain and
Austria would to war against France, largely because it's pretty
scary to see these common French peasants overthrow the previously
(15:08):
unassailable monarchy and the noble classes, the French military would
use balloons to get a bird's eye view of the battlefield.
I'll explain more when we come back from this quick break. Okay,
(15:29):
So we had French military officials using balloons in order
to get a high altitude view of areas like potential
battlefields or even actual battlefield conditions like active conditions during combat.
It turned out that these uses were at best distractions.
(15:55):
They were not providing really useful info. Apparently, the reports
of the time said that they had no impact whatsoever
on the course of battles. So early on they had
hardly any impact. But flash forward a little more than
half a century and head on over to the United
States and we would see another use of observation balloons,
(16:17):
this time during the US Civil War. So you had
the Union and you had the Confederates, and both sides
of the conflict used balloons to gather observations of the
enemy and to map out battlefields. So in this case
it wasn't necessarily during an actual battle, but sometimes it
was just to get a really good bird's eye view
(16:38):
of a battlefield, map out where units could take position,
places that they should avoid, just conditions they need to
be aware of before they go into battles so that
they're not finding out while you know, warfare is breaking
out all around them, and it starts to make a
little sense. And this was all in an effort to
just provide intelligence to military units on the ground. Now,
(16:59):
the Confederates had their share of military balloons, but the
Union side historically made better use of this technology. Meanwhile,
the Confederates were experimenting with submarines. It was a really
scary time for military innovation because these were all in
many cases unproven technologies where people were being put at
(17:23):
risk in order to test them. Now, both sides used
gas balloons for this purpose. They weren't using hot air balloons,
They're using gas balloons. They tried using balloons to extend
communication lines, but they found that the actual use of
this was tricky. It was hard to read signals that
were sent by balloonists. They were relying on things like
(17:45):
signal flags, which could be difficult to see. Some of
them were even outfitted with telegraph wires that extended down
to the ground, but those ended up being a little
fiddly as well. However, the idea was sound, even though
the implementation was a bit lack Again, like, this was
all unfolding in the middle of a war, so it
was tricky to get things to work just right while
(18:08):
you're out in the field while it's all happening. The
first weather balloons to carry instruments but not people, would
arrive in the eighteen nineties back in France, where this
whole business got started, essentially a century after balloons were
first being used for surveillance in wartime conditions. These weather
balloons had an open bottom and they were gas balloons,
(18:31):
and so when they would be released during the day,
the lighter than air balloon would rise up into the sky.
They would carry all these instruments that would record measurements.
At night, the gases would cool down enough for the
balloon to start deflating. You had air pressure that was
forcing gases out, and the balloon would start to come down,
(18:52):
and the idea was to retrieve the instruments and record
the readings as quickly as possible in order to track
weather conditions. This was not always easy because the balloons
had a tendency to drift, sometimes by hundreds of miles,
so sometimes the data you got back wasn't necessarily the
most useful. But not long after this, early meteorologists came
(19:15):
up with a better plan. So instead of using an
open ended balloon, where you know, you're essentially releasing a
bag filled with light gas up into the sky, they
would use a sealed balloon that was filled with lighter
than air gas. They would release this balloon into the air.
It would ascend up into the sky, and as the
(19:39):
air around the balloon would get thinner at higher altitudes,
the balloon would swell because there was less air pressure
on the outside of the balloon than there was on
the inside of the balloon at that altitude. You've probably
seen pictures of balloons that looked incredibly spherical way up
in altitude, but when they were first launched they and
(20:00):
look like that at all. Now, the material on these
balloons was also really thin. These days we make them
out of latex, and because they're thin, this material is
so thin at higher altitudes. As the balloon stretches and
stretches and stretches, as it swells up, it begins to tear.
And when it tears, then the gas escapes the balloon
(20:21):
and it starts to come tumbling down. Now, the meteorologists,
they knew this was going to happen, so what they
did was they attached a small parachute to the payload
to the instrument bundle, so that the parachute would deploy
as the bundle was falling, and then the payload could
float down rather than crash down. And we still use
(20:43):
weather balloons that use this method today, though obviously now
we can include devices that send out a radio signal
that make it way easier to track down where those
instruments have landed once they do. So, by the time
you get to the early twentieth century, balloons have become
a common tool the militaries. They were in fact in
heavy use in World War One among pretty much all
(21:04):
the countries involved in the conflict. The potential for spies
to use balloons to uncover enemy positions and battlefield conditions
were enough to prompt the various militaries to target balloons
with high priority. They became important targets for the military.
This is also in balloons, often in the form of
dirigibles like the Hindenburg, were used as weaponized vehicles. Some
(21:28):
dirigibles had machine guns mounted within the cabin, or they
carried a payload of bombs. But that starts to get
outside the surveillance and spy stuff, so I'm not going
to spend any real time talking about that. That's a
separate episode. Also in World War One and into World
War Two, some countries started to use what we're called
barrage balloons. Now, these were a defensive measure, So essentially
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the idea was to attach steel cables to unmanned balloons,
and if there was an incoming attack by a you
could release the balloons and they would go up into
the air, lifting these cables up in the air, and
the cables would serve as obstacles for enemy aircraft. Like
you would just have these balloons holding taut cables still
(22:14):
attached to the ground, and aircraft if they were to
try and fly through the area could get tangled up.
They could foul the aircraft and cause them to crash,
or it would force pilots to climb at a higher
altitude to fly over these barrage balloons, but that would
bring them within range of anti aircraft weaponry. So it
(22:37):
was all meant to dissuade aerial attacks, all right. But
back to observation balloons. In the nineteen forties, General Mills yep,
the food company, the one famous for cereal, created balloons
designed to ascend all the way up into the stratosphere.
The aeronautical arm of General Mills, which is wild to
(23:01):
think about, would use these balloons to lift instrumentation way
way up in the sky, typically to do stuff like
study weather conditions and also detect radiation in the upper atmosphere.
They used essentially what was the similar to a photographic plate,
where instead of using light to create an image, it
(23:23):
was there to detect nuclear radiation that could hit the
plate and create an image that we could then see
once we retrieved this when it came back to the ground.
So these balloons were not meant to spy on people.
They were meant to make observations about weather and science,
potentially detecting nuclear radiation which could be related to espionage
(23:47):
or at least intelligence gathering. This whole thing was called
Project Skyhook, and it fell under the administration of the
Office of Naval Research in the United States, with the
Atomic Energy Commission joining in a little bit later. These
balloons would typically jettison their payload, which would then descend
via parachute for retrieval by a ground team or a
water team, as the case may be, and the work
(24:10):
done there would then inform later espionage efforts. See if
you could send balloons way, way, way up into the sky,
maybe you could do that so that they could potentially
take photographs or film of the land that was beneath,
so that, you know, you could get an idea where
someone might be, I don't know, trying to hide nuclear
(24:32):
silos in their country, or military bases or whatnot. And
so in the late nineteen forties and into the nineteen fifties,
the US began to rely on balloons to lift surveillance
payloads into high altitudes, expressly for the purpose of photographing
the then Soviet Union as well as China. The two
(24:54):
massive communist powers that the US was convinced served as
existential threats to truth, justice, and the American way, so
the only way to really defend yourself is to snoop
on them. Now. One early example of this was called
Project Mogul, which technically started before Projects Skyhook did with
(25:14):
General Mills. But Mogul's purpose was to carry equipment designed
to detect sound, but not just any sound. Instead, it
was designed to detect sound that would come in the
wake of the detonation of atomic bombs. The thought was
an atomic bomb detonation would create sound that would travel
in a channel, high, high, high up in the atmosphere.
(25:37):
So the US was concerned that the Soviet Union was
testing atomic weapons and they wanted to keep an ear
out for that. And the US had already demonstrated atomic
weapons being extremely effective if you wanted to wipe out
an entire city, because they had done it twice already.
By the way, balloons like the ones the US released
(25:58):
and the ones that China has released have a pretty
huge overlap. In the ven diagram that has balloons in
one circle and UFOs in the other circle like a
really big overlap. UFO stands for unidentified flying object, and
that's all that UFO actually means, right Like, it literally
means you see something that's in the air and you
(26:21):
can't figure out what it is. So it's a UFO.
It's unidentified, it is flying, and it's something an object.
What UFO does not mean, at least it doesn't intrinsically mean,
is that it's an extra terrestrial object. That is, that
it's something that's not from Earth. But over the years,
(26:42):
we've kind of conflated these two things that UFOs and
aliens are one and the same, or rather that UFOs
are what aliens used to tool around in our solar system.
But no, UFOs are just stuff what's up in the sky,
but we ain't sure what it is yet. And when
you look at balloons, especially weather or surveillance balloons, you
(27:06):
can really understand how this can happen because I think
a lot of people think, well, of course I know
what a balloon looks like. I'm not going to mistake
a balloon for something else. But at lower altitudes, these
balloons are tear drop sheepd right with the bulbous part
of the tear at the top of the balloon. They
look like they've been released prematurely, like ah, you let
(27:28):
go before you've finished filling it up. It's not full
of gas. This, however, is done on purpose, because, as
I mentioned earlier, as these balloons rise in altitude, they
move into areas of lower air pressure and they expand.
The balloons get bigger and bigger. So a balloon that's
tear drop shaped at a low altitude turns into this
(27:50):
enormous sphere as it climbs to upper altitudes, and like
I said, it eventually can pop or rather the material again.
Typically latex will tear and then release gas and cause
the balloon to deflate quickly, or sometimes they'll just completely
rip apart and the stuff what the balloon was carrying
comes crashing down. In nineteen forty seven, a rancher named
(28:12):
WW mac Brazil was driving across his land with his
son Vernon, and the two encountered something weird. They found
a mass of fabric, rubber, metallic foil, and some other
stuff that was heaped on the ground. So the rancher
collected as much of this stuff as he could, and
then a few days later he drove it down to Roswell,
(28:32):
New Mexico, to hand it over to the local sheriff.
This innocent chain of events would eventually be reported as
a rancher having salvaged the wreckage of a flying saucer. Now,
the US military thought maybe it was best to just
let the flying saucer story go unchallenged, because the truth
(28:53):
of the matter was the balloon was part of the
aforementioned Project Mogul. But you were entering into an era
of observations by balloon, and so there were a lot
of UFOs that were out there, not extraterrestrial, but unidentified
by the people on the ground. And because the US
military didn't want to talk about espionage, because despite what
(29:16):
a certain James Bond would have you believe, it's best
not to walk into a room and introduce yourself as
a spy to everybody, folks were left to fill in
the gaps of their understanding with all sorts of speculation
and nonsense. They weren't told that the US was using
balloons to try and keep tabs on the Soviet Union
because the US didn't want the Soviet Union to know that,
(29:39):
So they were left to just kind of figure out
what the heck this stuff was. Even when a Kentucky
National Guard pilot and military pilot died in an accident
in nineteen forty seven while he was trying to identify
an object in the sky that was very likely an
observation balloon, the military states silent on this because that
(30:03):
was classified. Not even pilots were told that there were
this there was a surveillance balloon program that was active.
That kind of silence continues to this very day. All Right,
we're gonna take another break. When we come back, we'll
continue the history of spy balloons, all right, So we
(30:30):
talked about Project Mogul, which was designed to listen in
for the evidence of atomic weapon detonations, but for more
direct observation, the US created a couple of projects, one
called Project moby Dick and another one called Project Genetrics.
These were balloons that carried cameras that were meant to
(30:53):
gather intels, specifically on the Soviet Union and on China,
and they would float at altitudes of more than fifty
thousand feet, which put them out of range of fighter
aircraft at the time. Because it's pretty common for these
aircraft not to have sort of oxygen equipment, so they
couldn't go and higher altitudes pilots would pass out they
wouldn't be able to breathe. So the idea was that
(31:16):
these balloons would remain out of reach of Soviet forces,
but they would still be able to take detailed photographs
and film of the ground below. But she still had
to retrieve the darned things. By the way. They would
release these in various places around the world, like in Turkey, Norway, Scotland,
and they would just let the air currents carry the
(31:36):
balloons across the Eastern Asian continent. Well, there were a
couple of ways that the US would try to retrieve
these payloads once they had drifted across the USSR and China.
One was just to wait until payload released from its
(31:58):
balloon parachuted into the Sea of Japan, whereupon a US
Navy vessel would rendezvous and pick up the payload. But
the other was to use an aircraft to catch the
payload as it was falling in midair. This aircraft was
the C one nineteen flying box car. This aircraft was
(32:18):
used for tons of different stuff, including deploying airborne troops.
So like parachute corps would jump out of C one nineteens.
But this aircraft could also go long for a hail
merry pass, which is my dumb way of saying. They
could be outfitted with equipment designed to snag a descending payload.
But the Soviets caught on to the Shenanigans for one thing.
(32:40):
In the early morning hours, these balloons would drift at
a significantly lower altitude. Again, this is because the gas
inside the balloons would cool down overnight. Then as they cooled,
they became more dense and they lost some of the
balloons buoyancy. Then they would float low enough for some
Soviet aircraft to fire upon these surveillance balloons. And so
(33:03):
really just a fraction of the balloons launched were ever retrieved.
I think they launched more than five hundred of one
of these, and I think around fifty were finally retrieved.
So yeah, it was not great odds. The Soviets managed
to get hold of some of the payloads and they said, hey,
United States, stop violating our sovereignty by sending these spy
(33:26):
balloons over our country. And the US responded in a
couple of different ways. One was to say, hey, easy comrade,
these are just weather balloons. We're just studying the weather,
you know, all over the world to get a better
idea how weather and climate patterns happened. No big deal,
we can't even control where these things go. The other
strategy was to say, hey, nobody owns the upper atmosphere.
(33:50):
Airspace only extends as far up as you can use it,
and you don't have any aircraft that can go that high,
so go pound sand. As you can imagine. The Soviets
didn't they guy. These responses had very much merit to them,
But the US would end up migrating away from balloons
as a main method of spying, not necessarily because balloons
were ineffective, but because the United States had secretly developed
(34:13):
aircraft like fixed wing aircraft that could fly at extreme altitudes,
namely the U two spy plane. And for those of
y'all interested in that story, I recommend searching the Tech
Stuff archives for our old episodes about the U two,
because that story is crazy all on its own. Also,
by the late nineteen fifties we started getting into the
(34:35):
space age. Spootnick was the first man made satellite to
go into orbit. It was launched on October fourth, nineteen
fifty seven. It essentially just went beep, sent out a
little radio signal as it moved through its orbital pattern.
But this still had an enormous impact around the world.
For one thing, folks in the United States became terrified
(34:55):
because if the USSR could launch a payload into space,
then they potentially launch a nuclear weapon at the United
States aboard an intercontinental ballistic missile. Then America suddenly felt
a threat that earlier had been hard for them to
really imagine, because otherwise the thought was they would have
(35:15):
to fly nuclear payloads over in bomber aircraft which could
be intercepted between the USSR the United States. Now there
was this very real threat of things being delivered via missile.
But in addition to this fun source of existential dread,
there was also the concern that should you create a
(35:36):
satellite that was capable of maintaining orbit for a while,
and you outfit it with the right kinds of equipment,
it would pass over the Earth in arcs that could
gather information using stuff like powerful cameras, you could spy
on other countries well beyond even the stratosphere. And sure,
at first we would need to be able to retrieve
(35:58):
the payloads of these dallites. They wouldn't be designed to
stay up there Perpetually, they would come down and we
would have to retrieve them in order to get the
information that was captured. But over time we'd be able
to maintain a live connection with these satellites. So we
were entering the era of satellite surveillance. However, balloons would
continue to remain useful. For one thing, you could deploy
(36:21):
balloons pretty quickly, whereas with satellites there's a whole lot
of prep work that goes into it. Even if you
want to divert a satellite, that's not always possible, and
when it is, it's not always easy, So sometimes you
need to have an alternative that you can use quickly. Also,
balloons remain useful because folks expect higher tech approaches to surveillance.
(36:44):
America used helium balloons carrying cameras both infrared and visible
light video cameras to surveil a rock nearly twenty years ago,
around two thousand and four. The US also made similar
use of observation balloons over Afghanistan during that extremely long war. Okay,
so we get to the point now where surveillance balloons
(37:06):
can be more sophisticated. Right, you can have a surveillance
balloon that has a perpetual radio connection back to a
control point, so you can get real time data from
these surveillance balloons. It's no longer let it go hope
that you can retrieve it later and then get to
the data. Then now we can have a perpetual signal.
(37:30):
When you can pair it with stuff like solar panels,
then the balloons payload can continue to draw a power
from solar power and be an action longer. These are
things that were not possible, you know, obviously early on
in the use of spy balloons. But now let's get
to the Chinese balloon that got us started on this
whole topic. On January twenty eighth, twenty twenty three, the
(37:54):
North American Aerospace Defense Command, which is a part of
a US military organization, detects and begins to track a
balloon that's drifting over Alaska, which is in the northwest
of the United States. It borders Canada, it is not
part of the contiguous US At the time. The agency
determined that there was no risk from the balloon, either
(38:17):
from physical threats or from surveillance, so the agency decided
to just continue tracking it there was Since it didn't
stand as a threat, there was no reason to intervene
at that moment. On January thirtieth, the balloon drifted over
into Canadian airspace. Nor Rad kept eyes on the balloon,
(38:37):
and experts determined that, based upon the fact the balloon
had solar panels to power its payload, the balloon's purpose
was likely to gather intelligence. It was most likely a
spy balloon. They also saw that the balloon appeared to
be outfitted with propellers and motors, indicating that it could
be radio controlled to direct its flight, so it could
(38:57):
at least move in areas that we're not just determined
by air currents. On January thirty first, twenty twenty three,
the balloon passed out of Canadian airspace and back over
into US airspace. This time it was over Idaho, and
it's at this point that the US President, Joe Biden,
(39:19):
ordered the military to shoot down the balloon. The military
decided it was best to shoot down the balloon when
it wasn't over a populated area, both to minimize the
chance for damage to citizens and citizen property, as well
as to increase the chances that the military would be
able to retrieve the payload. Plus, at the time, the
(39:40):
balloon was not passing over any really secret bases or
anything or military operations, so they were thinking, if it's
over Idaho and it's not over something sensitive, we can
let it be for now and wait for it to
move over to a place where we can take it
down safely. In the time, the military continued to track
(40:02):
the progress of the balloon and started to make proactive
decisions to prevent it from being able to gather any
useful intelligence. They would postpone or cancel things that would
potentially get picked up by the balloon. They curtailed all
unencrypted communication so that the balloon wouldn't be able to
pick up on radio communications between military units that might
(40:23):
give some sensitive information to the Chinese. They were minimizing
the amount of information that this balloon could potentially snoop
in on and send back to China. The next couple
of days had the US tracking the balloon. Some folks
on the conservative side of the political spectrum began to
criticize the Biden administration for not taking action already they
(40:43):
didn't have all the information, though personally, I think trying
to avoid having debris hit citizens as a worthwhile endeavor,
but then what do I know? Anyway, By Friday, February third,
China had actually owned up to having launched this balloon.
But China was claiming that it was essentially a weather
balloon that just got blown off course, that this was
not intended to fly into US airspace and in fact
(41:06):
was part of a scientific operation, and the fact that
it was outfitted with propellers and motors kind of contradicted
that claim a bit. And the US said, we are
not buying it because we use that same excuse with
the Soviets back in the fifties, and we know it's
a lie because we lied back then. And further, the
(41:29):
US said this was a violation of its sovereignty. Also
interesting side note, when it comes to airspace, we actually
do not have a firm international agreement on the vertical
limitations of airspace, Like we know how far out it
extends from a country, but we don't know how far
up it extends. At least we don't agree on that.
And this gets complicated because stuff like satellites obviously can
(41:52):
cross the entire planet many times in a day, like
some do a full orbit in like ninety minutes, so
if you had to quest permission to cross over the
areas that a satellite was traveling around, that would be impractical.
So we're kind of in a murky area here. Well.
On Saturday, February fourth and f twenty two, Stealth Fighter,
(42:13):
one of the most advanced fighter jets in the world,
takes off from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, flies
to an area off the coast of South Carolina, and
it fires an AIM nine X sidewinder air to air
missile at this balloon, which at that point was at
an altitude of between sixty thousand and sixty five thousand feet.
(42:34):
Needless to say, the balloon did not survive this encounter
with a missile. The wreckage fell into an area that's
about six miles off the coast of South Carolina. This
is well within the twelve miles of territorial waters, so
this still makes it a US based operation. The US
still has sovereignty over that water. The Department of Defense
issues a statement that reassures US citizens that the balloon
(42:57):
never posed any sort of physical threat, so it wasn't
carrying a weapons payload, but that it did violate US sovereignty.
Further review of earlier intelligence then revealed that China had
flown balloons over the US at least four times in
the recent past that were not intercepted or taken down.
(43:18):
Three of those incidents happened while Trump was president. One
happened earlier in Biden's presidency. On February tenth, twenty twenty three,
the US shot down a quote unquote high altitude object
off the coast of Alaska. Not at the time, the
US wasn't sure if it was in fact a balloon,
let alone where it came from. Further investigation indicated that
(43:42):
this particular object was from quote commercial or research entities
and therefore totally benign end quote that's according to the
White House. So in other words, they shot down a
balloon that was not intended to be used for surveillance,
but was for some other purpose. And you might, I'd say,
this whole balloon thing is kind of taken off, and
(44:03):
that the military reaction has similarly been on an upward trajectory.
Dad jokes. The Northern Illinois Bottle Cap Balloon Brigade a
hobbyist group that sends up helium balloons with small payloads,
the sort of pico balloon approach just to do stuff
like gathered data, which can end up being things like
(44:23):
to help with weather models. They can take photos, high
altitude photos. It's really meant to be a science based hobby,
and there are like websites out there that will sell
you the kits and the and the balloons that you
can use to launch these sorts of things. Anyway, this
hobbyist group reported that one of its balloons was quote
(44:45):
unquote missing in action. Further, it reported that the last
known location was over Alaska, and that on February eleventh
and F twenty two jets shot down an unidentified airborne
object in that ural vicinity. So the implication is that
the US military and what is perhaps an overabundance of
(45:06):
caution or you could argue paranoia, shot down a hobbyist
weather balloon. Now, according to weatherboy dot com, the balloon
probably costs somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve bucks, and
the payload was also probably around that same amount of money. Now,
I do not know what the F twenty two used
(45:29):
to take down this particular unidentified object, nor can I
even say that the F twenty two actually shot down
the hobbyist balloon. These could be two separate events that
they may not be the hobbyist balloon that this F
twenty two took down. It could just be coincidence. However,
what I can say is that a single sidewinder missile
(45:51):
costs nearly four hundred thousand dollars. So it's tempting for
me to joke that the United States wasted a four
hundred thousand dollars weapon to take down a twelve dollar
helium balloon carrying a similarly priced hobbyist payload. But we
do not know that for certain. I do not know
(46:14):
that the object that the F twenty two shot down
was this hobbyist balloon. I don't know what method the
pilot used to take down the object. Maybe they didn't
use a sidewinder missile at all. So I cannot really
be as irresponsible as to joke about it, But boy
do I really want to. So. Surveillance balloons are still
very much a thing, But so our balloons meant to
(46:36):
make scientific observations and to increase our understanding of how
the world and beyond works. This creates a complicated issue, right,
how do you determine if a balloon stands as a
threat to intelligence or is just there to further our knowledge.
There aren't really easy answers to this. The more you
(46:59):
know about the origins of the balloon, the more the
more you can guess at the intent for that balloon.
And I think that's really what you have to rely upon.
But at the same time, if you don't act well,
then you get criticized, right because we saw that happen
with the first balloon back earlier in February, that if
(47:20):
you don't act, you stand at risk of being criticized
by the opposition for failing to take the safety of
the United States seriously. However, if you act prematurely, then
you get criticized of being trigger happy and shooting down
legitimate scientific oriented equipment. It turns into a no win situation,
(47:45):
right You act too quickly and you're seen as being
irresponsible and paranoid. You don't act quickly enough, you're criticized
of not taking security seriously. I don't really have an
answer for how we solve this issue. It is a
really difficult one to do. It might even be one
of China's objectives, right, like not just to gather surveillance
(48:10):
but to create this kind of environment where the current
administration really has a no win situation on their hands.
They get criticized no matter what they do or don't
do in the case of waiting. So yeah, complicated thing.
I don't think we're going to see surveillance balloons go
away too soon, because again, they can be effective even
(48:33):
if it's just a form of psychological warfare. But I
thought this would be an interesting topic. Hope you agree.
If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in
the future of this show, reach out to me and
let me know. You can go on Twitter, tweet at me.
The show's handle is tech Stuff HSW or you can
download the iHeartRadio app, navigate over to the tech Stuff
(48:54):
page by using a little search tool, hit that little
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to hear and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Text Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
(49:15):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech
are you? So I've been teasing this topic for a while,
but I figured today we would finally dive into the
(00:26):
history of spy and surveillance balloons. We've heard a lot
of talk about this in the news here in the
United States this month, as the US military is shot
down a couple of objects that were thought to be
surveillance devices built by China, or perhaps, in at least
one case, an unidentified object that could have been a
(00:48):
surveillance or spy balloon. But so we shot it down
just to be on the safe side. But we're going
to get to all of that now. Before we talk
about China, we need to talk about the history of
using balloons and stuff like espionage and warfare, and that
brings us to beans. It brings us back to China.
(01:08):
So the story goes that a Chinese military genius named
Ju Liang, and I apologize for my terrible pronunciation. However,
he was known as Kong Ming, used a paper lantern
with a message written on it in order to call
for help when enemy troops were surrounding his forces. This
(01:28):
was one of the tactics he would use, and essentially
this sky lantern was a small hot air balloon. In fact,
I should probably talk about how a hot air balloon works.
Now you've probably heard that hot air rises, but from
another point of view, you really should say that, you know,
colder air sinks. This is because warmer air is less
(01:53):
dense than colder air. Cold air is more dense, so
it settles and the warm air gets pushed up. The
dense cold air sinks down, the warmer air is pushed
upward to float on top, and it just kind of
acts like that. It's a fluid, just as any fluids
where you would deal with different densities would do the
(02:14):
same sort of thing. Right. Well, if you have yourself
a container that's light enough, and you fill it with
air that is warm enough, the whole of that container
will become lighter than the air surrounding it and it
will rise. This is just a basic feature of fluid dynamics, y'all. So,
with a paper lantern made of thin material and a
(02:37):
heat source that can be suspended inside the lantern, preferably
held away from the walls of the lantern, or else
you're just going to set fire to the lantern. You
would have yourself a sky lantern. It needs to be
closed off obviously. If it's not, then the heat air
is just going to rise straight through the lantern, so
it needs to have a cap on the top. Lighting
the lantern means a small fire heats the air inside
(03:00):
the lantern to the point where the whole thing can
rise up into the sky and voila. You got yourself
a potential signaling device. You can see it, it's lit
up in the sky, and you know generally where it's
rising from. Assuming that is that the folks that you
want to signal can actually see the lantern from their
perspective or their downwind of the lanterns, so that they
(03:21):
have a chance to spot and or retrieve it if
it has drifted away from where you released it. If
the lantern floats in the wrong direction, you might find
yourself without the benefit of reinforcements. Kong Ming lived around
two hundred Common Era, and to this day, sky lanterns
are also known as Kongming lanterns. In China, they have
(03:44):
been popular in various festivals and celebrations, as can be
seen in the documentary Tangled when Rapunzel dreams of seeing
them in person. Also, just a quick shout out to
any tech stuff listeners who have been with this show
long enough to remember when I would refer to work
of fiction as documentaries. It has been quite some time,
(04:04):
all right. But sky lanterns are a long way from
spy balloons, right, I mean they would take centuries a
bunch of them to get to a point where humans
could turn to balloons for the purposes of observing others.
That's because early uses of balloons for the purposes of
seeing what the heck is going on over the hill
over yonder would require a real human being to be
(04:27):
lifted up into the sky, because it's not like we
had wireless sensors that could collect data and then beam
information down to us. We didn't even have wired sensors
that could do that. The sensors that we relied upon
were mostly connected to one of the five traditionally associated
with human beings. Heck, even the earliest weather balloon observations
(04:50):
involved humans going up with basic stuff like thermometers and
barometers to see what it's like up there in the
wild blue yonder. According to the US National Parks Service,
the earliest recorded example of an observation balloon dates back
to seventeen ninety four, during the French Revolution. That's just
(05:11):
a touch more than a decade after the Montgolfier Brothers
first wild France with their experiments with hot air balloons.
So the Montgolfier's built larger and larger balloons while experimenting
with hot air as a means to achieve flight. Their
earliest experiments just involved inflating a balloon and there was
no payload. That was probably a good thing, because one
(05:33):
of those earlier experiments saw the anchor strings on the
balloon break and the balloon rose to around six hundred
feet in altitude and there was no way to get
down apart from it cooling off enough to descend, because
once the air cools down, it gets more dense, and
if it gets dense enough, then it's no longer going
to be bulliant in the surrounding atmosphere. It's going to
(05:54):
come back down, right. So, in seventeen eighty three, three
important actual living beings took the very first hot air
balloon flight to carry a living payload. Now, earlier experiments
did include moments where strapping men who were holding on
to anchor lines were lifted off their feet, but those
(06:16):
don't really count like they weren't intended to go on
a flight. They were intended to hold the balloon down
while experiments were conducted, and occasionally they would be lifted
up like a foot or two before they would either
let go or the balloon would be pulled back down.
The three critters that actually went on this maiden voyage
were a sheep, a duck, and a rooster, which sounds
(06:40):
like the beginning of a joke, but no, these were
suggested by King Louis the sixteenth himself. Now why he
chose those particular three animals, I have no idea. I
also don't know if lou thought he was giving these
animals a real treat, or if he wanted to punish
them for some reason. There's so many unanswered quest stents
in history. This balloon ascended to around fifteen hundred feet
(07:04):
or so. It traveled about ten thousand feet until the
air inside the balloon had cooled enough for the balloon
to descend. It landed. The animals were all safe inside
the wicker basket that was attached to the balloon, so
they got out none the worse for wear. I don't
know how they felt during the flight, but they were
fine afterward. And not long after that, some brave pioneers
(07:26):
and ballooning decided they would become the first humans to
take flight in such a contraption. Now, at this stage,
the balloons featured a sort of container that had portholes
through which one could insert fuel into a brazier that
was suspended above the wicker basket that could hold people.
(07:47):
You know, that would be at the very base of
the balloon, and it would be right at the very
bottom of the opening for the balloon itself. Right, So
you filled this brazier up with fuel and you fire
to it. Heats up the air, the balloon inflates and
eventually becomes light enough to take flight. If you wanted
to go higher, you put more fuel into the brazier,
(08:10):
or if you just wanted to stay in the air,
you would put more fuel in because otherwise the fire
would burn down and the balloon would lose bullyancy and
it would come down. Right, you could also cause the
balloon to come down on purpose by introducing something that
would slow down or stop the combustion, like pouring water
(08:31):
through the porthole into the brazier to help extinguish the fire.
This would allow the air to cool and again the
balloon would come back down. These balloons were pretty risky.
You know, a quick change in wind could potentially cause
flames from this brazier to come into contact with the
inner wall of the balloon itself, which could potentially mean
(08:54):
that the balloon catches fire. Obviously that would be disastrous.
You would have an uncontrolled descent, ak a crash. And
there was also no way to steer these balloons, so
you were just subjected to the whims of the wind itself.
So you might think, oh, we're gonna go up, we'll
travel a few thousand feet and we'll come down in
that field over there, But because of the wind, you're like, nope,
(09:15):
we're coming down the louver. Move over, Louis. It marked
an incredible advance in science and technology. Even old Benjamin Franklin,
fresh off his hardened glass Armonica tour, took note of
the first hot air balloon flight while he was in France.
Around this same time, other scientists and daredevils had come
(09:36):
up with an alternative to hot air balloons because some
gases are pretty light, right like, they're lighter than the
surrounding atmosphere. Hydrogen, for example, is lighter than the air
that we're walking around in, and so thought the physicists.
If you were to fill a balloon with a very
(09:57):
light gas like hydrogen that could also float on air,
you wouldn't need a source of heat to heat up
the gas. You would just need enough hydrogen to overcome
the weight of the balloon itself. But hydrogen comes with
a couple of drawbacks. The big one is that it's very,
very flammable see also the tragedy of the Hindenburg disaster.
(10:20):
But you wouldn't need or want an open flame anyway,
because again, the gas you're using is lighter than air.
There's no need to have a heat source to heat
the air inside the balloon. Now, the same year that
the Montgolfiers were launching hot air balloons, we got the
first flight of a hydrogen balloon and it carried a
payload of about twenty pounds or around nine kilograms. And
(10:42):
you might wonder where the heck did they get hydrogen gas?
Because hydrogen, while it is the most plentiful element in
the galaxy, is also notorious for bonding with other elements
like hydrogen and oxygen makes water, so you have to
put forth real effort to break those molecular bonds to
(11:03):
release hydrogen gas, and then you have to collect it. Well.
The researchers were using scrap iron and then they were
pouring sulfuric acid onto the iron. One of the byproducts
of the chemical reaction that would follow is hydrogen gas.
They captured this with a system of lead pipes that
fed into the interior of the balloon, and this allowed
(11:24):
them to inflate the gosh darn thing. At the end
of seventeen eighty three, the Fringies successfully flew a hydrogen
based balloon just a few days after the first successful
hot air balloon flights. So these things are progressing in tandem.
You know, it's really amazing how quickly this took off.
(11:48):
That was a terrible, unintentional pun which I'm sure I'm
going to repeat throughout this episode. Anyway, Unlike a hot
air balloon, a lighter than air gas balloon doesn't need
to constantly be refueled, so it just will stay up
there for as long as the balloon is able to
contain this lighter than air gas, so to be able
(12:11):
to control things like altitude, the balloon would have ballast.
That's bags of stuff that's used to weigh it down.
So if you wanted to go higher, you had to
ditch some ballast. You have to throw some weight overboard,
like a sand bag or something. This would decrease the
weight of the balloon and allow it to fly higher
in altitude. But in order to come down, you would
(12:33):
have to have a release valve that would let you
have a controlled release. Controlled is the important part of hydrogen.
You let out a little hydrogen, you lose some buoyancy,
you start to come down. The more hydrogen you release,
the more you come down. And if you're very careful,
you're able to have a controlled descent and land without crashing.
(12:55):
But you know, when you have that flammable true goal
where you've got fuel and oxidizer and heat, things get dangerous.
So hydrogen is fuel with a big, big f And
if the hydrogen were to catch fire, believe me, you
(13:15):
would be well and truly ft. It wouldn't be so
much a fire as it would be an explosion. We
get back to the Hendenburg disaster there, but there were
also other factors that contributed to that particular tragedy. Interestingly,
the Hindenburg was not designed to use hydrogen gas in
the first place. It was meant to use helium. Helium
(13:39):
is also lighter than air. You know, we're all familiar
with helium balloons, but unlike hydrogen, helium is not flammable,
so it's safe to have in areas where you've got
things like internal combustion engines and such. However, in the
nineteen thirties, the Hendenburg, which originated in Germany, wasn't able
to import heli because well, it's nineteen thirties, it's Germany.
(14:05):
Nazis were in power, and even though World War Two
had not really started yet and the United States certainly
wasn't pulled into it, the US was already let's say,
concerned about Germany and refused to export helium to the Germans,
so instead they used hydrogen, and thus the die was
(14:26):
cast for the Hendenburg. The use of the hydrogen balloon
also taught us that if you go to a high
enough altitude, your ears go pop and that can hurt. Also,
researchers started to carry meteorological instruments like thermometers and barometers
aboard the hydrogen balloons. So these became the first weather
(14:46):
balloons of a sort, but they were manned. Unmanned weather
balloons would have to wait nearly a century. So by
seventeen ninety four, balloons were a known thing. And during
the French Revolution wars in which countries like Britain and
Austria would to war against France, largely because it's pretty
scary to see these common French peasants overthrow the previously
(15:08):
unassailable monarchy and the noble classes, the French military would
use balloons to get a bird's eye view of the battlefield.
I'll explain more when we come back from this quick break. Okay,
(15:29):
So we had French military officials using balloons in order
to get a high altitude view of areas like potential
battlefields or even actual battlefield conditions like active conditions during combat.
It turned out that these uses were at best distractions.
(15:55):
They were not providing really useful info. Apparently, the reports
of the time said that they had no impact whatsoever
on the course of battles. So early on they had
hardly any impact. But flash forward a little more than
half a century and head on over to the United
States and we would see another use of observation balloons,
(16:17):
this time during the US Civil War. So you had
the Union and you had the Confederates, and both sides
of the conflict used balloons to gather observations of the
enemy and to map out battlefields. So in this case
it wasn't necessarily during an actual battle, but sometimes it
was just to get a really good bird's eye view
(16:38):
of a battlefield, map out where units could take position,
places that they should avoid, just conditions they need to
be aware of before they go into battles so that
they're not finding out while you know, warfare is breaking
out all around them, and it starts to make a
little sense. And this was all in an effort to
just provide intelligence to military units on the ground. Now,
(16:59):
the Confederates had their share of military balloons, but the
Union side historically made better use of this technology. Meanwhile,
the Confederates were experimenting with submarines. It was a really
scary time for military innovation because these were all in
many cases unproven technologies where people were being put at
(17:23):
risk in order to test them. Now, both sides used
gas balloons for this purpose. They weren't using hot air balloons,
They're using gas balloons. They tried using balloons to extend
communication lines, but they found that the actual use of
this was tricky. It was hard to read signals that
were sent by balloonists. They were relying on things like
(17:45):
signal flags, which could be difficult to see. Some of
them were even outfitted with telegraph wires that extended down
to the ground, but those ended up being a little
fiddly as well. However, the idea was sound, even though
the implementation was a bit lack Again, like, this was
all unfolding in the middle of a war, so it
was tricky to get things to work just right while
(18:08):
you're out in the field while it's all happening. The
first weather balloons to carry instruments but not people, would
arrive in the eighteen nineties back in France, where this
whole business got started, essentially a century after balloons were
first being used for surveillance in wartime conditions. These weather
balloons had an open bottom and they were gas balloons,
(18:31):
and so when they would be released during the day,
the lighter than air balloon would rise up into the sky.
They would carry all these instruments that would record measurements.
At night, the gases would cool down enough for the
balloon to start deflating. You had air pressure that was
forcing gases out, and the balloon would start to come down,
(18:52):
and the idea was to retrieve the instruments and record
the readings as quickly as possible in order to track
weather conditions. This was not always easy because the balloons
had a tendency to drift, sometimes by hundreds of miles,
so sometimes the data you got back wasn't necessarily the
most useful. But not long after this, early meteorologists came
(19:15):
up with a better plan. So instead of using an
open ended balloon, where you know, you're essentially releasing a
bag filled with light gas up into the sky, they
would use a sealed balloon that was filled with lighter
than air gas. They would release this balloon into the air.
It would ascend up into the sky, and as the
(19:39):
air around the balloon would get thinner at higher altitudes,
the balloon would swell because there was less air pressure
on the outside of the balloon than there was on
the inside of the balloon at that altitude. You've probably
seen pictures of balloons that looked incredibly spherical way up
in altitude, but when they were first launched they and
(20:00):
look like that at all. Now, the material on these
balloons was also really thin. These days we make them
out of latex, and because they're thin, this material is
so thin at higher altitudes. As the balloon stretches and
stretches and stretches, as it swells up, it begins to tear.
And when it tears, then the gas escapes the balloon
(20:21):
and it starts to come tumbling down. Now, the meteorologists,
they knew this was going to happen, so what they
did was they attached a small parachute to the payload
to the instrument bundle, so that the parachute would deploy
as the bundle was falling, and then the payload could
float down rather than crash down. And we still use
(20:43):
weather balloons that use this method today, though obviously now
we can include devices that send out a radio signal
that make it way easier to track down where those
instruments have landed once they do. So, by the time
you get to the early twentieth century, balloons have become
a common tool the militaries. They were in fact in
heavy use in World War One among pretty much all
(21:04):
the countries involved in the conflict. The potential for spies
to use balloons to uncover enemy positions and battlefield conditions
were enough to prompt the various militaries to target balloons
with high priority. They became important targets for the military.
This is also in balloons, often in the form of
dirigibles like the Hindenburg, were used as weaponized vehicles. Some
(21:28):
dirigibles had machine guns mounted within the cabin, or they
carried a payload of bombs. But that starts to get
outside the surveillance and spy stuff, so I'm not going
to spend any real time talking about that. That's a
separate episode. Also in World War One and into World
War Two, some countries started to use what we're called
barrage balloons. Now, these were a defensive measure, So essentially
(21:53):
the idea was to attach steel cables to unmanned balloons,
and if there was an incoming attack by a you
could release the balloons and they would go up into
the air, lifting these cables up in the air, and
the cables would serve as obstacles for enemy aircraft. Like
you would just have these balloons holding taut cables still
(22:14):
attached to the ground, and aircraft if they were to
try and fly through the area could get tangled up.
They could foul the aircraft and cause them to crash,
or it would force pilots to climb at a higher
altitude to fly over these barrage balloons, but that would
bring them within range of anti aircraft weaponry. So it
(22:37):
was all meant to dissuade aerial attacks, all right. But
back to observation balloons. In the nineteen forties, General Mills yep,
the food company, the one famous for cereal, created balloons
designed to ascend all the way up into the stratosphere.
The aeronautical arm of General Mills, which is wild to
(23:01):
think about, would use these balloons to lift instrumentation way
way up in the sky, typically to do stuff like
study weather conditions and also detect radiation in the upper atmosphere.
They used essentially what was the similar to a photographic plate,
where instead of using light to create an image, it
(23:23):
was there to detect nuclear radiation that could hit the
plate and create an image that we could then see
once we retrieved this when it came back to the ground.
So these balloons were not meant to spy on people.
They were meant to make observations about weather and science,
potentially detecting nuclear radiation which could be related to espionage
(23:47):
or at least intelligence gathering. This whole thing was called
Project Skyhook, and it fell under the administration of the
Office of Naval Research in the United States, with the
Atomic Energy Commission joining in a little bit later. These
balloons would typically jettison their payload, which would then descend
via parachute for retrieval by a ground team or a
water team, as the case may be, and the work
(24:10):
done there would then inform later espionage efforts. See if
you could send balloons way, way, way up into the sky,
maybe you could do that so that they could potentially
take photographs or film of the land that was beneath,
so that, you know, you could get an idea where
someone might be, I don't know, trying to hide nuclear
(24:32):
silos in their country, or military bases or whatnot. And
so in the late nineteen forties and into the nineteen fifties,
the US began to rely on balloons to lift surveillance
payloads into high altitudes, expressly for the purpose of photographing
the then Soviet Union as well as China. The two
(24:54):
massive communist powers that the US was convinced served as
existential threats to truth, justice, and the American way, so
the only way to really defend yourself is to snoop
on them. Now. One early example of this was called
Project Mogul, which technically started before Projects Skyhook did with
(25:14):
General Mills. But Mogul's purpose was to carry equipment designed
to detect sound, but not just any sound. Instead, it
was designed to detect sound that would come in the
wake of the detonation of atomic bombs. The thought was
an atomic bomb detonation would create sound that would travel
in a channel, high, high, high up in the atmosphere.
(25:37):
So the US was concerned that the Soviet Union was
testing atomic weapons and they wanted to keep an ear
out for that. And the US had already demonstrated atomic
weapons being extremely effective if you wanted to wipe out
an entire city, because they had done it twice already.
By the way, balloons like the ones the US released
(25:58):
and the ones that China has released have a pretty
huge overlap. In the ven diagram that has balloons in
one circle and UFOs in the other circle like a
really big overlap. UFO stands for unidentified flying object, and
that's all that UFO actually means, right Like, it literally
means you see something that's in the air and you
(26:21):
can't figure out what it is. So it's a UFO.
It's unidentified, it is flying, and it's something an object.
What UFO does not mean, at least it doesn't intrinsically mean,
is that it's an extra terrestrial object. That is, that
it's something that's not from Earth. But over the years,
(26:42):
we've kind of conflated these two things that UFOs and
aliens are one and the same, or rather that UFOs
are what aliens used to tool around in our solar system.
But no, UFOs are just stuff what's up in the sky,
but we ain't sure what it is yet. And when
you look at balloons, especially weather or surveillance balloons, you
(27:06):
can really understand how this can happen because I think
a lot of people think, well, of course I know
what a balloon looks like. I'm not going to mistake
a balloon for something else. But at lower altitudes, these
balloons are tear drop sheepd right with the bulbous part
of the tear at the top of the balloon. They
look like they've been released prematurely, like ah, you let
(27:28):
go before you've finished filling it up. It's not full
of gas. This, however, is done on purpose, because, as
I mentioned earlier, as these balloons rise in altitude, they
move into areas of lower air pressure and they expand.
The balloons get bigger and bigger. So a balloon that's
tear drop shaped at a low altitude turns into this
(27:50):
enormous sphere as it climbs to upper altitudes, and like
I said, it eventually can pop or rather the material again.
Typically latex will tear and then release gas and cause
the balloon to deflate quickly, or sometimes they'll just completely
rip apart and the stuff what the balloon was carrying
comes crashing down. In nineteen forty seven, a rancher named
(28:12):
WW mac Brazil was driving across his land with his
son Vernon, and the two encountered something weird. They found
a mass of fabric, rubber, metallic foil, and some other
stuff that was heaped on the ground. So the rancher
collected as much of this stuff as he could, and
then a few days later he drove it down to Roswell,
(28:32):
New Mexico, to hand it over to the local sheriff.
This innocent chain of events would eventually be reported as
a rancher having salvaged the wreckage of a flying saucer. Now,
the US military thought maybe it was best to just
let the flying saucer story go unchallenged, because the truth
(28:53):
of the matter was the balloon was part of the
aforementioned Project Mogul. But you were entering into an era
of observations by balloon, and so there were a lot
of UFOs that were out there, not extraterrestrial, but unidentified
by the people on the ground. And because the US
military didn't want to talk about espionage, because despite what
(29:16):
a certain James Bond would have you believe, it's best
not to walk into a room and introduce yourself as
a spy to everybody, folks were left to fill in
the gaps of their understanding with all sorts of speculation
and nonsense. They weren't told that the US was using
balloons to try and keep tabs on the Soviet Union
because the US didn't want the Soviet Union to know that,
(29:39):
So they were left to just kind of figure out
what the heck this stuff was. Even when a Kentucky
National Guard pilot and military pilot died in an accident
in nineteen forty seven while he was trying to identify
an object in the sky that was very likely an
observation balloon, the military states silent on this because that
(30:03):
was classified. Not even pilots were told that there were
this there was a surveillance balloon program that was active.
That kind of silence continues to this very day. All Right,
we're gonna take another break. When we come back, we'll
continue the history of spy balloons, all right, So we
(30:30):
talked about Project Mogul, which was designed to listen in
for the evidence of atomic weapon detonations, but for more
direct observation, the US created a couple of projects, one
called Project moby Dick and another one called Project Genetrics.
These were balloons that carried cameras that were meant to
(30:53):
gather intels, specifically on the Soviet Union and on China,
and they would float at altitudes of more than fifty
thousand feet, which put them out of range of fighter
aircraft at the time. Because it's pretty common for these
aircraft not to have sort of oxygen equipment, so they
couldn't go and higher altitudes pilots would pass out they
wouldn't be able to breathe. So the idea was that
(31:16):
these balloons would remain out of reach of Soviet forces,
but they would still be able to take detailed photographs
and film of the ground below. But she still had
to retrieve the darned things. By the way. They would
release these in various places around the world, like in Turkey, Norway, Scotland,
and they would just let the air currents carry the
(31:36):
balloons across the Eastern Asian continent. Well, there were a
couple of ways that the US would try to retrieve
these payloads once they had drifted across the USSR and China.
One was just to wait until payload released from its
(31:58):
balloon parachuted into the Sea of Japan, whereupon a US
Navy vessel would rendezvous and pick up the payload. But
the other was to use an aircraft to catch the
payload as it was falling in midair. This aircraft was
the C one nineteen flying box car. This aircraft was
(32:18):
used for tons of different stuff, including deploying airborne troops.
So like parachute corps would jump out of C one nineteens.
But this aircraft could also go long for a hail
merry pass, which is my dumb way of saying. They
could be outfitted with equipment designed to snag a descending payload.
But the Soviets caught on to the Shenanigans for one thing.
(32:40):
In the early morning hours, these balloons would drift at
a significantly lower altitude. Again, this is because the gas
inside the balloons would cool down overnight. Then as they cooled,
they became more dense and they lost some of the
balloons buoyancy. Then they would float low enough for some
Soviet aircraft to fire upon these surveillance balloons. And so
(33:03):
really just a fraction of the balloons launched were ever retrieved.
I think they launched more than five hundred of one
of these, and I think around fifty were finally retrieved.
So yeah, it was not great odds. The Soviets managed
to get hold of some of the payloads and they said, hey,
United States, stop violating our sovereignty by sending these spy
(33:26):
balloons over our country. And the US responded in a
couple of different ways. One was to say, hey, easy comrade,
these are just weather balloons. We're just studying the weather,
you know, all over the world to get a better
idea how weather and climate patterns happened. No big deal,
we can't even control where these things go. The other
strategy was to say, hey, nobody owns the upper atmosphere.
(33:50):
Airspace only extends as far up as you can use it,
and you don't have any aircraft that can go that high,
so go pound sand. As you can imagine. The Soviets
didn't they guy. These responses had very much merit to them,
But the US would end up migrating away from balloons
as a main method of spying, not necessarily because balloons
were ineffective, but because the United States had secretly developed
(34:13):
aircraft like fixed wing aircraft that could fly at extreme altitudes,
namely the U two spy plane. And for those of
y'all interested in that story, I recommend searching the Tech
Stuff archives for our old episodes about the U two,
because that story is crazy all on its own. Also,
by the late nineteen fifties we started getting into the
(34:35):
space age. Spootnick was the first man made satellite to
go into orbit. It was launched on October fourth, nineteen
fifty seven. It essentially just went beep, sent out a
little radio signal as it moved through its orbital pattern.
But this still had an enormous impact around the world.
For one thing, folks in the United States became terrified
(34:55):
because if the USSR could launch a payload into space,
then they potentially launch a nuclear weapon at the United
States aboard an intercontinental ballistic missile. Then America suddenly felt
a threat that earlier had been hard for them to
really imagine, because otherwise the thought was they would have
(35:15):
to fly nuclear payloads over in bomber aircraft which could
be intercepted between the USSR the United States. Now there
was this very real threat of things being delivered via missile.
But in addition to this fun source of existential dread,
there was also the concern that should you create a
(35:36):
satellite that was capable of maintaining orbit for a while,
and you outfit it with the right kinds of equipment,
it would pass over the Earth in arcs that could
gather information using stuff like powerful cameras, you could spy
on other countries well beyond even the stratosphere. And sure,
at first we would need to be able to retrieve
(35:58):
the payloads of these dallites. They wouldn't be designed to
stay up there Perpetually, they would come down and we
would have to retrieve them in order to get the
information that was captured. But over time we'd be able
to maintain a live connection with these satellites. So we
were entering the era of satellite surveillance. However, balloons would
continue to remain useful. For one thing, you could deploy
(36:21):
balloons pretty quickly, whereas with satellites there's a whole lot
of prep work that goes into it. Even if you
want to divert a satellite, that's not always possible, and
when it is, it's not always easy, So sometimes you
need to have an alternative that you can use quickly. Also,
balloons remain useful because folks expect higher tech approaches to surveillance.
(36:44):
America used helium balloons carrying cameras both infrared and visible
light video cameras to surveil a rock nearly twenty years ago,
around two thousand and four. The US also made similar
use of observation balloons over Afghanistan during that extremely long war. Okay,
so we get to the point now where surveillance balloons
(37:06):
can be more sophisticated. Right, you can have a surveillance
balloon that has a perpetual radio connection back to a
control point, so you can get real time data from
these surveillance balloons. It's no longer let it go hope
that you can retrieve it later and then get to
the data. Then now we can have a perpetual signal.
(37:30):
When you can pair it with stuff like solar panels,
then the balloons payload can continue to draw a power
from solar power and be an action longer. These are
things that were not possible, you know, obviously early on
in the use of spy balloons. But now let's get
to the Chinese balloon that got us started on this
whole topic. On January twenty eighth, twenty twenty three, the
(37:54):
North American Aerospace Defense Command, which is a part of
a US military organization, detects and begins to track a
balloon that's drifting over Alaska, which is in the northwest
of the United States. It borders Canada, it is not
part of the contiguous US At the time. The agency
determined that there was no risk from the balloon, either
(38:17):
from physical threats or from surveillance, so the agency decided
to just continue tracking it there was Since it didn't
stand as a threat, there was no reason to intervene
at that moment. On January thirtieth, the balloon drifted over
into Canadian airspace. Nor Rad kept eyes on the balloon,
(38:37):
and experts determined that, based upon the fact the balloon
had solar panels to power its payload, the balloon's purpose
was likely to gather intelligence. It was most likely a
spy balloon. They also saw that the balloon appeared to
be outfitted with propellers and motors, indicating that it could
be radio controlled to direct its flight, so it could
(38:57):
at least move in areas that we're not just determined
by air currents. On January thirty first, twenty twenty three,
the balloon passed out of Canadian airspace and back over
into US airspace. This time it was over Idaho, and
it's at this point that the US President, Joe Biden,
(39:19):
ordered the military to shoot down the balloon. The military
decided it was best to shoot down the balloon when
it wasn't over a populated area, both to minimize the
chance for damage to citizens and citizen property, as well
as to increase the chances that the military would be
able to retrieve the payload. Plus, at the time, the
(39:40):
balloon was not passing over any really secret bases or
anything or military operations, so they were thinking, if it's
over Idaho and it's not over something sensitive, we can
let it be for now and wait for it to
move over to a place where we can take it
down safely. In the time, the military continued to track
(40:02):
the progress of the balloon and started to make proactive
decisions to prevent it from being able to gather any
useful intelligence. They would postpone or cancel things that would
potentially get picked up by the balloon. They curtailed all
unencrypted communication so that the balloon wouldn't be able to
pick up on radio communications between military units that might
(40:23):
give some sensitive information to the Chinese. They were minimizing
the amount of information that this balloon could potentially snoop
in on and send back to China. The next couple
of days had the US tracking the balloon. Some folks
on the conservative side of the political spectrum began to
criticize the Biden administration for not taking action already they
(40:43):
didn't have all the information, though personally, I think trying
to avoid having debris hit citizens as a worthwhile endeavor,
but then what do I know? Anyway, By Friday, February third,
China had actually owned up to having launched this balloon.
But China was claiming that it was essentially a weather
balloon that just got blown off course, that this was
not intended to fly into US airspace and in fact
(41:06):
was part of a scientific operation, and the fact that
it was outfitted with propellers and motors kind of contradicted
that claim a bit. And the US said, we are
not buying it because we use that same excuse with
the Soviets back in the fifties, and we know it's
a lie because we lied back then. And further, the
(41:29):
US said this was a violation of its sovereignty. Also
interesting side note, when it comes to airspace, we actually
do not have a firm international agreement on the vertical
limitations of airspace, Like we know how far out it
extends from a country, but we don't know how far
up it extends. At least we don't agree on that.
And this gets complicated because stuff like satellites obviously can
(41:52):
cross the entire planet many times in a day, like
some do a full orbit in like ninety minutes, so
if you had to quest permission to cross over the
areas that a satellite was traveling around, that would be impractical.
So we're kind of in a murky area here. Well.
On Saturday, February fourth and f twenty two, Stealth Fighter,
(42:13):
one of the most advanced fighter jets in the world,
takes off from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, flies
to an area off the coast of South Carolina, and
it fires an AIM nine X sidewinder air to air
missile at this balloon, which at that point was at
an altitude of between sixty thousand and sixty five thousand feet.
(42:34):
Needless to say, the balloon did not survive this encounter
with a missile. The wreckage fell into an area that's
about six miles off the coast of South Carolina. This
is well within the twelve miles of territorial waters, so
this still makes it a US based operation. The US
still has sovereignty over that water. The Department of Defense
issues a statement that reassures US citizens that the balloon
(42:57):
never posed any sort of physical threat, so it wasn't
carrying a weapons payload, but that it did violate US sovereignty.
Further review of earlier intelligence then revealed that China had
flown balloons over the US at least four times in
the recent past that were not intercepted or taken down.
(43:18):
Three of those incidents happened while Trump was president. One
happened earlier in Biden's presidency. On February tenth, twenty twenty three,
the US shot down a quote unquote high altitude object
off the coast of Alaska. Not at the time, the
US wasn't sure if it was in fact a balloon,
let alone where it came from. Further investigation indicated that
(43:42):
this particular object was from quote commercial or research entities
and therefore totally benign end quote that's according to the
White House. So in other words, they shot down a
balloon that was not intended to be used for surveillance,
but was for some other purpose. And you might, I'd say,
this whole balloon thing is kind of taken off, and
(44:03):
that the military reaction has similarly been on an upward trajectory.
Dad jokes. The Northern Illinois Bottle Cap Balloon Brigade a
hobbyist group that sends up helium balloons with small payloads,
the sort of pico balloon approach just to do stuff
like gathered data, which can end up being things like
(44:23):
to help with weather models. They can take photos, high
altitude photos. It's really meant to be a science based hobby,
and there are like websites out there that will sell
you the kits and the and the balloons that you
can use to launch these sorts of things. Anyway, this
hobbyist group reported that one of its balloons was quote
(44:45):
unquote missing in action. Further, it reported that the last
known location was over Alaska, and that on February eleventh
and F twenty two jets shot down an unidentified airborne
object in that ural vicinity. So the implication is that
the US military and what is perhaps an overabundance of
(45:06):
caution or you could argue paranoia, shot down a hobbyist
weather balloon. Now, according to weatherboy dot com, the balloon
probably costs somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve bucks, and
the payload was also probably around that same amount of money. Now,
I do not know what the F twenty two used
(45:29):
to take down this particular unidentified object, nor can I
even say that the F twenty two actually shot down
the hobbyist balloon. These could be two separate events that
they may not be the hobbyist balloon that this F
twenty two took down. It could just be coincidence. However,
what I can say is that a single sidewinder missile
(45:51):
costs nearly four hundred thousand dollars. So it's tempting for
me to joke that the United States wasted a four
hundred thousand dollars weapon to take down a twelve dollar
helium balloon carrying a similarly priced hobbyist payload. But we
do not know that for certain. I do not know
(46:14):
that the object that the F twenty two shot down
was this hobbyist balloon. I don't know what method the
pilot used to take down the object. Maybe they didn't
use a sidewinder missile at all. So I cannot really
be as irresponsible as to joke about it, But boy
do I really want to. So. Surveillance balloons are still
very much a thing, But so our balloons meant to
(46:36):
make scientific observations and to increase our understanding of how
the world and beyond works. This creates a complicated issue, right,
how do you determine if a balloon stands as a
threat to intelligence or is just there to further our knowledge.
There aren't really easy answers to this. The more you
(46:59):
know about the origins of the balloon, the more the
more you can guess at the intent for that balloon.
And I think that's really what you have to rely upon.
But at the same time, if you don't act well,
then you get criticized, right because we saw that happen
with the first balloon back earlier in February, that if
(47:20):
you don't act, you stand at risk of being criticized
by the opposition for failing to take the safety of
the United States seriously. However, if you act prematurely, then
you get criticized of being trigger happy and shooting down
legitimate scientific oriented equipment. It turns into a no win situation,
(47:45):
right You act too quickly and you're seen as being
irresponsible and paranoid. You don't act quickly enough, you're criticized
of not taking security seriously. I don't really have an
answer for how we solve this issue. It is a
really difficult one to do. It might even be one
of China's objectives, right, like not just to gather surveillance
(48:10):
but to create this kind of environment where the current
administration really has a no win situation on their hands.
They get criticized no matter what they do or don't
do in the case of waiting. So yeah, complicated thing.
I don't think we're going to see surveillance balloons go
away too soon, because again, they can be effective even
(48:33):
if it's just a form of psychological warfare. But I
thought this would be an interesting topic. Hope you agree.
If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in
the future of this show, reach out to me and
let me know. You can go on Twitter, tweet at me.
The show's handle is tech Stuff HSW or you can
download the iHeartRadio app, navigate over to the tech Stuff
(48:54):
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