I’m going to have to say it, and I’m sorry because I know UFO people roll their eyes at the word balloons. But they need to get over it because balloons of various kinds — high-altitude weather balloons, cosmic-ray research balloons, sound-detecting balloons, thunderstorm-study balloons, aerial-reconnaissance balloons, “rockoons” that shoot missiles, propaganda balloons, toy balloons, and, most secret, crop-warfare balloons —are at the heart of this high-altitude adventure we’ve been on as a culture. None of it is paranormal, but it’s still strange.
It began after the Second World War, when Soviet scientists dropped hints that they were on the verge of world-changing discoveries in the stratosphere that had to do with the untapped power of cosmic rays. A team led by Artem Alikhanian had been working at a new high-altitude research laboratory near Mount Aragats in Soviet Armenia, and they’d been sending up research balloons to fish for new cosmic particles, one of which, the “varitron,” was heavier than all others. In May 1946, Piotr Kapitsa, physicist and founder of the Institute for Physical Problems in Moscow, told startled reporters that bombs that harnessed the power of the new particles “could cause devastation several times greater than that of the atomic bomb that wiped out Hiroshima, Japan.” Gossip columnist Walter Winchell wrote about the threat in September 1946: “Reason Russians so cocky lately is they allegedly have Cosmic Ray Bomb.”
The U.S. government quickly stepped up funding for cosmic-ray research, hoping to learn more about whatever the Russians might have found. (The varitron was eventually determined not to exist.) At New York University, there was a physicist and balloon wrangler named Serge Korff who went all over the country helping scientists rig up enormous balloon trains — free-floating chains of weather balloons hundreds of feet long — in order to carry heavier payloads higher. These were composed of ten, 15, 20, even 30 large neoprene weather balloons.
The problem was that sometimes the balloon trains, longer than football fields when airborne, went missing, and they were disturbing looking. Out of scale, silent and spectral — especially after dark when they glowed, still sunlit, in the stratospheric sky — these apparitions distressed countless people. “New Jersey residents who saw 28 ‘flying saucers’ linked together in a block-long aerial snake dance today were reassured by Princeton scientists that it was merely a cosmic ray experiment,” said the Camden Courier-Post in July 1947. “The scientists said they hoped someone would see the balloon chain descend so they could recover their cosmic ray equipment.”