Fire balloon(en.wikipedia.org)
en.wikipedia.org
Fire balloon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_balloon
17 comments
> On March 10, 1945, one of the last paper balloons descended in the vicinity of the Manhattan Project's production facility at the Hanford Site. This balloon caused a short circuit in the power lines supplying electricity for the nuclear reactor cooling pumps, but backup safety devices restored power almost immediately.
What are the chances?!
These are still (very rarely) found by hikers in the pacific northwest (source: i'm a bomb tech).
Other relevant / weird WWII reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb (US program) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_dog (Russian program)
Other relevant / weird WWII reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb (US program) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_dog (Russian program)
And let's not forget more recent efforts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_dolphin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_dolphin
Another crazy one was pigeon-controlled missiles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon
There's a really great Radiolab episode on this topic: http://www.radiolab.org/story/fu-go/
Such a fantastic episode. This was the first episode I had ever listened to of Radiolab.
This was the test subject for trying to prove any conflict situation could be turned into a wargame:
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/34117/winds-war
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/34117/winds-war
If you remember the old show Ripley's Believe it Or Not hosted by Jack Palance they did an episode on the Fire balloon. There were cases where unknowing hikers happened upon them in the west coast and some with horrible consequences as mentioned in the article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ripley%27s_Believe_It_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ripley%27s_Believe_It_...
So here's a weird idea: Could Roswell 1947 simply have been one of these balloons? Maybe the US was trying to improve those balloons with some, at the time, experimental material.
The Roswell incident was a balloon, but it's highly unlikely that it was a fire balloon. Most contemporary analysis points to the Roswell incident being caused by one of the Project Mogul balloons [1]. Project Mogul was a top-secret (at the time) project to detect Soviet atomic bomb tests by listening for their shock waves with very sensitive microphones. These microphones were mounted on large hexagonal discs, which, when viewed by an untrained eye, looked like a flying craft of some sort.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mogul
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mogul
Eventually, an Army fighter managed to push one of the balloons around in the air and force it to ground intact, where it was examined and filmed.
Wait, what, how??
Wait, what, how??
Wingtip turbulence, most likely.
In the UK during WWII, it was discovered that you could flip over a V1 flying bomb by putting the wingtip of your plane just under the wingtip of the bomb, at which point its gyro would get confused and it would flip over and spiral into the ground. This was apparently much safer than shooting them because otherwise you'd get caught in the shockwave when they exploded (they were bombs, after all).
Here's a terrible Daily Mail article, but it's got the famous photos of someone actually doing it.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1384740/Kate-Middlet...
BTW, wikipedia claims that in at least one case the V1 engine quenched after tipping, at which point it regained controlled flight and came down to a safe landing near Tilburg, where it was captured for examination...
In the UK during WWII, it was discovered that you could flip over a V1 flying bomb by putting the wingtip of your plane just under the wingtip of the bomb, at which point its gyro would get confused and it would flip over and spiral into the ground. This was apparently much safer than shooting them because otherwise you'd get caught in the shockwave when they exploded (they were bombs, after all).
Here's a terrible Daily Mail article, but it's got the famous photos of someone actually doing it.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1384740/Kate-Middlet...
BTW, wikipedia claims that in at least one case the V1 engine quenched after tipping, at which point it regained controlled flight and came down to a safe landing near Tilburg, where it was captured for examination...
Yeah, one of these landed in Omaha, NE damaging a clock in Dundee neighborhood. Not terribly deadly, but it made press.
New front-end framework?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Outward