UFOs and Balloons

by Charles Lear

Throughout UFO history, a common explanation for sightings has been that the witness or witnesses saw a weather balloon. This explanation has often been used in a ludicrous manner by authorities seeking an easy means of dismissal, and this causes many UFOlogists to scoff at it in all cases. The truth is that it has been convincingly proven that weather balloons and balloons of all sorts have been mistaken as anomalous flying objects.

There is a classic Project Blue Book case known as, “The Gorman Dogfight.”  This incident occurred on October 1, 1948 and involved North Dakota Air National Guardsman, Lt. Frank Gorman. Gorman described chasing a six to eight inch, white light with sharp edges that “was blinking on and off. He chased it in an F-51, getting up to a maximum speed of 400 miles per hour, and it eluded him. The explanation in the Blue Book file is that Gorman was chasing a lighted balloon but there are problems with that and even notorious skeptic, Donald Menzel took issue with it.  What makes the balloon explanation doubtful is that two air traffic controllers saw the object from the ground and one described its speed as “excessive”. Adding to this, a pilot in the vicinity flying a Piper Cub also saw the object and described it as “moving very swiftly”. Menzel resolved the problem by concluding that Gorman was seeing a balloon and “a mirage of the planet Jupiter”.

Because this was at the very beginning of modern UFOlogy, the balloon explanation was off to a bad start and would continue to be used by the Air Force as a convenient way to dismiss a case. This was unfortunate because the explanation is often correct and if the Air Force could have been trusted it would have been able to remove a lot of noise from the signal.

A Blue Book case involving what appears to be a genuine misidentified balloon appears in a scanned document from the collection of Robert Mercer. The document can be viewed in the section, “From the Desks of Project Blue Book” on The Black Vault website. A .pdf labeled, “Balloons” has an undated description of the above- mentioned incident along with pictures. The report states that there had been “a rash of UFO sightings” reported from Golden, Colorado. The case was solved when police found a homemade hot air balloon made of thin clear plastic with a “saucer- shaped platform” that supported candles.

Weather balloons can often be identified by checking with local meteorologists. However, a case in Japan from June 17, 2020, was not so easily resolved. What looked like a large white balloon attached to two “crossed propellers” was reported over the city of Sendai. It remained motionless for several hours and then drifted out over the Pacific Ocean. A spokesman for the local Japan Meteorological Society denied it was theirs and Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary, Yoshide Suga, also denied knowledge of its origin. Suga also did what he could to dispel rumors that the likely unidentified flying balloon was a nefarious device from a foreign government.

A frequent source of UFO reports is something known as a Chinese lantern. This is a paper bag with a support for a heat source at the open end and has, over the last few years, become popular in America at celebrations such as weddings. A lantern misidentification in East Liberty County, Texas made the news in 2013.  Around 8:30 P.M. on Saturday, March 23, the local police received a 911 call from a person who reported seeing “red fireballs” up in the sky.  Police responded and looked with the aid of magnification (binoculars?) not specifically identified in the news report. While it seemed to them that they were looking at four hot air balloons in a line flying at a few thousand feet, they saw no gondola underneath. The UFOs disappeared and a second, nearly identical line of four objects appeared and also vanished.

The police were mystified and concerned enough to contact The National Weather Bureau, the Federal Aviation Administration and even the National UFO Reporting Center.  The mystery was solved when members of a wedding party in the area came forward and explained the sighting as being lanterns that had been released.

Another common source of UFO reports is mylar balloons. There is a huge assortment of shapes and sizes available at present, including numbers and every letter of the alphabet. It is more than likely that it was balloon of this sort that caused a great deal of embarrassment for Chris Mellon and To The Stars Academy.

In October of 2017, Mellon was describing the tic-tac shaped UFO encountered in San Diego in 2004 by the crew of the USS Nimitz. With a picture of an object on a screen behind him, Mellon said, “Clearly this is not a U.S. experimental aircraft, but whose is it?”

In January of 2017, the U.K. paper Express broke the news that what was in the picture almost certainly of terrestrial origin. The photo was one of six that were taken in July, 2005 by British researcher, Steve Mera and posted on Rense.com that same month. After carefully examining the photos and comparing them with pictures of mylar balloons, Mera came to the conclusion that what he had taken a picture of was a silver mylar balloon shaped like the number one.

Recently, news of a leaked photo of a UFO taken from the cockpit of a fighter jet caused a stir in the community. What was supposedly a clear image of a triangular craft has been convincingly identified as a clear image of a mylar Batman balloon.