Page 5 - The 'X' Chronciles Newspaper - June / July 2018 Edition

Attack Of The Killer Balloons 5

ATTACK OF THE situation worked: the Japanese abandoned the
project because they didn’t hear of any
KILLER BALLOONS successes.

But after the Mitchell tragedy in Oregon,
the public was warned. The last balloon bomb
The secret weapon aimed at the west.
was found in Alaska in 1955; its bombs were
still capable of exploding. Ironically, on March
On May 5, 1945, Reverend Archie Mitchell, his
10, 1945, one of the last paper balloons
wife Elsire, and five children from his Sunday
descended near Hanford, Washington. The
school drove from the tiny southern Oregon two
balloon landed on electrical power lines,
of Bly for a picnic on Gearhart Mountain. While
shutting off the Hartford nuclear reactor for
Reverend Mitchell parked his car, his wife and
three days. The Hanford reactor, part of the top-
children explored. They came upon a device the
secret Manhattan Project, was producing
U.S. knew about but had kept secret. When one plutonium for the bomb that was dropped on
of them touched the device, it exploded: Mrs. Nagasaki, Japan, five month later.
Mitchell and the five children were killed. The
The Fugo balloon bombs are considered
six Oregonians became the only known fatalities
a failure as a weapons system. There were no
on the U.S. mainland from enemy attack during
bomb-caused forest fires, and they cause little
all of World War II.
other damage. Elsi Mitchell and the five
children were the tragic exceptions. []
MADE IN JAPAN
The exploding contraption was a Japanese Fugo WORLD’S GREATEST
balloon bomb, the brainchild of Major General
Sueyoshi Kusaba of the Japanese Ninth Army HOAXES
Technical Research Laboratory. The balloons
measured 33 feet across and 70 feet long from THE CARDIFF GIANT
top to bomb. They were constructed (by
Japanese schoolgirls) from bits of tough paper
called washi, made from mulberry trees, and
glued together with potato paste. The bomb parts
were made in a factory - not by schoolgirls.
Filled with hydrogen gas, the payload
consisted of 36 sandbags for ballast, four
incendiary bombs, and one 33-pound
antipersonnel bomb. Launched to rise to 35,000
feet, the balloons were designed to use the
prevailing Pacific eastward winds to reach the
west coast of North America. As the balloons
leaked gas and lost altitude, barometric pressure
switches caused the sandbags to drop off and the
balloons would rise back to the jet stream. The
trip took three to five days. By the time they
reached the United States, the balloons, now out
of sandbags, were supposed to drop the bombs
and then self-destruct. The Japanese hoped the The Set-Up: In 1869, at an upstate New York
bombs would cause forest fires and panic the farm just outside the town of Cardiff, well
American public. diggers found what seemed to be the petrified
body of a man, but more than a man, a 10-foot-

FUGIO, FUGO, FUGO! tall giant. The diggers had been hired by New
York cigar maker George Hull, a relative of the
Between October 1944 and April 1945, Japan
farm’s owner.
launched 9,300 of these balloons. Estimates are
The Impact: News of the amazing discovery
that fewer than 500 balloons reached the United
States or Canada; the rest fell into the Pacific spread quickly around the world. Hull charged
people 50 cents to take a peek at the giant.
Ocean.
Experts cried fraud, but the fundamentalists ate
In November 1944, one balloon was
it up. So did the civic boosters in whatever town
discovered in the ocean off Dan Pedro,
it was exhibited in. The sign that accompanied
California. In January 1945, a balloon bomb
the giant claimed that P.T. Barnum had offered
landed in Medford, Oregon, without exploding.
$150,000 to buy it. The figure may have been
At some point a rancher in Nevada discovered a
lower, but an offer was made. Hull refused to
balloon and used it as a tarp to cover his hay;
sell, so Barnum made his own replica of the
police later discovered that two bombs were still
attached to it. giant and sued Hull, declaring the original to be
a fake.
It Was All a Hoax: Under cross-examination
WHAT BALLOONS?
during the ensuing trial, Hull admitted that the
Most of the balloons either exploded harmlessly
giant was nothing more than an elaborate hoax,
or failed to detonate on impact. Approximately
carved from gypsum and washed with sulphuric
90 of them were recovered in the United States
acid to make it look old. He had thought up the
as far east as Michigan. Strict censorship kept
idea after an argument with a fundamentalist
their existence out of the newspapers, and those
preacher. He wondered if he could convince the
who knew of their presence were sworn to
preacher that the “giants in the earth” mentioned
secrecy. It was feared that the news of the
in the Bible were real. Of course, there was the
balloons’ arrival would encourage the launching
money-making angle, too. Hull came out of the
of more balloons. They weren’t seen as much of
deal some $30,000 ahead.
a danger, but the hush-hush handling of the