Back in the early ‘70s, I was part of a small crew doing some reconnaissance prospecting in the Keewatin looking for uranium. Basically, I spent days hiking across the tundra looking for anything of interest.
One day on the ground I noticed a small metal object that seemed to have been made by humans. It was very light, fit in the palm of my hand and was certainly a bit of a puzzle. What was it and how did it get there, just sitting on the ground in the middle of the barrens? I examined it a bit and decided it was some sort of instrument to measure temperature and probably air pressure and send a signal back to someone somewhere.
Over the course of a week, we found five of these things and a couple were still in their cardboard boxes. They said they were the instrument package for weather balloons and there was a reward if they were returned to the government. When we tried to claim a reward, the fellow said they stopped that program years ago and we could do what we wanted with them. So we each kept one.
On my prospecting map, I marked the general area we found them in as a weather balloon graveyard for the communities they were downwind of. The company I was working for thought this wasn’t appropriate for a geology map even though I pointed out it was an important geological feature of human geology. I also pointed out it was a form of littering that should be reported, but they ignored this plea as well.
I just looked it up and the U.S. National Weather Service says that every day, from 900 sites around the world, they release two balloons. That is 1,800 balloons a day for 365.25 days every year. That is 65,700 balloons a year and that is for only the USA. Every other country that has a sophisticated weather office is also out there releasing thousands of balloons.
Holy moly, that is a lot of weather balloons and should be considered a global littering problem. The site said these small weather balloons fly for a couple of hours on average and can travel 125 miles. They can also reach heights of 100,000 feet.
These are just the local weather balloons. Much bigger ones that can stay up for days or even weeks are used by governments universities and companies doing weather research. So, there are a whole lot of weather and research balloons floating around out there.
Now everyone is suddenly all excited about balloons in the sky and they are shooting them down,with missiles from military aircraft. They then spend a small fortune trying to find their remains. With today’s technology, why not send a drone up to poke a hole in them or grab onto them and pull them down? Blowing them up and then trying to find the wreckage in remote areas just doesn’t seem to work all that well.
Also, imagine that, if these were alien probes, it might upset them that their probes keep getting shot down. It would certainly give them a negative view of humans and put a real damper on intergalactic tourism.
No one seems to know what is going on – or they are not telling us – but one thing is for sure, it has a lot of people either worried or upset. This creates a lot of speculation and I also suspect someone in the government is trying to figure out a way to tax them.
Things have certainly changed since the 1970s, both politically and technologically. This may spur the government to spend a bit more on defence. Not just in the air but on the airwaves and with social media.
On the bright side, if a prospector did find the wreckage, I would hope they would get some sort of reward or finder’s fee.