Balloons I guess there are many people who are tired of hearing about the objects which were shot down over the U.S. and Canada. Some say they were all Chinese balloons, others unknown objects except for the first one. Why would the government keep all this secrecy about the objects? It seems to me there are far too many secrets. Anyway, at the point I am writing this there are also some saying at least some of the objects could have been alien UFOs. This seems absurd to me. If history is any indication of what we can do and can’t, shooting alien UFOs out of the sky has not been a successful endeavor and trying it cost us lives in the past. What makes anyone think we can now shoot down an alien UFO at will? Usually what we believe are alien UFOs zip away at incredible speed when fighter planes head toward them with weapons systems active or they mess with the planes electronics so the missiles can’t hit the intended target. According to everything I heard so far, the objects which were shot down were slow traveling objects which did not try to avoid being shot down and were relatively easy to hit. Rather than being an alien UFO, the meager description I got of one of them was it was octagon shaped and traveling very slowly. Sounds more like an advanced drone of some sort rather than a balloon. Could the Chinese, if it is Chinese, have developed a drone which they could control at very long distances and are testing them? We know Iran is getting into advanced drones and has sold some to Russia. Maybe they are the ones testing a new model over the United States. We have no shortage of enemies who would love to be able to construct accurate maps of all our defenses and flying over the United States at low altitude is one way of doing it, if you can get away with it as the Chinese did the time with a balloon. One thing I believe for sure is the people of the United States, regardless of party, are not happy with the way the first object was allowed to go over the entire country before action was taken. Balloons are nothing new in the art of spying or launching weapons. The Japanese launched thousands of them against us in World War 2, but they were dependent on wind currents, and even though they carried a bomb on each one, hardly any ever reached us and most that did were shot down. They were a lot more primitive than the balloon launched against us by the Chinese. The use of balloons in spying and in war time go back hundreds of years. It is said the first use of a balloon for spying occurred in 1794. The French used a spy balloon in the Battle of Fleurus. They actually formed a balloon corps. The balloons were used to spy on the Dutch and Austrian troops. Some people believe the use of balloons could go back much further in history and they might have been used to guide the creation of the Nazca drawings in Peru. When the model of a bird was found in a Egyptian tomb which had the perfect attributes to fly as a glider, some also thought there might have been balloons known to them. During the American Civil War, balloons played a big part in the observation of troops on a battlefield. The armies would launch a balloon with an observer in the basket. The balloon was tethered to the ground and the rope let out as the balloon rose. The balloon could then be pulled back down by the rope when the observer was finished. As armies modernized when the years past, the balloons were equipped with cameras and even telegraphs. Obviously balloons still have their uses today. Weather balloons are launched all the time. Balloons are used as an inexpensive way of getting near space and there has even been talk of using them for rocket launching platforms. This would save a lot of rocket fuel if a rocket was launched into space from a balloon which was already up around 100,000 feet. The first known balloons were the idea of Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier from France. It is said they launched the first one in 1782. It was a hot air balloon and the fire used to heat the air was composed of wool and damp straw. In 1824 the first rubber balloon was invented by Professor Michael Faraday and he used hydrogen, a lighter than air gas to get it aloft. In World War 1, blimps which were a type of balloon with a gondola under them were used in war, along with zeppelins which had a rigid body filled with gas bags. One of the big problems was hydrogen was a very explosive gas. When the Americans discovered helium which was also lighter than air, but not explosive they had an advantage. During World War 2 American airships were used to hunt submarines and were effective at times. It is said they became effective with the invention of the homing torpedo. Before that, submarines would just dive to get away. Balloons have been used for years as entertainment for children. Besides filling them with helium and letting them float on a string while the child has one, the different shaped ones can be twisted into different animal shapes by an expert. I’ve seen balloons being used in many different ways. Sometimes people buy a bag of assorted sized balloons. They take the smallest ones out and use them to put over the legs of a chair or stool that was marking the floor. It seems to save the floor and makes the legs of the chair more decorative. Do you miss those snowball fights, no problem. There is nothing like a good water balloon fight. NASA uses a lot of balloons. They are used to lift scientific payloads into the atmosphere. They have a program which challenges teams in the Formulate, Lift, Observe, and Testing: Data Recovery And Guided On-board Node Balloon Challenge. It is known as Floating Dragon. It seems balloons are still very useful to the space and science community among others. It has been said balloons are hard to detect and have to be detected by detecting their payloads. I certainly do not know much about this and I am just repeating what I read. It seems balloons still have a lot of uses and certainly have not reached the end of their usefulness.
|
