normally i call bullshit on 'swamp gas' and 'venus' type dismissals of ufo sightings...i mean i don't know the last time i saw venus change from green to orange and then bifurcate into a fleet of smaller orbs before speeding off at mach speeds in the afternoon... but anyway, i digress. my point is that in the classic gallery of culprits, the weather balloon may be plausible and probable more often than not. especially in the 50's.
see, if it wasn't greys and reptillians plotting our demise from atomic spaceballs, it was the us and the ussr doing it with balloons... not that we were trying to figure out how to rain death on each other with balloons or nuclear carrier pigeons exactly...but the us in particular was going nuts trying to understand what they were up against. the russians were, as churchill stated, "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."
and so, under the guise of 'scientific research' and being 'enthusiasts of cloud photography,' we started sending out balloons over the soviet union to take pictures. this went swimmingly until the soviets started catching them with their own planes using the same hooks that we put on the balloons so that we could easily retrieve them on returning...smooth move team america. anyway, check out the article...its a bit more interesting than i care to be this evening...
