December 7, 2024

This Week in Amateur Radio

North America's Premiere Amateur Radio News Magazine

Bill Brown, WB8ELK with a "pico-balloon"

A hobby group may have the answer to what the U.S. shot down over Canada last week

resident Joe Biden on Thursday said the U.S. still doesn’t know what it shot down in the skies over North America last weekend, when Air Force fighter jets took out three car-sized objects flying over Alaska, the Yukon and Lake Huron.

He did, however, say they were “most likely balloons.” And as it turns out, there’s a group of hobbyists in Illinois that says one of its balloons is missing.

The Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, in a blog post that was first reported by Aviation Week, says one of its balloons went “missing in action” in the same region the U.S. military shot down one of the three unknown objects.

On Tuesday, the group said one of its balloons was last spotted at 12:48 a.m. on Saturday along an uninhabited island off the coast of Alaska. That tracks with when a U.S. F-22 used a Sidewinder missile to shoot down an object over the Yukon later that same day. Canadian officials have since said the debris will be extremely difficult to retrieve due to the frozen terrain and the remoteness of the site.

Read more – Politico: