After the first bombs fell on Tokyo in April 1942, the Japanese needed a revenge. They had no way to bomb the US by planes, so they projected to use balloons carried by the jet streams to throw incendiary bomb to set fire at the US forests. It took them two years to develop their reprisal. They used Japanese schoolgirls to construct the balloons from non-strategic materials such as paper and potato paste. Starting in November 1944, they launched 9000 Fugo balloons across the Pacific ocean during a five-month period, at an altitude of 30,000 to 35,000 feet on prevailing winds at 100 to 200 miles per hour.
They appeared everywhere from Alaska to Mexico and caused enough concerns to the military that they try to censor any damages and put up the top secret "project Firefly", an Army unit of paratroopers firefighters.
|
There were very few real damages and little casualties. The US forests did not burn. However a little known fact is that one Fugo balloon landed on a power line near the Hanford nuclear plant in Washington state, where plutonium for the atomic bomb was produced. The power interruption caused the first nuclear incident in history. However and luckily, the power was restored soon enough to avoiding a Chernobyl-like nuclear plant core meltdown.
At the end of April 1945 the balloon barrage ceased. So obviously the object found at Roswell was not a freshly crashed Fugo balloon, since the Roswell Incident occurred in 1947. Most researchers also agree that silk and paper Fugo balloon debris remaining for two years in the open under the heavy sun of the New Mexico desert would have completely degraded and flown away and would not fit with any of the witnesses descriptions of the remains.
|
