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leather balloon leads to some flights of fancyMONTGOMERY, Ala. lt;UPI) - Itbegan when something white, as ie as a city street, floated down o a residential section of Monigom-Y during the cold, dark hours Fri-y morning, ripping down telephone d power lines.Panic ensued. ‘ The folks over there ought the sky was falling.” said Lt.R. Henderson at the Montgomeryilice djeartmenf, where phone lines ?re jammed.“A couple of them mentioned it was UFO, or somehting like, that, “Hen-seon said. “A couple of them called and said it looked like an icebergin the street. Another guy just called in and said a bunch of white stuff was coming down. 'THEN, AS DAWN broke, a man driving to work near Tuskegee, 35miles to the East, called police to report a strange metallic object in a field.It was beeping, he said.Police in Tuskegee drove out to take a look. They reported the silver object had the arresting word ‘ bomb” written on its side.They backed off and called Fort Benning, Ga., for the bomb squad.As it turned out, there was no mention of the word bomb on the object, and it was part of the white stuff that fell on Montgomery. It was a weatherexperiment and the balloon that carried it aloft.The white plastic research balloonwas launched Thursday by the National Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Tex., for the University of California at San Diego.THE SILVER object was a harmless apparatus designed to detectx-rays in the universe.Ralph Harju of the balloon facilityin Texas said the payload weighed 2.200 pounds and was carried to a height of bout 128,000 feet by the bai-loon.‘ There is a radioactive source on the experiment,” but it is a very small source,” Harju said. “Actually, this source is 90 small you could probably carry it for months in your pocx-et and no one would notice it.”The balloon tore down several power and telephone lines in Montgomerysaid the flight w*as terminated oncommand as scheduled after midnightFriday.We sent a radio command that fires a separation device between the bottom of the balloon and the top of the parachute,” Harju said. “It also triggers a nylon rope that rips out a panel of the balloon.”when it landed about 1 a.m. Harju
Newspaper Details
Arlington Heights Daily Herald Suburban Chicago
Arlington Heights, Illinois, US
Sat, Jan 28, 1978
Page 6
Full Page
Clipped by
Luis P.
AR 08 Dec 2021
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