New submitter kalieaire writes: Steve Trimble of Aviation week stories {that a} Passion Membership’s lacking ballon may need been inadvertently focused as a malicious UFO and subsequently shot down. When Scientific Balloon Options (SBS) firm founder, Ron Meadows, reached out to Gov’t assets on the FBI and DoD, they had been dismissed. “I am guessing most likely they had been pico balloons,” mentioned Tom Medlin, a retired FedEx engineer and co-host of the Novice Radio Roundtable present. Merlin has three pico balloons in flight within the Northern and Southern hemispheres. In keeping with Trimble, the outline of all three UFOs shot down throughout 2/10-12 match the outline of pico balloon fashions which may be bought for $12-180 every, relying on the sort. “Launching high-altitude, circumnavigational pico balloons has emerged solely inside the previous decade,” writes Trimble. He continues: Meadows and his son Lee found it was attainable to calculate the quantity of helium fuel essential to make a standard latex balloon neutrally buoyant at altitudes above 43,000 ft. The balloons carry an 11-gram tracker on a tether, together with HF and VHF/UHF antennas to replace their positions to ham radio receivers all over the world. At any given second, a number of dozen such balloons are aloft, with some circling the globe a number of occasions earlier than they malfunction or fail for different causes. The launch groups seldom get well their balloons.
The balloons can are available a number of kinds. Some fans nonetheless use frequent, Mylar celebration balloons, with a set of printed calculations to find out the quantity of fuel to inject. However the round-shaped Mylar balloons usually are unable to ascend greater than 20,000-30,000 ft., so some pico balloonists have upgraded to totally different supplies. […] In actual fact, the pico balloons weigh lower than 6 lb. and due to this fact are exempt from most FAA airspace restrictions, Meadows and Medlin mentioned. Three international locations — North Korea, Yemen and the UK — prohibit transmissions from balloons of their airspace, so the neighborhood has built-in geofencing software program into the monitoring gadgets. The balloons nonetheless overfly the international locations, however don’t transmit their positions over their airspace.
On Feb. 15, NSC spokesman John Kirby instructed reporters all three objects “may simply be balloons tied to some industrial or benign objective,” however he didn’t point out the potential of pico balloons.
