< Militaries have sought to use spy balloons for centuries. The real enemy is the wind

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

This week the U.S. government said China may have never intended to fly its balloon over the continental United States. Intelligence officials say they now suspect the alleged spy balloon was thousands of miles off course. NPR's Geoff Brumfiel reports on the surprisingly long history of spy balloons losing to the wind.

GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE: Since the balloon was invented in the late 1700s, armies around the world have taken an interest.

TOM D CROUCH: In military terms, it's always good to be able to get up high to see as much as you can behind the enemy lines.

BRUMFIEL: Tom D. Crouch is a curator emeritus at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum who's written books on balloons. During the Civil War, a Union general named Fitz John Porter ascended to look at Confederate forces around Yorktown, Virginia. Suddenly, the line snapped, and Porter found himself bobbing towards the enemy.

CROUCH: People were shooting at him and everything else. And fortunately, the wind shifted, and they were blown back over the Union lines.

BRUMFIEL: This is among the earliest documented cases of a military balloon blown astray, but it's hardly the only one. Fast-forward about a century, and the U.S. was in a new, different kind of war - the Cold War. Stephen Schwartz is a scholar of nuclear weapons. The U.S. and Russia, back then the Soviet Union, were locked in a nuclear arms race.

STEPHEN SCHWARTZ: We were desperate for information. We were terrified that the Soviet Union was going to unleash a surprise attack, and we didn't know what they were really capable of.

BRUMFIEL: It was before the time of spy satellites, but America had an ace up its sleeve - the balloon. New plastics and other materials allowed the government to build balloons that could fly at incredible altitudes.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Fitted to the plastic sphere is an aluminum gondola pressurized to withstand the effects of such a tremendous height.

BRUMFIEL: The Air Force hatched a plan.

SCHWARTZ: Take special cameras, attach them to these high-altitude balloons, and let them drift over the Soviet Union.

BRUMFIEL: But the key word in that sentence is drift. Once again, the wind got involved, and it blew America's spy balloons to all sorts of random places.

SCHWARTZ: It was essentially a disaster. A lot of the imagery was of clouds or just fields.

BRUMFIEL: And historian Tom Crouch says, just like America saw China's balloon, the Soviets spotted the U.S. balloons floating by and took action.

CROUCH: They just shot them out of the sky.

BRUMFIEL: The Soviets went public with the wreckage, and the U.S. tried to deny everything. An Air Force source said at the time the balloons were just taking pictures of clouds, which was kind of true. It turned out they got a lot of shots of clouds. These are but a few examples of spy balloons blown off course, which is why Crouch is so befuddled by China's choice. In an era when satellites, surveillance planes, drones and even cell phone cameras can take a peek at almost every inch of the planet, what, he wonders, did they hope they could learn with a balloon? Geoff Brumfiel, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF NENA SONG, "99 LUFTBALLONS")

Copyright © 2023 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.