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“Mystery of the Canadian Weather Balloon Gone Rogue: What Really Happened?”
Twenty-five years later, Dale Sommerfeldt can laugh at the rogue weather balloon that withstood the firepower of the three-nation air forces attempting to bring it down.
But he admits it was a headache for those involved at the time.
In 1998, the research balloon did not land as planned in two or three days due to a technical defect.
Instead, it began drifting across Canada toward the Atlantic.
Mr Sommerfeldt, who works for Canadian engineering firm Scientific Instrumentation Ltd, which built the instrumentation for the balloon, said it was intended for “strictly scientific research” related to ozone.
The Canadian balloon is a different style to the Chinese balloon shot down by the US over the weekend, he added, noting that “these are designed to go on for weeks or even a month at a time.”
It was a huge thing – the size of a 25-storey building that would cover an area of five football pitches if deflated, according to a BBC report from the time.
The helium-filled balloon was launched in late August 1998 by the province of Saskatchewan for research by the Canadian Space Agency, Environment Canada and the University of Denver in the United States.
But the researchers quickly realized that something had gone wrong. A valve that would allow the balloon to naturally deflate and deflate over time had finally been covered by a piece of plastic.
It didn’t take long for them to lose control of it.
“The finishing device failed and the backup system failed, and that’s why the balloon is where it is now,” Mr. Sommerfeldt told the Associated Press in 1998.
On Monday he told the BBC: “It was just exposed to the winds.”
An attempt to bring it down was made off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, but to no avail.
“We asked the Canadian military if they would consider shooting it down and sending someone for gunnery training,” Mr. Sommerfeldt said.
A fighter jet had an altitude of about 60,000 feet, he recalled, and “of course, the balloon was much higher.”
Hoping to save the research, he told them to shoot up and aim at the suspension point, where the release mechanism for the package of scientific instruments attached to a parachute was located.
According to news reports, the Canadian CF-18s fired more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition at the balloon – the pilots refrained from using air-to-air missiles.
The ammo salvos didn’t work.
“It wasn’t enough to shake the release mechanism loose. They probably also hit the balloon. But these small bullet holes and a balloon this size would have almost no effect,” said Herr Sommerfeldt.
It was also shadowed by British and US fighter jets. The rogue balloon continued towards Iceland before drifting into Russian airspace.
It then drifted back towards Norway before finally landing on the Finnish island of Mariehamn after what the Tribune News Service called a “nine-day odyssey”.
The instrumentation was shipped back to Canada and reused (although the instrument pack and its parachute suffered a few bullet holes). said Herr Sommerfeldt.
There was, he added, a slap in the face from Nav Canada, the country’s air traffic control agency, which had to divert transatlantic flights around the balloon route.
“It’s been a while so I’m kind of over it now,” he said. “But I guess it was a bit stressful at the time.”
A CF-18 fighter jet like those sent after the rogue balloon
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