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Japanese WW2 "Fu-Go" Balloon Bombs (2016)
On November 3, 1944, Japan released fusen bakudan, or balloon bombs, into the Pacific jet stream. Japan’s latest weapon, the balloon bombs were intended to cause damage and spread panic in the continental United States.
“We had built special safeguards into that line, so the whole Northwest could have been out of power, but we still were online from either end,” said Colonel Franklin Matthias,the officer-in-charge at Hanford during the Manhattan Project, in an interview with Stephane Groueff in 1965. Vincent “Bud” Whitehead, a counter-intelligence agent at Hanford, recalled chasing and bringing down another balloon from a small airplane: “I threw a brick at it. The team was co-headed by Karl T. Compton, a longtime scientific advisor to the US government, and Edward Moreland, a scientist hand-picked by General MacArthur.
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