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High-Altitude 'Security Blimps' Coming Soon
quackking writes "The AP is reporting (in New York Newsday) that the Georgia Tech spinoff company TechSphere has sold their concept of immense (300 foot diameter), high altitude spherical surveillance blimps to the honchos at Fort Benning, GA, and production is beginning now! (more here.) These things are as big as a 30-story building. Meanwhile Lockheed-Martin is working on gigantic 500-foot long robot blimps, (and more here.) This would be 25 times the size of the well-known Goodyear blimp. Says Mayor Don Plusquellic, 'For Akron, it's a very emotional thing.'"
No, not just against Hawaii. They sent hundreds (or thousands?) of hydrogen balloons, to which they had attached simple fire bomb(s) towards mainland US. Intention was to try to start forest firest and other damages, and in general create terror in civilian population (ie. demoralize enemy). There was a very interesting documentary about that campaign; campaign itself was VERY top secret during WWII (esp. on US side). For once censorship did succeed; it (lack of news related to balloons) convinced japanese that plan wasn't working. Too bad there were actual casualties -- in couple of cases kids died when they went to look into funny balloons drifting in places like Montana and Wyoming. :-/
Wish I had link; I think you should find link to it from some PBS web site. There was also a map that had locations of every known instance of such a balloon found... and there were quite a few pins on it.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
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