Looked a little closer at this balloon image, fam. Those sections look like they're embedded on a clear film. This was a high-speed shot of the balloon, so no blur, but the irregular shape of each of the squares plus striation patterns suggests movement in a plastic material. That center ballast looks an awful lot like a housing for something mechanical, like a winch.
Wouldn't be the first time…
How Geologists Unraveled the Mystery of Japanese Vengeance Balloon Bombs in World War II
"During the Second World War the Japanese conceived the idea of fashioning incendiary bombs and attaching these to balloons which were released with easterly wintertime jet stream winds above 30,000 feet to float 5,000 miles across the north Pacific. The idea was to have these devices explode over the forested regions of the Pacific Northwest and initiate large forest fires that would hopefully divert U.S. manpower from warfighting in the Pacific theater to combating fires at home.
The balloons were crafted from mulberry paper, glued together with potato flour and filled with expansive hydrogen. They were 33 feet in diameter and could lift approximately 1,000 pounds, but the deadly portion of their cargo was a 33-lb anti-personnel fragmentation bomb, attached to a 64–foot long fuse that was intended to burn for 82 minutes before detonating. The Japanese programmed the balloons to release hydrogen if they ascended to over 38,000 feet and to drop pairs of sand filled ballast bags if the balloon dropped below 30,000 feet, using an onboard altimeter. Three-dozen sand-filled ballast bags were hung from a 4-spoke aluminum wheel that was suspended beneath the balloon, along with the bomb. Each ballast bag weighed between 3 and 7 pounds. The bags were programmed to be released in pairs on opposing sides of the wheel so the balloon would not be tipped to one side or another, releasing any of the precious hydrogen. In this way the balloons would rise in the daylight heat each day of the crossing and fall each evening, till their ballast bags were depleted, at which time the balloon and its deadly contents would descend upon whatever lay beneath it.
The first balloons were launched on November 3, 1944 and began landing in the United States on November 5th (off San Pedro, California) and by the following day (November 6th) were landing as far away as Thermopolis, Wyoming. 285 confirmed landings/sightings were made over a wide area, stretching from the Aleutian Islands, Canada and across the width and breadth of the continental United States: as far south as Nogales, Arizona (on the Mexican border) and easterly, to Farmington, Michigan (10 miles from Detroit). Most of the ballast bags were released in the trip across the north Pacific, but a few balloons crashed without exploding and some of the ballast bags were recovered. All of the bags contained the same type of dark colored sand.
The U.S. government muzzled the media about making any mention of the balloons in fear that whoever was producing them might be encouraged to send more. On March 5, 1945 a minister’s wife and five Sunday School students on a fishing trip were killed by one of the grounded balloons near Bly, Oregon while attempting to pull it through the forest, back to their camp. These were the only casualties of the balloon bombs during the war and the victim’s relatives were provided with a special death benefit after the war ended (in March 1946). The American public was made aware of the balloons after these tragic deaths, but word of their detonation never filtered back to the Japanese."
https://archive.ph/WgrjD