Spreading anti-communist hot air: Washington’s balloon warfare against the USSR

February 8, 2023 9:58 AM CST BY RICHARD SAVILLE

A test launch of a Project Moby Dick propaganda and surveillance balloon at Holloman Air Force Base, N.M., circa 1955. | U.S. Air Force Public Affairs Office

LONDON—On Feb. 3, 1956, astonished residents in the U.K. towns of Lewisham, Pinner, and Farnborough were greeted with the news that several U.S. propaganda balloons had crash-landed locally.

Appearing in the local press and the publication World News, the report brought the Cold War to Britons’ very doorsteps, quite literally.

This was not the first landing of such large balloons. They were used to carry anti-communist propaganda into Eastern Europe, regularly over Hungary and Czechoslovakia and even as far as the Soviet Union.

This particular large air-space balloon was simply off-course and caused no damage. But in Czechoslovakia, for example, this kind of high-pressure publicity stunt extolling Western ideas had been going on for some two years. Around 400,000 balloons were counted in the skies of Czechoslovakia, carrying an estimated 250 million leaflets.

As farmers found out, the balloons’ debris could cause animals to choke. The big U.S. balloons were filled with hydrogen—the explosive gas that doomed the Hindenberg back in 1937—and included a container box for dropping the leaflets and an explosive device which opened the box.

A U.S. Navy balloon in flight. | U.S. Office of Naval Research

As a result of the bang the balloons made when scattering their propaganda sheets, many Czechoslovak citizens were burned or otherwise injured by debris. (When President Joe Biden was faced with the recent “Chinese spy balloon” over the U.S. and worried about the debris, he had it shot down over the Atlantic Ocean.) …