LowObservable said:
So who was flying balloons in the 1970s?
I've tried researching this issue for a number of years (not intensively), and it is a really perplexing one. Here's a summary of what I have put together:
-extensive US spy balloon programs in latter 1950s. There were really two phases to this. The first one involved hundreds of balloons, the second one involved only a few. They were not very successful. After that it was widely believed that the recon balloon program ended.
-there are a few declassified documents from around 1963-1964 indicating some CIA interest in balloon programs. At least one of the documents indicates that the plan was to build a standard weather balloon with a radiosonde but to include some kind of sigint receiver inside the electronics. This implies a highly deceptive electronics program where the electronics look like one thing, but do something else entirely.
-I once asked a former senior CIA science and technology official about spy balloons in the 1960s and he said he was unaware of any such program. He actually was confused by the question. Now maybe he was lying to me, or maybe this was a very small program and he either forgot about it or he knew nothing about it. (I find it easier to believe that he forgot than he did not know. If he was lying, he did an amazingly good job of it.)
-There is a photo from around 1967 or so of a large photographic camera being prepared for a balloon flight. This appeared in Skeptical Inquirer magazine about six years ago in an article about high-altitude balloons. I never got a good explanation of it. I'm not sure if I have a copy of the photo or not. It does not make much sense to put a really big camera on a balloon for testing purposes, so this remains an enigma.
-I have heard of some research in very high altitude "balloon trains" but do not remember the details.
-I know somebody who used to work for CIA. He said that when they found out about the Soviet laser aircraft and what it was supposed to do, they did not understand it. If I remember correctly, their response was "whose balloons do they want to shoot at? We don't have any!"
These data points don't connect very well. It seems that there were some 1960s-era CIA spy balloons. But there's no evidence the US side that these continued beyond the 1960s. All we really have is the development of Soviet equipment to shoot down balloons in the 1970s and 1980s. Now it is always possible that there were no balloons and the Soviet programs continued because some enterprising engineer was able to convince his superiors to fund the research. If there were balloons were the Soviets able to shoot any down? And if they shot them down, why didn't they display them to the world?