Rogue History

- The soldiers around the campfire celebrated the day's victory, but a sense of unease hung in the air.

Though they were in firmly held territory surrounded by their undefeated army, they knew one thing with absolute certainty, they were being watched.

This time, scouting the land would be useless.

The spies they feared weren't on the land as they had been for thousands of years before, they were above it.

Their numbers, strategies, and even their rations were all being documented under the cover of night by a spy balloon.

I'm Joel Cook, and this is "Rogue History."

If you were anywhere near a screen in February, 2023, this is probably what you saw.

- China spy balloon - Spy balloon.

- Spy balloon.

- Chinese.

- Spy balloon.

- When an unmanned high-altitude surveillance balloon owned by China passed through North American airspace over Alaska, our eyes and cameras were glued to the sky for several days until it was shot down off the coast of South Carolina.

The Chinese government called the destruction of the balloon an excessive reaction, while the US Secretary of State canceled a planned visit to China.

So why were two superpowers with satellites and spy planes galore upset about a balloon?

Well, despite their unthreatening appearance, spy balloons have been vital to surveillance and spying techniques throughout history.

Our story starts with a sheep, a duck, and a rooster.

Yeah, really.

In 1783, French brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier designed the first passenger balloon called Le Reveillon, but were too scared to try it out for themselves.

So I guess there was a sheep, a duck, a rooster, and two chickens.

After ascending to a height of almost 2,000 feet and traveling over two miles, these brave aeronauts were designated heroes of the air and became attractions in Louis XIV Zoo.

Shortly after, Pilatre de Rozier became the first man to ever be carried aloft when he took a tethered flight in Le Reveillon.

11 years later, the French Army became the first on record to use balloons in battle for reconnaissance during their revolutionary wars, but it was really civilian inventors who pushed the limits which is precisely how an eccentric balloonist named Thaddeus Lowe found himself sitting in the office of President Abraham Lincoln.

So how did this Doc Brown type become a valuable government asset for the Union Army?

It all began in 1861, just after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter.

Lowe was experimenting with the limits of balloon technology, even proposing transatlantic balloon flights for commerce purposes.

To put his balloon dreams to the test, Lowe embarked on an impressive nine-hour flight from Cincinnati.

Unfortunately, the winds had carried him all the way into Confederate territory.

Oops.

Needless to say, the people of South Carolina were not very welcoming to the strange flying apparatus, not in 1861, not in 2023.

[people shouting] One local accused him of being a devil and another argued that he should be executed on the spot.

He managed to talk his way out of the situation and catch a train to Columbia, South Carolina, where he was once again detained and threatened with all manners of violence.

The Mayor of Columbia, W.H.

Boatwright, reluctantly vouched for Lowe as a harmless hobbyist and ensured his safe travel to the north.

But if he had known just how useful Lowe's inventions would be to the Union, he might have made a different decision.

The United States was in the midst of a civil war and the federal government, aka the Union, needed a strategy to gain the advantage over a growing Confederate army.

When word got out of Lowe's flight, he was invited to Washington, DC.

In June of 1861, he pitched his balloon technology to President Abraham Lincoln himself.

Most impressively, he communicated directly with the president from 500 feet above the ground.

In the first ever telegraph from an aerial station, Lowe messaged Lincoln, "This point of observation commands an area nearly 50 miles in diameter, and in acknowledging indebtedness to your encouragement for the opportunity of demonstrating the availability of the science of aeronautics in service of the country."

As far as we can tell, Lincoln left him on red, but by August, he was given the money to build the first balloon for his new command, the Union Army Balloon Corps.

Unfortunately, this dazzling demonstration of telegraphs being transmitted from the sky proved spotty on the battlefield and was never fully implemented.

So the primary options to communicate highly-sensitive messages were yell, land, and my favorite, secret codes.

Flag colors, movements, and locations would give key information for the generals on the ground planning their next move.

In one instance, a balloon used white flags placed in different positions around the balloon to direct cannon fire on a target three miles away.

Raising a flag high would mean to fire to the right of the landmark, in this case, a church.

Lowering it signified firing towards the left, and whether it was held still or waived gave even more details to the cannon operators on the ground.

As early as September, 1861, Lowe theorized about using colored flares to communicate over long distances during nighttime observations.

By 1863, flares were being used by infantry units at night to communicate their movements with spy balloons located at various headquarters.

He wasn't the first to think of this though, much smaller unmanned balloons were used to signal during military operations in China during the Three Kingdoms Era.

The concept of the Balloon Corps also wasn't the first time the idea of surveillance via balloon was floated in the US.

In 1840, the US War Department explored using balloons to locate Seminole campfires in the Everglades.

About six years later, John Wise proposed their use in the Mexican War, but was not taken seriously.

But it was taken seriously nearly two decades later and even affected the outcome of the Battle of Seven Pines also known as the Battle of Fair Oaks.

The Confederate troops used tree lines and hill cover to conceal their advance, a common and generally effective strategy.

However, that day their plan was foiled by the union's eyes in the sky who warned the commanders about the incoming attack.

The union forces were technically defeated that day but without this new method of gathering intelligence, they may not have lived to fight another day.

The Confederate Army was well aware of the advantage provided by the Union Army surveillance balloons, but unfortunately for the rebels, they had neither the infrastructure or the materials, specifically silk needed to build their own balloons, so they innovated.

According to a Confederate officer, "A genius arose for the occasion and suggested that we send out and gather together all the silk dresses in the Confederacy and make a balloon."

While that story was more likely myth than fact, designer Langdon Cheves did use patchwork silk fabric for the build.

The balloon called The Gazelle was successfully put together, no doubt through the forced labor of enslaved people and deployed in the Peninsular campaign.

However, The Gazelle and the vessel towing it down the James River were both captured just a few days after being deployed and the Confederacy never built another balloon.

I guess you could call it a lost cause.

Even for the Union who had more resources, these early spy balloons had a lot of issues.

They were fragile, the tethered lines often caught on trees or buildings and broke sending the aerostats floating away towards enemy lines.

They were bulky and difficult to transport.

On land, observation balloons were usually transported with a large wagon train and its own crew, and with nowhere to take cover, they were vulnerable to artillery fire.

With all of its challenges, the balloon Corps was disbanded after only two turbulent years, but even though it was short-lived, it laid the framework for decades of aerial surveillance afterwards, literally.

In 1874, Count Ferdinand Von Zeppelin, an acquaintance of Thaddeus Lowe conceptualized and drew plans for the rigid airship, an aluminum framed vessel covered with fabric and containing several cells filled with hydrogen.

When the First World War broke out, the German military deployed Zeppelins for surveillance and defense, and one of the first strategic bombing raids was when a squadron attacked the Belgian city of Liege in August, 1914.

The US continued to use balloons, including non-rigid ones like blimps, for surveillance and submarine patrol in both world wars, and they worked.

During World War II, U-boat sank over 500 ships and unescorted convoys along the eastern seaboard of the US.

But only one ship was sunk in a convoy that had blimps present.

Who knew Snoopy could be so effective?

In the 1970s, the US Air Force revisited the idea of aerostats designing a tethered blimp called the Tethered Aerostat Radar System, or TARS, to detect low flying aircraft during the Cold War.

Similar aerostats were deployed during the drug wars of the 1980s and even saw service in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Nowadays, the modern spy balloon is unmanned and often deployed at altitudes of about 80,000 feet.

But just like the balloon core, are often at the mercy of the winds.

You'd think we'd have that part figured out by now but apparently it's still up in the air.

As people living in a modern world, we're pretty much numb to surveillance, from traffic cams to satellite imagery or an ad that pops up for something you just mentioned.

We've accepted it, but there's just something about seeing the thing that's watching us that makes us uneasy, isn't there?

We panicked about that spy boom.

It's almost like just for a few days we were back in 1862.

How do you feel about being spied on?

Tell us in the comments.

[light melancholic music]