I was the weather balloon: a retired Bureau man comes clean

Warren’s note: This arrived in a plain envelope, typed, no return address, postmarked from a regional centre we have chosen not to name. The author gives no name and asks that we not speculate. We have run it exactly as received, apart from one word Noreen asked us to take out. The Collective considers this the most significant leak since Pine Gap Pete’s Keno slip of 2008. Noreen considers the date of receipt significant for other reasons.

I worked for the Bureau for thirty-one years. Which Bureau, you’ll want to know. The Bureau. The one with the balloons. I’ll say no more than that, and you’ll understand why by the end.

I was a field officer. My job, at a succession of small stations in places you’ve driven through, was to go out at set times, fill a balloon from a cylinder, hang an instrument package under it, let it go, and track it with a theodolite until it was out of sight. Twice a day, every day, in all weathers, for thirty-one years. I have let go of, by my own count, something over twenty-two thousand balloons.

I was proud of that. I want you to know I was proud of that. I kept the logbooks. I still have the logbooks.

The explanations

It took me a long time to notice the pattern, because you don’t read about UFOs when you work for the Bureau. It’s frowned on. But my wife did, and she’d say over tea, “There’s been lights over so-and-so,” and I’d say, “Oh yes?” and she’d say, “They’re saying it was a weather balloon,” and I’d think, was it? Because I’d have been the one who let it go.

And here’s the thing. Half the time, it wasn’t one of mine. I’d check the log. No launch that night. No launch within three hundred kilometres. And the next day there’d be the man from the Bureau, a different man, a man I never met, in the paper, saying “a routine meteorological balloon”.

I rang it in, the first time. I said, I don’t think that was us. And a very pleasant voice from head office said that I was quite right to check, that it had been a “special release”, that these happened from time to time, and that I should log it as such. So I did. I logged it as a special release. I wrote SPECIAL in the margin in red.

I have four hundred and six SPECIALs in the margins of thirty-one years of logbooks, and I let go of none of them.

The ones I did let go

Now the other half. The ones that were mine.

Every so often, and I mean maybe twice a year, the cylinder would come with a different instrument package. Not the usual white box. Heavier. Sealed. No serial number I recognised. And a note, typed, saying launch at such-and-such a time, do not track, do not log the ascent, log as routine.

I asked, the first time. The pleasant voice said it was a calibration unit and that I need not concern myself. I didn’t ask the second time. By the tenth time I’d stopped looking at them closely, because they hummed, and I didn’t want to know why they hummed.

They did not behave like balloons. A balloon goes up and drifts with the wind and bursts at height and that’s your lot. These went up, and then they stopped, at perhaps two thousand feet, and sat there. In wind. And then, after a period, they went, and I don’t mean drifted, I mean went, and not always upward.

And then two days later there’d be lights over so-and-so, and the man from the Bureau would be in the paper.

What I’m saying

I’m an old man and I’ve got the logbooks and nobody’s come for them, which tells you either that they don’t matter or that nobody thinks I’d ever say anything, and both of those make me angry in different ways.

So I’ll say it plainly. I was the weather balloon. For thirty-one years, every time something was seen in the sky over this country and someone needed it to be nothing, I was the nothing. My balloons, my name on the log, my pleasant voice from head office. I was the cover story and I was never once asked whether I minded.

They were balloons, I think. The ones that hummed. They had the shape. They came out of the cylinder room like all the others. They were balloons, I think.

They did not tell us what was in them.

I’ve asked, since retiring, through the proper channels. I’ve had three letters back. One says there is no record of special releases. One says the special releases were routine. One says that the Bureau does not comment on operational matters and thanks me for my service.

The third one came with a pamphlet about drought assistance. I live in a town on a river. We were not in drought.

Draw your own ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ conclusions.

Warren’s note: the redacted word was not a swear word. Noreen felt it was “unkind to the Bureau”. The Collective has retained the original and will produce it at the appropriate time.

Document U8MC-17-0309. Status: LEAKED. This file is retained indefinitely, or until the Men in Beige ask for it, whichever is never.

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