By Melissa Ziobro
MONMOUTH COUNTY – The U.S. military’s downing of a Chinese spy balloon and other unidentified aerial objects across North America over the past several weeks has many looking skyward.
Once upon a time, balloons dotting the skies right here in Monmouth County would not have been so unusual. The county’s military installations historically launched balloons of varying sizes, to varying heights, for a number of different reasons.
The military used large balloons at the Sandy Hook Proving Ground as targets for artillery guns. While these tests were often secret, a 1909 New York Times article noted, “The government could not prevent people in boats and those at Highlands from seeing the balloon after it was sent up. On the mainland, everybody who owned small telescopes or field glasses got them out and leveled them on the proving grounds.”
The Proving Ground also used observation balloons to assist with the sighting of the guns. In one instance in 1919, an observation balloon broke away and floated down the coast before finally alighting near Corlies Avenue in Neptune. The Asbury Park Press reported, “A mild flurry of excitement marked the passage of the… balloon.”
“Wobbling crazily from side to side as its gas cargo escaped, it zigzagged a course a bit to the southwest and began sinking rapidly after it had sailed over the spire of the West Grove M.E. church. A mile further on it collapsed and fell into a field.”
Balloons were also used in meteorological experiments at Sandy Hook and, even more so, by the U.S. Army Signal Corps headquartered at Fort Monmouth. Personnel stationed there conducted meteorological work using equipment attached to balloons at the main post and multiple other satellite campuses throughout the county. Why? Accurate weather forecasting serves many needs, not the least of which is aiding military readiness. Military planners have long recognized that, as Air Force Deputy Chief Information Officer Winston Beauchamp only recently noted: “When planning military operations, the weather can be a huge determiner of success or failure.”
These county-based weather experiments were often quite significant. For example, Fort Monmouth’s William Blair constructed some of the first balloon-borne radio transmitters for measuring weather in the 1920s. The technology advanced rapidly and, in 1948, a specially-built balloon carrying meteorological instruments and flown by Fort Monmouth’s Evans Signal Laboratory in Wall Township set a balloon altitude record when it reached 140,000 feet – 27,200 feet higher than the previous maximum. The record-setting balloon took two and a half hours to reach its mark. By 1960, a Signal Corps balloon reached 144,000 feet –almost 27 miles! On launching, that balloon measured 7 feet in diameter. At its peak altitude, just before it burst, the balloon had expanded to 70 feet – roughly as tall as a six-story building. These records would be smashed again and again (and far outpaced when Fort Monmouth and its Evans area supported satellite and rocket technologies).
Sometimes meteorological balloons, like the 1919 observation balloon, broke loose and floated free. In September 1947 a large Signal Corps balloon escaped its mooring near Convention Hall in Asbury Park. The helium-inflated balloon was on loan to the American Radio Relay league for a convention. It was expected to float for miles and remain aloft until its helium was gradually lost. It is unclear where it landed.
In October 1948 a balloon launched by Fort Monmouth’s Eatontown Signal Laboratory reportedly landed on the roof of a tavern on Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn. The balloon was said to be 50 feet long and 20 feet wide. The laboratory’s information officer, when queried, did not want to divulge much information about it, and the press reported that teenagers ran off with the equipment attached to the balloon before the police could apprehend them.
Other times, the balloons were sent aloft knowing the Army would lose track of them. In August 1950, the Fort Monmouth public information office let the concerned public know that if any small balloons fell on their property, they could keep them as “souvenirs.”
Today, unexplained aerial objects have led to some fear and much speculation. This, too, is nothing new. In 1948, a “balloon train” used to measure the intensity of neutrons in the earth’s atmosphere, sponsored joint- ly by Princeton University and the Office of Naval Research, got loose and floated over Monmouth County. It sparked public panic, with folks calling the authorities en masse, and civilian and military pilots even flying up to try to get a better look.
On another occasion, a 1952 newspaper headline read, “Wall Township Resident Reports Flying Saucer.” William Ready of Wall Township reported seeing a mushroom-shaped red, green and silver object lumbering through the sky. Fort Monmouth authorities quickly informed the public that the Evans Signal Laboratory had recently released a 7-foot weather balloon matching that description.
Sometimes, though, local authorities had no explanation for what people saw in the skies. In July 1954, a spokesman for the Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth was quoted in the Asbury Park Press as saying it was “doubtful that the so-called ‘flying objects’ which have been reported seen by a number of Shore persons lately have anything to do with weather balloons released at the Evans Signal Laboratories.”
The Fort was forced to make a similar statement that December, following reports of lighted disks in the sky. Then, a spokesperson said that about 18 meteorological balloons carrying radio equipment were being released daily from Evans, “But these balloons look like balloons – and not like flying saucers.”
Sometimes the public believed the government’s explanations about the balloons and sometimes they did not. Sam Stine, who worked at Fort Monmouth from the 1940s to the 1990s, recalled in an oral history interview with base historian Richard Bingham, “We, one time, used to test… radio transmitters that go up on a balloon and tell us what the weather is above the surface of the ground. They carried an aluminum antenna to broadcast back to the earth what they were measuring. And one of these fell to the ground… in Arizona. It was picked up, placed in a chapel that they built around it, and about two years ago I got a telephone call from a man that used to work here, asking me if I could identify the object they were worshipping in this chapel from his description. To the best of my knowledge, I was able to give him some nomenclature for it; it was a piece of our radiosonde equipment. But the people… still insist(ed) in worshipping that as a piece of equipment lost by space people when they came to see us. What can I tell ya?”
These vignettes have just scratched the surface of this fascinating piece of Monmouth County history. For more, visit infoage.org; sandyhooknj.org; or cecom.army.mil/Historian.
Melissa Ziobro is the specialist professor of public history at Monmouth University’s Department of History and Anthropology. She served as a command historian for the Communications-Electronics Command at Fort Monmouth from 2004 until the post’s closure in 2011.
The article originally appeared in the February 23 – March 1, 2023 print edition of The Two River Times.
