Historian Ken Jessen reflects on balloon reports, shares Colorado story
The Chinese spy balloon that was shot down over the east coast a couple weeks ago seems to have started a frenzy of people seeing things in the sky that don't belong.
Local historian Ken Jessen says here in Colorado, that's an old story.
"It's just one of these wonderful Colorado odd stories," he said.
In 1945, the United States was fighting Japan in World War II, when the country constructed a plan to bomb the mainland without an airplane.
"Actually, it was a balloon. It was a balloon called a Fu-Go," Jessen said.
The Fu-Go carried a 10-pound bomb meant to start forest fires in the Pacific Northwest, but a design flaw caused many of the balloons to crash in the Pacific Ocean.
"300 made it across out of 9,300," Jessen said.
The ones that did make it mostly landed uneventfully, but one delivered its payload on the Swets' farm near Timnath.
John Swets and his 10-year-old son saw it come down and detonate. No one was hurt; the only damage was a crater in their newly cultivated field.
"I think it was pretty anti-climactic to them. They're busy farming raising crops and so forth. So, you know it's just one of those things to them," Jessen said.
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Jessen says because no one was hurt and the balloons largely failed the Fu-Go balloons are mostly just an odd little-known piece of Colorado history. But he reveals that technically Colorado was attacked by one of our World War II adversaries.
"Technically, the Japanese did bomb Colorado," Jessen said.
The farm in Colorado where the bomb went off became the famous Swetsville Zoo, which has since been sold for redevelopment.
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