Balloon Bombs Fall In Oregon and the Northwest United States! 
Hardly remembered and largely covered up by the government during World War II, the US mainland was being bombed by Japan on a regular basis. I remembered this when a friend and I were discussing Oregon's history and I realized that it all started about this time of year in 1944.
At that time Japan began launching bomb-carrying hydrogen balloons into the jet stream intended for the Northwest United States. Japan hoped that bombing the forests of our Northwest would cause widespread panic among our citizens and hopefully reduce our war effort by keeping large numbers of our people fighting forest fires. Their main Balloon Bomb effort was launched during the wet season in the Pacific Northwest so the forest fires they caused didn't achieve the catastrophic results they had hoped for, but they did do a considerable amount of damage.
These Balloon Bombs were made of three or four layers of cemented tissue paper and filled with hydrogen. They were about 33 feet in diameter and had 32 sandbags suspended under the balloon on the spokes of an aluminum wheel. The balloons were equipped with an altitude-control mechanism so that whenever the balloon descended to about 30,000 feet an altimeter connected to a small battery would trigger a release fuse and a small explosive device would drop two of the sandbags. The balloon would then ascend until it reached around 38,000 feet, to run again with the high winds of the jet stream, which the enterprising Japanese had been studying for years in anticipation of war. The cooler air up above plus the normal loss of gas through seepage would cause the balloon to eventually settle back to 30,000 feet and the entire process would repeat. These actions would be repeated all the way across the Pacific ocean zigzagging toward the US coast. Once all 32 sandbags were gone, the bombs would be released and the balloon would destroy itself with a small demolition charge.
These balloons were mainly constructed by Japanese school children as part of their national turnout to help their country's war effort. I'm certain the children didn't realize what the balloons would be used for.
The success of the Balloon Bombs went unrealized by the enemy, as the US government kept the landings and fires hushed up to avoid the panic that would result if our citizens realized that Japan was bombing us regularly and without making a sound. The cover up worked so well that the authorities were able to hide these attacks until one day a group of six hikers in Oregon came across a Balloon Bomb that had landed intact in the Southern part of our state.
This happened in May of 1945 when one of the hikers touched the balloon and the bombs went off killing all six discoverers on Gearhart Mountain. This caused the government to break the secrecy and they then warned all citizens to avoid any suspicious balloons and balloon fragments.
The US government did an excellent job of covering up the success of the Japanese Balloon Bombs. Had the authorities allowed the reporting of these successful strikes, the word would have leaked to Japan and realizing their accomplishment, the Japanese would have been able to more accurately make their attacks. Of approximately 9,000 balloons launched, about 1,000 reached the US. Japan had no idea that any of them had worked or they would have, I'm sure, increased their success rate.
A lot of fires were cause by the balloon assaults and one even started a brush fire causing a loss of power for a while at the Atomic-Energy plant at Hanford, Washington.
Finally, thanks to a US botanist, the source of the silent death was discovered. Analyzing plant life and geology in the recovered sandbags it was determined from studies that had been conducted from years before that the sand could only have come from one place; Honshu Island in Japan. The soil was unlike any other area, and it was determined that the Balloon Bombs were being launched from that location.
Immediate US bombing raids brought this page of Japan's war effort to a close. After the war, investigations showed that Japan had prepared to launch these Balloon Bombs from submarines 
and they had also planned to have manned balloon flights into the United States from these submarine-launched balloons. The pilots of course would have been suicide pilots that would fly the Balloon Bomb directly to US targets. It's a good thing we ran them out of time!
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