Chris Mickey was at home in Cheyenne on Thursday evening watching the NFL season opening game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Baltimore Ravens when he got an urgent call from his dad.
“Grab your camera, there’s a giant balloon in the sky,” his dad told Mickey, who’s a photographer.
His family was out in the backyard close to Mickey’s house when they spotted the small speck in the sky.
“They thought it was a high-altitude balloon floating north of the town,” Micky said.
He grabbed his longest lens and zoomed in on the shape in the sky.
“I was able to zoom in really far and you can see in the photo where there's a large array hanging below it,” he said. “I later found out it was solar panels and instrumentation.”
Turns out, Mickey and his family were not the only ones in Cheyenne to spot the strange apparition, with many speculating about what it could be.
The Cheyenne office of the National Weather Service (NSW) fielded many calls Thursday night people concerned, especially after last year’s Chinese spy balloon incident They wanted reassurance that it was not a spy balloon.
“It caught me off guard, because typically when I see balloons like this, I see them pop up on my Flight Radar app,” Mickey said. “But this one didn't seem to be putting out any sort of signal, so it wasn't showing up on my app. That's got me wondering if this was something other than a weather balloon and maybe even something that wasn’t from the United States.”
Cheyenne meteorologist Mike Natoli said that the night shift at the NSW got a lot of calls from people wanting to know if the balloon was one of theirs.
At first, the forecasters on duty were not even sure what people were seeing. Initially, they thought it was a NASA balloon, but further research revealed what it was and the NWS updated its Facebook page to answer the flood of questions.
“After a bit of digging, it looks like it might have been launched by World View Enterprises, similar to the one launched on July 20, 2022,” the agency reported.
World View Enterprises
Cowboy State Daily reached out to World View Enterprises and received confirmation that the balloon was indeed theirs. It’s loaded with scientific equipment for a project in collaboration with NASA.
World View Vice President of Communication Phil Wocken responded that, “Yes, I can confirm this is one of our Stratollite high-altitude balloon systems.”
Wocken also sent a statement from a company spokesperson about what exactly this particular ballon was that the people of Cheyenne observed floating above them.
“This Startollite mission flies under the ARMAS 2 patch. We launched this mission last Saturday, 31 August, from Arizona,” the statement says. “Our primary customer on this mission is Space Environment Technologies, in collaboration with NASA, as part of the Automated Radiation Measurements for Aerospace Safety (ARMAS) project.”
The information gathered is used to improve aviation safety, the company says.
The balloon itself, according to the statement from World View is specially made and is stronger than that of a weather balloon.
“A Stratollite is a high-altitude balloon system that uses a combination of a zero-pressure lift balloon filled with helium and a super-pressure ballast balloon to lift a stratospheric vehicle with payloads attached into the stratosphere,” the company reports. “These missions can stay aloft for up to 30 days, depending on objectives for the mission.”
The company says its balloons are often mistaken for weather balloons or, in the case of Thursday over Cheyenne, Chinese spy balloons.
Weather Balloons
The weather balloons that are typically launched in Wyoming can only be observed around Riverton and are short-lived compared to the World View Stratollite balloon, the agency reports.
“There’s about 100 or 120 or so local offices across the United States and about half of those offices launch weather balloons twice per day,” Riverton meteorologist Lance VandenBoogart said. “It's good to get a snapshot of not only the surface of the Earth, but also the atmosphere and what's going on in it.
“So, we launch our balloons at 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. These weather balloons go up in the atmosphere and take weather observations up to about 20 miles above the surface.”
To see the weather balloons, you must look toward the Riverton airport between 5 and 5:15 twice each day.
“You might see a big white balloon going up, and that balloon expands as it goes up in the atmosphere,” VandenBoogart said. “So even though it gets further away, it's getting bigger. And in the right conditions, you can oftentimes see them even when they're several miles above the surface.”
The Balloon Over Cheyenne
Meteorologist Mike Natoli said that the pink Stratollite balloons are not usually visible because they normally move too fast to be seen.
“There really wasn't a whole lot of movement in the atmosphere Thursday night,” Natoli said. “I'm guessing so many people noticed it just because it hung over the area for a for a while due to the light winds. Things were kind of just staying where they were when the winds died down.”
The National Weather Service encourages the public to continue to call in when people see something strange in the sky.
“We have a public line and we're happy to take public calls at any time,” Natoli said. “We're open 24/7 and well answer to the best of our ability. Sometimes we don't know what's going on with some of these things, but we will do our best to find out.”
The balloon Thursday “was a really neat thing to see,” Mickey said. “I’m just glad it was not anything bad and just a company conducting some interesting research.”
The World View balloon was last seen over Denver, heading slowly through the atmosphere on its 30-day mission for NASA.
Jackie Dorothy can be reached at jackie@cowboystatedaily.com.
