The RCMP stopped the search because there was less chance of finding the object
Andrew Gregg, a filmmaker, says that finding the remains of a “suspected balloon” that crashed over Yukon a week ago was never going to be easy.
“To be honest, I think this is harder than trying to find the Skymaster,” he said, referring to the U.S. military plane that his 2022 documentary film was about.Skymaster Down. In 1950, that plane with 44 people on board went missing in Yukon and has never been found.
“There hasn’t been a single one.” So, yeah, the Yukon can just take all of these things in.
After a little less than a week, the RCMP said on Friday that the search for balloon parts had been stopped. The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) had shot down the object on February 11. The pieces were thought to be somewhere in the vast, wild land between Dawson City and Mayo, Yukon.
“Given the snowfall, the decreasing chance that the object will be found, and the current belief that the object is not tied to a scenario that justifies extra search efforts, the RCMP is ending the search,” police said in a news release on Friday.
This month, four strange objects were shot down over North America. The missing object was one of them. Only one has been identified: a 60-meter balloon that crashed off the coast of South Carolina. China says it was used to check the weather, but the U.S. says it was a surveillance balloon with a huge undercarriage full of electronics.
Searches for the other strange objects, which were in Alaska and Lake Huron, have also been stopped.
Chief of the Defense Staff Gen. Wayne Eyre said a few days into the search in Yukon that the object was “suspected to be a balloon” and that the search for debris in Yukon was hard because it was in a “remote, mountainous area with deep snow, avalanche risk, and harsh weather conditions.”
Gregg is not surprised that the search turned out to be hard or even impossible.
“How do you find something in the Yukon wilderness in the winter when you don’t even know what it is?” “I mean, I don’t even know where to start,” Gregg said.
Was it a hobby balloon
One idea about the Yukon thing is that it belongs to a small U.S. hobby club. The Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade got its last message from one of its pico balloons on its seventh trip around the world on February 11, the day the object was shot down. The balloon was near Hagemeister Island, which is in the southwest corner of Alaska. It was expected to continue floating over Yukon.
Steve Trimble of Aviation Week I told people about the possible link. He says the group has been afraid of the spotlight.
“If it hadn’t been shot down by a missile, they might have been able to set a new record for distance,” Trimble said.
“I think they’re pretty embarrassed and, like, shocked by how much trouble they may have caused.”
Trimble says that pico balloons, which are usually inflated to a diameter of about three feet and sent to float high in the air with a tracker, are mostly a new thing.
“No one really knew about this hobby,” he said. “I don’t think NORAD got it,” she said.
He is also not surprised that the search for debris in Yukon has ended. He says that it would be impossible to find the pieces of a pico balloon.
“I mean, the wind will carry the small pieces who knows where, and it’s not that big to begin with. “So you won’t see this stuff ever again,” he said.