Interesting Bit of Trivia

My mother-in-law sends me the "Focus" section of their paper, which comes on Sunday. It is like a little magazine with a celebrity page, books reviews, funny column (used to be Dave Barry and now is a guy not nearly as funny), dog training column, English column, and a few other interesting articles and so on. The main reason she sends it to me is because it has 2 crossword puzzles and 2 cryptoquips in it, and it is the perfect size to fold up and take with me when waiting somewhere without kids (rarely happens, unfortunately, LOL), or on trips.

There is also a column called "Strange But True" by Rich Sones and Bill Sones, and they had an item that I did not know about in there last week.

Q: When, during World War II, incendiary bombs rained down on U.S. and Canadian forest and set them ablaze, what were the "fingerprints in the sand" to help pinpoint the source and stop the attacks?

A: The Japanese sent the bombs attached to balloons toward North America, where air currents wouldn't hold them aloft and they would crash to the ground, say William J. Neal, et al. in Atlantic Coast Beaches".

Beach sand served as ballast to adjust the balloons' buoyancy for the cross-ocean trip. Because of the sand's unique mix of minerals in its heavy-mineral fraction, Allied geologists were able to deduce the balloon-release site by poring over every available geologic map of Japan and noting the location of surface rocks the minerals could have come from.

Then "the release site was bombed, and because the American news media had been ordered not to report fires resulting from the incendiary balloons, the Japanese assumed the effort wasn't working and abandoned the project." (emphasis mine)


Huh! Media working on our side, instead of just fear-mongering! And look--keeping back information did good! Obviously, no lessons were learned however, judging from the current reporting going on all over the world.