READY, FIRE, AIM: Voices from Heaven

Living in Pagosa Springs, we get to see hot air balloons on a pretty regular basis. Not every day, but just often enough that it always feels special.

Just often enough that it makes me feel special… to live in a place where I get to see hot air balloons.

Not that I would ever want to ride in one. I think they normally go up 2,000 feet, which is about 1,999 feet too high for a person who suffers from a fear of heights.

And given that we’re living at 7,000 feet elevation, that puts the balloon at 9,000 feet above sea level.  Way, way too high for me.

Scientific balloons would be more my style. Like the kind of solar-powered balloons that Sandia National Laboratory has been sending up into the stratosphere.

Like 70,000 feet up.  13 miles up.

But they don’t have to worry about fear of heights, because they only send instruments. To measure stuff.

Recently, some of their scientific balloons have been listening to the sounds of the stratosphere, and strangely enough, they’ve picked up noises that sound a bit like whispering.

If a human were up at 70,000 feet, hanging from a balloon, they wouldn’t hear much of anything at all. Maybe the sound of their own teeth, chattering?  But the scientific equipment attached to these balloons has been picking up ‘infrasound’ noise… noise inaudible to the human ear. 

Not that there are any humans around, 13 miles up, claiming that they hear nothing.  But the sensing devices attached to the balloon sure enough seem to be picking up noises.

The scientists can’t explain where these inaudible sounds are coming from.

A solar-powered balloon takes flight bearing multiple scientific instruments, including a GPS tracker and a reusable ‘infrasound’ sensor. (Courtesy Sandia National Laboratories)

I learned all about this while reading a May 11 article by Carolyn Johnson, in the Washington Post.

“Scientists sent balloons into the stratosphere — and found a mystery.”  

You can read the article here.. Ms. Johnson writes:

At first listen, Earth’s stratosphere seems calm and quiet. But when researchers launched solar-powered balloons up 70,000 feet, they detected a hidden acoustic world — including mysterious noises without a known origin.

I bet these sounds could be heard by a dog. Dogs can hear stuff that we can’t hear.

But the scientists are not sending dogs up in the balloons, because… well… what’s the dog going to tell you when he comes back down?  “Woof, woof”?

So Sandia National Laboratories geophysicists Daniel Bowman and Sarah Albert use their balloons to send up infrasound sensors, inside the box that protects it from the extreme stratospheric temperatures.

“I’ve been doing it for about 10 years now, and, you know, the fact that there’s mysterious sounds that I don’t understand is troubling, but it’s not like a revelation,” said Daniel Bowman, a principal scientist at Sandia National Laboratories who builds and launches the solar-powered balloons. Bowman is presenting his latest work this week at the 184th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Chicago.

“But it’s funny to speak with folks… who are like, ‘Wait, what? You’re hearing stuff?’ And no, we don’t know what it is.”

Daniel Bowman and Sarah Albert display an infrasound sensor and the box used to protect it from the extreme temperatures it will encounter as it flies on a high-altitude balloon. (Randy Montoya)

The scientists look pretty happy, for a couple of people who can’t explain these mysterious noises.

Maybe they don’t know what the noises are, but I can tell them.

It’s angels.  Whispering.

Humans have known about angels for a long time; much longer than we’ve had scientists.  If I’m not mistaken, angels are mentioned in the Bible.  Angels also appeared in Zoroastrian stories, back in about 550 BC.

But heaven isn’t the quiet place it used to be.  Unfortunately, with all the modern jets and missiles and rockets and satellites flying around in the heavens lately, the angels have had to make themselves scarce. 

They’re pretty much afraid to talk above a whisper.

So the only way we get to hear them, is by send up a harmless-looking balloon with infrasound sensors dangling from a rope.

Everybody likes balloons.  Even angels.  So when they see a balloon slowly floating up from Hell (they refer to the surface of the Earth as ‘Hell’) they all want to gather round.  And whisper.

“Hey, Gabriel.  Here comes another one of those scientific balloons.”

“Cool.  Probably one of those Sandia Laboratory experiments.”

“The ones with the infrasound sensors.”

“Yeah, I bet you’re right.  Let’s fly around it and whisper.  That should really confuse them. ”

“Yep, they’re easily confused.  Poor things.”

Louis Cannon

Louis Cannon

Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.