BURSTDENVER (KDVR) — Colorado is no stranger to strange objects floating or flying across the sky (remember "Balloon Boy" from October 2009?), and many residents wanted answers for a strange balloon seen floating across the state on Tuesday.
The National Weather Service said it was a Stratollite balloon, owned by a private company in New Mexico that launches high-altitude balloons for research. The Moffat County Sheriff's Office also reported that residents had spotted the balloon just south of Craig.
Nexstar's KDVR was able to find the balloon on the flight-tracking website FlightAware, showing that the balloon had drifted toward the Boulder County region on Tuesday before heading west to about Routt County and heading south-southwest toward the Four Corners region on Wednesday.
Phil Wocken, vice president of World View Enterprises, Inc., told KDVR via email that the balloon seen over Colorado on Tuesday had launched 42 days prior from the company's headquarters in Tucson, Arizona.
"That is one of our Stratollites, which is a fancy name we give to one of our stratospheric high-altitude balloon systems. Some people label these as weather balloons because that’s what's familiar," Wocken said. "But the technology and capabilities are so much more advanced."
Wocken said the balloon navigates and persists in the stratosphere by navigating the four-directional winds at different altitudes. He said that advanced flight modeling and forecasting tell the researchers exactly what altitudes the balloon needs to fly in to "catch" the winds for a desired direction.
"We’ll then increase and decrease altitude thousands of times during a flight to navigate the system," Wocken said.
The balloon floating over Colorado is a research and development flight on which World View Enterprises is testing "next-generation materials and avionics to advance our flight capabilities," according to the company.
Wocken said that because Hurricane Priscilla remnants were impacting southwestern states, the company navigated the balloon into Colorado for a few days before taking it back to southern Arizona. He added that due to the company's proximity to Colorado, flights launched in Arizona sometimes navigate into the Centennial State.
In fact, almost exactly a year ago, a similar balloon was reported flying over the Denver metro. That balloon was also from World View Enterprises, which was carrying a payload for NASA at the time.
The Moffat County Sheriff's Office noted that the weather balloons typically fly between 75,000 and 100,000 feet in altitude, which makes them rarely visible to those on the ground.