One day the guys and I were playing some sort of game in the street; I can’t remember what we were playing but whatever it was it was soon forgotten, as it is to this very day! And that’s probably because of what we all saw in the sky coming our way!
We lived south of the Portland airport and were accustomed to the noise of airplanes taking off from time to time, except for the jet fighters which were very loud, so seeing planes in the sky was no big deal, but this was no airplane, sure it was some sort of flying object, but what was it? Some of the guys started saying it was a UFO, I thought to myself, “A UFO!”; the only UFO that I ever saw was in the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, and that was a scary movie with a giant robot that could destroy the earth so I was a little freaked out when someone said a UFO!
As the object got closer and closer I could see it wasn’t a flying saucer or even a plane. It now had a familiar look to it, it started taking on a shape that we had seen before, in fact, many, many times but this was a lot bigger. It was huge and the biggest that I had ever seen…..“Well, what was it?” you ask!…. it was a giant red balloon with something tied or hanging to the underside. It must have been at least 6 feet diameter and was hitting the treetops traveling around 10 miles an hour.
People up and down the block came out of their homes to take a look and some were saying that it was a weather balloon. “What’s a weather balloon?”….well, just for fun why don’t you look it up!

The big balloon then hit the street and started to rise again so us kids took after it to try to catch it but it was going to fast and just out of reach, but we still ran after it. Each time the balloon got to the end of a block the cross wind took the balloon higher and higher and we got more tired and tired. Soon the big balloon was gone and out of sight so we went home.
Two days later I heard that some kids found our big red weather balloon deflated in there front yard and mailed some of the stuff back to the weather bureau.
It was fun trying to catch the big balloon, we talked about it for many days, each time the story was told our finger tips got closer and closer to the big red balloon.

Grandpa Tom