UFOs

 Back in the day, IE 1964-67 we would launch balloons while at sea. The first ones were made of red rubber that had an aluminum ball about 8" in diameter. The later balloons were made of metalized mylar and were about three feet in diameter. The purpose of these balloons was for us to track the balloons with our two missile tracking radars and also the gun fire control radar all at the same time. Ideally all three radars would show the same bearing, elevation and range to the target. This was our way to verify that all three radars were calibrated properly. If not we would know that we had some serious troubleshooting to do. The winds would normally send the balloons farther out to sea. Where they ended up was not really anything that anyone concerned themselves with.  We knew that the balloons would eventually come back down to mother Earth but didn't have a clue how long they would stay up or how far that they would travel.

Someone, I won't give any names, came up with the bright idea of writing with a magic marker on the balloons where the things came from to see where they ended up. Sort of message in a bottle type thing. We would write the name of the ship on it an an address where the lucky finder could tell us where they ended up. We dis this about every month, or so. Later on, some genius, I still won't mention any names, we switched to Russian writing. One of the guys was really good at writing in fake Cyrillic. It was all bogus and didn't have any meaning but it sure looked like the real McCoy. He was a real artist, a real abstract artist. 

As you may, or may not, know sailors at sea get real bored and are always thinking up what kind of mischief they can create. The same guy, still nameless, came up up with yet another brilliant idea. Why don't we try writing things on these unidentified objects flying through the air that could be written in a language from another planet. Once again, our in house resident artist gave it a mighty try and he hit it right out of the park. The script he wrote looked believably UFOish. 

We never heard from anybody about our little art projects and no NCIF storm troopers ever invaded our little tin can but we had a lot of chuckles about the shock and awe of our worthy recipients when, or if,  they received one of our balloons.