Japan launched more than 9,000 bomb-carrying balloons toward North America during World War II.
The idea sounds almost impossible.
The balloons were made largely from paper, filled with hydrogen, and designed to ride powerful high-altitude winds across the Pacific Ocean.
There was no pilot.
No aircraft crossed the ocean with them.
The wind did almost all the work.
Most of the balloons disappeared, landed harmlessly, or caused little damage.
But one of them reached a forest in Oregon.
And on May 5, 1945, it found six people who had no idea that the war had followed them all the way to the American mainland.
A young pastor named Archie Mitchell had taken his pregnant wife, Elsye, and five Sunday-school children on a picnic near Bly, Oregon.
Archie was parking the car when Elsye and the children noticed something strange lying in the woods.
They walked toward it.
Archie realized that something was wrong and shouted for them not to touch it.
He was too late.
The bomb exploded.
Elsye Mitchell and all five children were killed.
She was 26 years old and pregnant with her first child.
The children were between 11 and 14 years old.
What makes the story even stranger is how the weapon had reached them.
Japanese military planners had discovered that powerful winds high above the Pacific could carry balloons thousands of miles toward North America.
The balloons flew at roughly 30,000 feet.
A complicated system of sandbags, valves, and pressure controls helped them automatically rise and fall during the journey.
Explosive and incendiary bombs hung underneath.
Japan hoped they would kill people, start large forest fires, create panic, and force the United States to divert resources away from the war.
There was another strange part to the story.
The American government already knew that the balloons were reaching North America.
But newspapers and radio stations were asked not to report the incidents widely.
The logic was simple.
If Japan heard no reports of explosions, casualties, or forest fires, its commanders might assume the weapon was failing.
And that appears to have worked.
Japanese officials eventually concluded that the campaign was accomplishing very little.
But it also meant that many ordinary Americans had heard almost nothing about the strange objects falling from the sky.
Then came the explosion in Oregon.
The six people killed near Bly became the only known people killed by enemy action in the continental United States during World War II.
Today, the site is marked by the Mitchell Monument.
There is one final part of the story that makes it even more remarkable.
Decades later, some Japanese women who had been schoolgirls during the war learned what had happened in Oregon.
As children, they had helped manufacture parts of the paper balloons without knowing exactly where those balloons would go or who might be hurt by them.
They later folded 1,000 paper cranes as a gesture of regret and reconciliation.
Some eventually traveled to Oregon and met people connected to the tragedy.
Thousands of miles of ocean separated Japan from rural Oregon.
No bomber carried the weapon there.
No pilot guided it.
A balloon crossed the Pacific on the wind.
And one quiet Sunday picnic became the deadliest result of one of the strangest weapons used during World War II.
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