Backyard Trinity

The five-note, other-worldly riff of film composer John Williams' Close Encounters tune would not yet reverberate for another decade– but the "Exeter Incident" had already captured the public's imagination with recent headlines.
And our nation was soon to mount its own triumphant expedition to the lunar surface and back. Reality and imagination– history and mythology concerning interplanetary/interstellar travel swirled together in an intoxicating brew of possibility. The time was ripe.

The very early spring of 1967 hatched ideas of hoax and hoodwinkery in the imaginations of two young men– in the early spring of their own lives. Neill and I had known each other for a few years, after first sharing a seat on the long bus ride to and from school. We not only lived a short block-and-a-half from each other, but had common interests in science (how the universe works) and psychology (how people work). It was a natural conspiracy.

For quite some time we discussed the possibilities of deceiving a good-sized chunk of the population– if not nationally, at least locally. It was our junior year in high school, and on a Monday morning I could see "the look" on Neill's face as he made his way to the back of the bus. This peculiar expression– a slight grin on just the left side of his mouth, lips slightly parted, and the hint of a glint in his eye– indicated some mischief was afoot and he wanted me to quiz him about it.

I humored him: "OK– what's up?"

"D'ya see the article near the back of the paper on Saturday?"

"Prob'ly not..."

He held his right hand up, palm away from us, and slowly scanned it horizontally from left to right, as if  revealing a line of printed text: "The headline read: 'UFO Hoax Stirs Japan'..."

"Nope...tell me."

"This Japanese guy made hot-air balloons by pasting together really thin sheets of rice paper into man-sized bags. Then, he slung little candles from the opening at the bottom with these thin, bamboo cross-pieces..."

"Yeah?"

"...and after he lit the candles, the bags inflated with warm air, and the low density air took the balloons way up into the sky." He gradually floated his hand up toward the ceiling of the bus.

"They'd float up there for a long time, and people would see 'em for miles. They freaked out and notified the authorities and everybody went nuts! You know how crazy people are over there for things like that– you know, like Godzilla and stuff..."

As excitement fueled my mind with the theatrical potential, I responded: "Cool– let's do it!"

A couple of nights later, Neill called me and said he rescued a dry-cleaner's bag from their trash. We both agreed the extremely thin, lightweight polymer film of the bag made a huge technological leap beyond the now-archaic rice paper. And the bag was perfect in size and shape for our nefarious purpose. All that remained was constructing a lightweight cross-frame for candles and we were good to go.

He met me about nine in the evening at the deserted street corner between his house and mine. We mounted half a box of little birthday candles on the cross-piece, and as I held the top of the bag, Neill began lighting them, one-by-one. It was difficult to keep the little candles lit, as occasional wafts of the cool evening breeze would extinguish some of the wavering flames. Finally successful with most of the candles, the bag plumped with warm air, and I remarked to Neill it wanted to rise. We waited several seconds more and released the pseudo-spacecraft into the dark night above.

The balloon slowly ascended, tilting sideways in the slight wind. The variable air currents puffed out more and more of the candles, until our craft of deception darkened completely and our fun ended. In half a minute, having only achieved an altitude of twelve feet or so, the bag returned to earth and collapsed in a smoking heap.

Our evaluation of the aeronautical experiment concluded the necessity of waiting for calmer weather conditions. We also came to believe the flickering flames would not demonstrate sufficient technological flare to con an American public, recently regaled with Gene Roddenberry's opening season of Star Trek. While the flames of candles might yet provide adequate lift for our hoax, it still needed something of obvious technical illumination to convince earthlings on the ground they were being observed (and threatened) by interstellar travelers.

Neill and I were both interested and conversant in the language of electronics. The relative miniaturization enabled by the recent advances and commercialization of solid-state physics was our invitation. We cobbled together a little transistor circuit that intermittently flashed a tiny Christmas tree light-bulb (another recent development) at an attention-grabbing rate. We powered the circuit with, what then was most appropriately referred to as, a nine-volt "transistor radio battery." The battery and circuit combo was heavier than we hoped, but we retained optimistic expectations. The flashing light was simply too good of an idea not to work.

With the little bulb pulsing at an extraterrestrial frequency, we lit the candles and the bag expanded. We waited for liftoff into the night. And waited...

Over the next several days, Neill and I discussed several modifications and even totally new designs. We hoped to get our neighborhood– even the region– buzzing over strange sights in the night sky over suburban Kansas City. Every new revelation eventually exposed its weakness. But there had to be something big enough– bold enough– to capture headlines.

One morning on the school bus, I waited eagerly for Neill to board at his stop. As soon as he sat beside me, I loudly whispered to him–

"I've got it– I figured out what we need to do!

"Yeah?"

"Here's the deal. I looked it up in a reference book in the school library yesterday that the density of methane is lower than air..."

"OK..."

"...and methane is hugely flammable. That's what "city gas"– natural gas– is. Well, in our basement we've got a gas line that goes to a set of fake logs in a fireplace down there. And where the line tees off to the logs, there's a hand-valve supplying an open spigot. All we've got to do is put some kind of balloon over that spigot, turn it on, and fill it. Now we've got a balloon full of highly flammable gas, that's also lighter-than-air..."

"Wow– great idea!"

"...and here's the best part. You know those dry-cleaners' bags we've been using? My mom has an entire, uncut roll of the material they use for making those bags! She bought it years ago for some craft-things she was doing. That roll is like a mile of thin-film tubing. We can pull off the roll whatever length of balloon we want to make, and just tie the end in a knot, and there you go– a twenty-foot long, ultra-buoyant, potentially explosive balloon! Is that cool, or what?!"

"Tonight?"

"Oh yeah!"

Earlier in the afternoon I obtained the roll of polyethylene tubing from my mom, telling her I needed some of the material for a science experiment Neill and I were conducting. "Sure– anything for the advancement of science!" she gladly responded.

Before Neill arrived, I wanted to make sure my idea didn't have some hidden glitch, waiting to embarrass me in front of my buddy. After unrolling about twenty feet of tube, I cut it from the roll and tied one end in a tight knot. I laid the length of it, still flat, on the cement floor. I cleared a path through the clutter of stuff stored at the back of our basement so I could easily ingress and egress from the gas line. I carefully distributed and pleated the large diameter of the tubing around the small spigot, to insure little or no gas leaked outside of the bag as it inflated. The moment of truth arrived as I slowly opened the valve, not quite knowing what to expect.

The low, standard pressure of city gas made the process very controllable and uneventful. It took several minutes to fill the bag. The once-flat tube began to billow outward, and slowly assumed a circular cross-section. As it filled, it lifted from the concrete, yearning to be set free in the atmosphere. Finally sated, the balloon took its fill of methane. I closed the valve, squeezed the tubing off the spigot, and tied the second knot to seal the tubing. I stood back and admired this twenty-foot long, transparent, cylinder of explosive happiness and cunning.

"Wow! I can't believe how good this is gonna work!"

It was quite a process getting the twenty foot long blimp maneuvered around the confines of the basement, and up the stairs into the kitchen. Once there, I floated the bag into the living room, where it bobbed tightly against the white, plaster ceiling. I played with it, rolling it around the ceiling, as if the earth's gravity somehow magically flipped its vector of attraction and repelled the cylinder upwards. As I goofed with the object of my fascination, the potentially grave danger of the situation totally escaped me. I possessed not the slightest clue the exceedingly dry air of early spring could conspire with the triboelectric nature of the polyethylene material to produce static electric charges of several thousand volts. The charge could easily break down the electrical insulation of air, producing the excited plasma of a spark– ultimately igniting, not only the bag, but our house, myself, and other family members, in an unimaginable conflagration. Such is the naive folly of youth.

Clearly, Neill and I were on the precipice of deception success. I called him with the news and he met me in my backyard about half an hour after nightfall.

We decided if a single, twenty-foot long, two-foot diameter balloon would work, two would be better. We heartily agreed with the proverbial statement attributed to B-52 cold-war bomber pilots: "If a little is good, more is better, and too much is just right!"

I went down in the basement and readied another balloon on the gas-filling port, while Neill stationed himself in the backyard. I told him instead of trying to get the big, unwieldy thing up and out of the house, I could just open the basement window near the gas line, and fill the balloon directly into the backyard. I opened the window, feeling the cool of the night air pour inside. I passed the flaccid tubing out the window to Neill and then attached its open end to the spigot. Turning the valve to its open position, the tube began expanding, and I could hear Neill outside exclaim his amazement at the results.

When it was full, I finished the job, and Neill floated the length of buoyant tube outside. While he held its bulging form on the back patio, I returned upstairs and retrieved the first cylinder from its berth at the living room ceiling. I moved it through the kitchen into the dining room, and out the back door to where my co-conspirator waited. We discussed how to proceed.

Neill mentioned: "I've got six BlackCats in my pocket– four, from which I've pulled the fuses. I pulled some extra fuses as well. I took all the fuses and twisted them into an extra-long fuse I finally twisted into the intact firecrackers. We can tape the six together and then tape them to the gas balloons." I voiced my agreement with the plan.

Note: a supply of spare firecrackers should always be retained from the Fourth of July for necessary experiments the remainder of the year.

I returned inside to obtain some scotch-tape to stick the two cylinders together, and to tape the firecracker-initiator to the gas-bags.

We quickly readied the bags and their ignitor and carried them into the backyard. The neighborhood was composed of large country-like lots of an acre or more each. A few large oaks and sycamores punctuated the openness. Since most of the houses resided on the front quarter of their unfenced properties, our backyard was in the middle of a large, open space– probably four or five nearly empty acres. The darkness seemed to swallow us as we descended the few steps from the patio to the backyard.

We stationed the twin cylinders near the center of our backyard, and Neill held them parallel to the ground, about four feet above it. He handed me a BIC lighter from his pocket, and I located the lengthy fuse. We estimated the fuse burn-time should extend to somewhere between fifteen and twenty seconds– more than enough time for us to clear the area, and, we hoped, enough time for it to rise high enough to capture the attention of anyone within a mile or two.

I flicked the flint-wheel on the lighter but couldn't get a flame. Small puffs of wind knocked the flame down before it started. After many more trials, the breezes subsided for several seconds and the lighter blazed, illuminating our "spacecraft-bomb." I carefully moved the lit lighter toward the fuse, which I kept as far as possible from the surface of the tube to which it was taped. It was hard for Neill to keep the tubes from moving around in the slight breeze and our positions began to shift.

"Are you gonna get that lit, or not?!" he demanded.

"Hang on, I'm about to get it."

As I continued my attempts to light it, the fuse was now much closer to the tube than I planned. I turned the flame up as high as possible to make sure it stayed lit in the intermittent breezes, and the long flame occasionally licked the side of the less-than-paper-thin plastic film. The gossamer material was the only thing standing between us and a certain and dramatic end. My heart jumped in my mouth.

Finally, a sizzle of flying sparks indicated a successful initiation of the fuse.

"Let go!– It's lit!"

We scrambled back twenty or thirty feet from ground zero and watched as the sizzling time-bomb floated upward. We were juiced at the apparent success of our plan. It continued to rise in the dark, cavernous vault overhead.

At about twenty five feet above the ground, a peculiar effect took over. My later appraisal of the situation was that wind currents, blowing over the roof of our house caused a large eddy-current– a vertical whirlpool– in the backyard atmosphere. This resulted in a down-current catching our craft and moving it quickly back toward the ground. Shocked at the outcome, we could do nothing to alter it– compelling us to witness the impending events unfolding before us.

The bomb continued its rapid descent as the fuse shortened, and ignition became imminent. At a mere six feet above the ground, the sparks from the fuse entered the firecracker cluster, and for a brief moment, it seemed to extinguish. An infinitely long second passed until the ignition occurred.

What transpired over the next many seconds was almost indescribable. What comes to mind as I write this is a parallel description by an eyewitness of the first atomic bomb blast in history, near the end of World War II– at the remote Trinity site in New Mexico. The Manhattan Project's deputy commander, Brigadier General T. F. Farrell, described the explosion in exquisite detail:

"The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous, and terrifying...the lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge...with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined..."

Although the drama of our own Ground Zero paled in magnitude next to the Trinity detonation, it held us in equal awe. As the incandescent, rolling clouds of combustion diminished, and finally collapsed, the thin-film envelope of polyethylene, now fully melted, coalesced and gathered together. With the buoyant effects of the methane gas now gone, the melted plastic fell as a molten, burning glob for the last few feet earthward. Neill and I finally awoke to the passing of the event, and looked at each other– dumbstruck.

Wondering if my parents had witnessed the terrifying event from our house, I ran forward to Ground Zero and stomped out the few flames of burning grass that had caught fire from the flaming wad of polyethylene.

I don't remember Neill and I talking about it any more that night. He returned home, and I entered the house, to find my parents and younger brother still watching television in the living room, apparently unaware of the dramatic goings-on in their backyard.

"Did Neill already head home?" my mom asked.

"Yeah, I guess so..."

"That's good– probably starting to get cold out there."

"Yeah, I guess so..."

"Hope you had fun tonight."

"Yeah, I guess so..."

"That's good."

I never told my parents about what my friend and I did that night, and I suspect that, as they read this, they will know about it for the first time.

We frequently have little idea of the potential for disaster that some of our ideas and actions hold. We believe that we are only accountable to ourselves because our actions affect only us. However, we live in a human ecology where we are not isolated, but connected to each other in countless profound and unknown ways. The way we live our lives– what we do, what we say, how we act and react– percolates into the lives of others, for good, or for ill.

What started out as "harmless fun" to simply "put one over on" our neighbors, quickly and naturally grew into something that might easily have ended in one tragedy or another. By the simply amazing grace of God it did not.

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>>> Unless otherwise attributed, all text and images are Copyright, Bill Brockmeier, 2015. All rights reserved.

Note: the image above is the only known successful color photograph of the first artificial nuclear explosion. The photograph was taken by Jack Aeby, physicist and photographer for the Manhattan Project.