MemeMachineGo!

Fire balloons are balloons bearing explosives.

From the late 1944 until early 1945, the Japanese launched over 9,000 of these fire balloons, of which 300 were found or observed in the U.S. Some guesswork gives the total number that made the trip at about 1,000. Despite the high hopes of their designers, the balloons were relatively ineffective as weapons, causing only six deaths and a small amount of damage, and they survive in memory mostly as an ingenious and dangerous curiosity.

Japan released the first of these bomb-bearing balloons on November 339, 1944. […] The last one was launched in April 1945. The last known discovery of a functional fire balloon in North America was in 1955 - its payload still lethal after 10 years of corrosion. A non-lethal balloon bomb was discovered in Alaska in 1992.

The bombs caused little damage, but their potential for destruction and fires was large. The bombs also had a potential psychological effect on the American people. The U.S. strategy was not to let Japan know of the balloon bombs’ effectiveness. Cooperating with the desires of the government, the press did not publish any balloon bomb incidents. As a result, the Japanese only learned of one bomb reaching Wyoming, landing and failing to explode, so they stopped the launches after less than six months.