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Normally when someone spots an unidentified flying object hovering ominously in the sky, it turns out to be something like the International Space Station or the person who saw it was off their face on hallucinogenic drugs.
Occasionally, just occasionally, it turns out to be a weather balloon. Well, today we have a little mystery for you where all three explanations have been ruled out. People have spotted two white objects floating above Kansas City.
They're photographed, so that rules out hallucinogenic drugs (unless this is all part of some trip I'm having, in which case, I apologize) and there are two of them, which rules out it being the ISS unless NASA has been working extremely hard over the past day or two.
Several people who spotted the objects thought they could be weather balloons.
"Not from any National Weather Service office, at least," NWS Kansas City tweeted, dismissing the possible explanation. "Had a similar report from Kearney, but weather balloons move and apparently these are stationary. Not sure what they are!"
They later went on to tweet more photos of the objects, and confirm they too were out of ideas.
People quickly leaped to the obvious answer.
Later on, people leaped to a better answer. So what are they?
Closer shots do make them look a bit balloony.
People suggested they were Google Loon balloons, high-altitude balloons that will be used to provide Internet access to remote rural areas.
But Google too denied they had been launched by them. But, like with a lot of UFO sightings, it did turn out to be a kind of balloon, just from a slightly different organization. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), themselves the subject of some mystery, confirmed to KMBC that they were likely some of their balloons in test flight, rather than translucent alien spacecraft.
Which completely stopped the conspiracy theories in their tracks, of course.
