Sunday, June 1, 2025

November 20, 2014

Whoah! Karoo Farmer Finds Huge Crashed Google Balloon [Image]

If you're not in the know of Project Loon by Google, you'll enjoy it when you find out. Except that if all the 'loons' keep falling out the sky, it won't actually work.

Imagine stumbling through your (large) back garden and you see a massive unidentified thing. You think it might be a weather balloon, but it turns out to actually be a Google internet balloon.

That’s what happened to Karoo farmer Urbanus Botha.

He thought it had floated all the way from De Aar, but after his daughter found signs that showed it belonged to Google, the journey seemed even further.

“An engineer in California said via e-mail that the components in my photos look like those of their system. He will send a regional team to fetch the parts from us,” said Sarita Botha [the daughter]

The Google project, called Loon, hopes to “provide permanent Internet connectivity to everyone”.

Check out Tech Central