A closer look
Before the U-2 spy plane, the CIA genuinely believed that launching giant, unsteerable balloons over hostile airspace was a flawless intelligence strategy. In 1956, the US military released 516 massive high-altitude balloons equipped with sophisticated cameras from Western Europe, hoping the jet stream would simply blow them across the USSR. The Soviets easily spotted them, shot down the vast majority, and then brilliantly recovered the American temperature-resistant camera film, which they ironically repurposed to photograph the dark side of the moon on their Luna 3 mission.
