So... Alright - Balloonfest 86

Episode Date: July 2, 2024

Geoff dives into the supposed tragedy of Balloonfest86 to find out what really happened. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, chicken, So I was laying in bed last night scrolling through TikTok. And you know how every once in a while you end up on the like disaster feed and you'll get a lot of hurricanes or like, I don't know, tornadoes, that kind of stuff. You see trampolines blowing by in the wind or anyway, one of the things that popped through in my feed last night when I was when I was stuck in that was this thing that I had seen a few times before the Balloon Fest 86 disaster is what they call it. And it's always this ominous video. I've seen three or four different versions of it because, you know, there's like

seven thousand AI versions of the same shit on TikTok at all times right now. But it's it's this ominous video that talks about how in 1986, the the city of Cleveland in a desperate attempt to regain some sort of relevance on the national stage. This is TikTok saying this, not me. They decided to in a scheme to do that, they decided to try to break the record for most helium balloons released at one time. Previously, the record was one million balloons that were released at Walt Disney World or land probably Disney released a million balloons. I'm not sure

exactly where they did it. Now, the first thing you'll think of is, wow, a million balloons being released into the wild, that seems ecologically devastating, right? And yes, I think so. I will say as we get into it, they they used 100% biodegradable balloons. And I know that there was some refusion. I don't know if refusion is a word or if I just made that up. Let's look that up. You should. Refutation, maybe that's what I meant to say, the act of proving a statement.

OK, yeah, yeah, yeah. So refusion is not a word, but we both just well, I learned just now you probably already knew that refutation is a word, but we both just well, I learned just now. You probably already knew that refutation is a word. And that's what I meant to say. Anyway, clearly not a good idea to at least a million balloons into the wild. But these were supposedly 100 percent biodegradable. There was a refutation that they were not, in fact, 100 percent biodegradable. It's one of the one of the knocks against this event on the TikTok.

But as we'll get into it later, I'm not sure that is entirely true. Anyway, so apparently in 1986, the city of Cleveland is inspired by the Disney balloon release to try to create a Guinness record for the city. And they come up with the idea to release 1.5, actually they come up with the idea to double it

and release two million balloons at one time in the city of Cleveland. However, that becomes logistically impossible. And so they cut it down to 1.5 million balloons, which is still beating the Disney record by 50%, which is pretty wild, right? So the TikTok you watch says a couple of terrible pretty wild, right? So the tick tock you watch says a couple of terrible things happen, right? First off, the balloons hampered the recovery efforts for some guys that capsized

in a boat and two people died as a result of the balloon drop. Then there is the supposedly the tragedy of planes having to be grounded at the last minute because the wind shifted and the balloons unintentionally went over an airport and caused chaos with the FAA. That was another one of the knocks against this event. Another one is that there were so many lawsuits from people who were injured by balloons and such that the city ended up spending more money in lawsuits than they made off of the event. There was another one that said that there was so much balloon residue dumped onto the interstates

that it shut down the interstate and they had to use bulldozers to remove all of the balloon debris. There's a bunch of other stuff too. It caused like, oh, that there were so, they caused so many downed power lines and so many injuries from falling debris, which is balloon debris, I guess, that the emergency services were overwhelmed and couldn't respond to all of the calls. and couldn't respond to all of all of their calls. And also just that it created such an ecological disaster

that it required an immense cleanup that took forever. Those are the things that they hit you with in the TikTok. However, those TikToks are so fucking annoying because they'll hint at this stuff. They'll say shit like that But then they'll never follow it up with the facts. They'll say like, oh, yeah, it caused The FAA had to ground planes and it was this whole issue But then they don't show any reports of that or any like like there's no proof of it They just it just just statements right thrown out into the ether. I

got to thinking how much can I actually trust these little TikTok vignettes that I'm watching? And, cause I was like, fuck, this is 1986? I was 11 years old. It seems like I would have heard of this, right? Like I was prime, I was the age for somebody who would be interested in a million and a half balloons being released into the wild, right?

That would have been a big fucking deal to me. That's my Super Bowl at 11 years old, right? And Cleveland was trying to get national, actually they were trying to get global attention. They were trying to repair their image. And so I feel like it would have been covered and everywhere. And I have not only no memory of the event, but no memory of the tragedy.

And you start thinking about it and you're like, I've never really heard anything about this until I get to TikTok. And then TikTok every couple months reminds me of it. And it's like, oh, was this some kind of crazy cover up? You look a little bit into it. I watched a bunch of tick tock videos. I get to one rule. Apparently, they explain at least that the initial point of this was to raise money for the United Way.

And I thought, oh, but once again, this tick tock says, you know, they ended up losing so much money in lawsuits that it cost the city way more than they raised. But I thought, like, how much did they actually raise? And I looked all over Tick Tock. Tick Tock couldn't give me the answer. So I started Googling it. I ended up watching a 40 minute documentary on YouTube that I think was produced by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which is their main newspaper, which was actually credited in the documentary as being part of the problem

in this whole thing. So I'm not sure if you go look it up yourself. I think it's called like the Internet has lied to you about Balloon Fest 86 or something. It was interesting, though. And it gives you a totally different perspective on this. And anyway, the whole reason I got to that is because I just I was curious if this was a way to raise money for the United Way. How much money did they actually raise?

Not you know, and then how much did it cost the city? So I look it up and apparently it raised 40 more than forty seven million dollars, which none of the Tic Tocs I watched mentioned that this thing raised 47 million dollars. So then I'm thinking, man, 47 million dollars of lawsuits in 1986. That's that's like 150 million dollars in actually, I think it's actually like 100. It's over 100 million dollars in today's money. But so like that's those are pretty fucking crazy lawsuits, right? That must have been that must have been some big shit. There would be a lot of articles, you know. So I start looking, trying to see what the biggest lawsuits are, or settlements are, and I'm really not finding much.

I end up watching this documentary, and I learn a lot about, or at least I learn a different side of the story. I guess you have to decide who you're gonna believe, but I will say the documentary at least had interviews with the people that made it, and it had interviews with the people that reported on it, and it had interviews with people from the Coast Guard

who were there, and you know, so it felt a little bit more intellectually honest than an AI-generated TikTok does. But it was interesting because they go through it, and I'm watching this documentary, and it doesn't seem like a tragedy. Like the people that are talking about designing it are really excited about having been a part of it. Right. And Tick Tock, you know, once again, makes it sound like this, like hastily thrown together ramshackle event that was poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly implemented.

Right. But you start watching this documentary and you realize they hired the guy who did the million balloons in Disney. This guy who's probably his own story, his own episode of So Alright in itself. He's like the original fucking balloon expert. And let me look his name up for you. His name is Treb Heining. And he, like I said, he's probably an entire episode

of So Alright on his own. So I started reading about it. He started working at Disney as a kid and ended up becoming like a professional. One of the first big shit balloon artists, I guess, would be how you describe it. He moved, I guess he started a company in Hollywood of balloon art in the 70s and kind of revolutionized that industry.

And so he became the authority on these things. So when the million balloons were launched at Disney, he was involved. And then when Cleveland decided to do it, he was the person they contacted. So he was involved again. Also, when they decided that they needed to build this huge net to hold all the

balloons in before they release it, they're like, how do you build a net that size? Because it's like the size of a city block, right? So they don't just throw something together. They contacted the company that NASA contracted to create the netting on the space shuttle. So they're using literally like NASA approved space shuttle designs to hold these balloons together. They spend a lot of time they go in they go to every school in in Cleveland and they recruit the the schools and then you find out they also donated money to the arts departments for every school that participated in this. They get 2,500 volunteers together. It actually becomes like this, the whole point of it, they don't really discuss other, at least in the TikToks,

is that it was A, to raise money for the United Way, which it apparently raised more than $47 million for, but it was also to instill a love of community and civics and civic mindedness into the youth of Cleveland. This was largely presented as an idea that the youth of Cleveland could break this Guinness record and participate in it. And the whole fucking city got behind it. There were I think they said that there were more

people it was the most people downtown in Cleveland at one time since World War Two ended and they had the parade, which is in itself tells you how big of a deal it was to Cleveland. And so they go through this process. They plan it for a really long time. And of course, this is me listening, watching this documentary. But once again, this documentary seems so much more on the level as compared to all the bullshit TikToks I've been watching.

They do end up having a lot of issues right before they plan it when the weather is supposed to be good But the night before there's like a huge The microburst storm that comes through and it damages the net and then they have to like get the fired Marshall involved at the 11th hour to repair the netting so that it that it can still happen and then After it like about 30 minutes after the launch, there was a very light squall that changed the direction of some of the balloons. But then it cleared up again immediately. It's been described in those tick tocks as, you know, like damn near tornado

winds and storm, but apparently it was really no big deal and didn't really cause any adverse effects. Anyway, so they put this whole thing together. They get 2500 students from around and community members, but mostly students and teachers from around Cleveland. They all show up at three in the morning to start blowing up balloons. And they end up I think it's one I did the math. One point five million people, 2500 balloons, I guess, like 600 balloons a kid.

And they are I look this up that's like 600 balloons a kid. And they are, I looked this up too, they averaged three balloons a minute was the goal. So if you're doing like 200 minutes, I think that that should be about what it took. And I think they ended up finishing early. They had, they have footage by the way, they have so much more footage than you'll see on TikTok. And they have footage of them under the tarp

or the netting, listening to rock music. And they have footage of them under the tarp or the netting listening to rock music. And it looks like a fucking party, actually. It looks like a lot of fun anyway. So they put this whole thing together. They release it. It was described by the one of the people on scene as he says, it looked like an atom bomb of joy, which I thought was kind of funny.

So they release it and then. The world kind of largely forgets about it after the balloons are released, and then nobody talks about this again until 2012 when this article pops up, talking about all of the controversy and tragedy around it. So the documentary does a pretty good job of addressing each one of those things. And I and kind of directly refuting The documentary does a pretty good job of addressing each one of those things and I and kind of directly refuting the tik-toks and so I'll just go through and

Each one line by line the first off there were supposedly there were there are two deaths associated directly associated with this two fishermen Capsized their boat in the storm the night before. And supposedly they drowned while the Coast Guard was looking for them. Coast Guard couldn't find them because there were a million balloons on the water and balloons look like humans in the water. And so it destroyed it. It didn't even hamper it, just like killed recovery efforts. And supposedly it also wasn't safe. So they had a guy from the Coast Guard on who said, that's actually not true.

We might not have flown the helicopter for sure, but the boats were running. It definitely made it harder to find the bodies. But the reality is unfortunately the two guys died the night before. I think the autopsy report that discussed that it was in, there was a lawsuit from the families. And the autopsy report that discussed that it was in, there was a lawsuit from the families and the autopsy report showed that the guys unfortunately

died of hypothermia, I think hours before the balloons were released, definitely hampered the recovery of the bodies for sure. So, oh, there was another one that supposedly there were a ton of lawsuits, right? Because there was a lawsuit about those two men, there were lawsuits about damages and it cost the city millions and millions and millions of dollars. There were two lawsuits that were both settled. That was one, I don't know what the amount was

on that one. They didn't say, but there was one other lawsuit where supposedly the balloons spooked some horses on a farm, and they settled on on like causing emotional distress for the horses and I think that was a five thousand dollar lawsuit but there's no indication that there was any kind of I mean there were lawsuits right but there was no indication that most of them were thrown out and I think all of them were thrown out except for those two and so but so that's fairly debunked from what I understand next on is the millions and millions of property damage that was caused and the millions of dollars the city had to spend in cleanup.

Supposedly, there is no record of that. There's no record of injuries. There are a bunch of actual that, you know, some of the footage looks kind of like that, looks kind of ominous in the videos. But you can watch a lot of those are taken out of context and you can watch the full videos online and as they come to the ground and people are just picking them up as souvenirs and laughing. And supposedly there was there's no record of there being much of any destruction from this thing, let alone millions and millions of dollars that the city had to dole out.

Supposedly the interstates were shut down because of all of the balloons that dumped on and one tick tock, I said, I watched said they actually had to have a bulldozer come to remove all the balloon debris, which even at the moment, at the time, I thought, do you really need a bulldozer to push balloons out of the way? Like in itself, that seems ridiculous. There's no record of anything like that. There was a 10 car pile up, like a 10 car accident that during the event, but it was largely because there were thousands upon thousands of people trying to get into the city to watch the

drop. And so there were, I think some people rubbernecking who were caught on the street or on the interstate while the balloons were released. And it did result in a 10 car accident. I don't think there were any serious injuries in that accident. From from what I understand. The other one that the it caused a bunch of planes to be grounded because it drifted over the airport unintentionally. It caused a big kerfuffle with the FAA, who got involved. Turns out that's apparently not true at all.

It definitely did affect an airport, but it was a private airport, not a commercial airport, mostly for private pilots and industrial type stuff. This airport was notified ahead of time. All the planes were already grounded. The whole airspace around the city was grounded. The FAA was notified, consulted, agreed to shut down the skies around the city. Like FAA was on board with this.

It wasn't a surprise. And the airport was already shut down to handle this. They they knew about it well in advance. And so that was there was no. Oh, fuck, we got ground the planes. It's a trade. It was none of that. So supposedly the in the Tic Tacs I watched, the balloons were supposed to be biodegradable, but weren't. And it caused an ecological disaster. All I'll say is that on that they say that they were 100% biodegradable, that they were designed to degrade within six months in a year. And there

was no record of there being any kind of ecological tragedy anywhere. There were no complaints to the EPA. There was one complaint, a local, I think a fisher or an outdoorsman, I was at like a maybe a state park and said that there was a bunch of, there were like thousands of balloons that had washed up on the shore. And he called the local newspaper, the newspaper came out and supposedly by the time the photographer and the reporter got there, all the balloons had already washed away.

And even the guy admitted, yeah, it doesn't seem to be a problem anymore. Once again, not trying to carry Cleveland's water here, I'm just, you know, just reporting the other side of what of what I'm hearing on TikTok that reporting. What am I? I'm not a fucking reporter, shut up. Oh, one other last thing about this is supposedly it was such a tragedy. Guinness was there and they certified it as the largest balloon drop in history.

And supposedly Guinness, it was such a tragedy that Guinness put it in the Guinness Book of World Records for one year and then quietly removed it and they just removed balloon drops as a category going forward so that this never happened again. Also entirely untrue. Apparently it was in the Guinness. Well, the category was in the Guinness Book of World Records for another 10 years, and they were

in possession of the record until in 1994, Disney did another balloon drop 1.7 million balloons and beat it. And so it wasn't quietly removed that, you know, 12 months later, as they tried to cover it up, it was in there for a lot longer. It was in there until it was beaten by Disney again. And then the category was eventually removed because, let's be honest, biodegradable or not. It's a fucking terrible idea to release one.5 or 1.7 or 2 million of anything into the wild. And no matter how quickly it degrades

and even I mean, let's be honest, I mean, even if they are biodegradable within six months in that six month period, they're still brightly colored little pieces of nylon that are littered about parks and waterways for fish and animals to choke on. So clearly not a great idea. And I don't think anybody's going to do a big balloon drop again. I imagine the one Disney did, it was for Aladdin, I believe, in 94 to break the record. I think they did it in England.

I imagine that'll probably be the last one we see in our lifetimes because we understand a little bit more about how to be, you know, how to have some fucking common sense in 2024. But I will say when you're watching Tick Tock's and you get into those little feeds where you kind of doom scroll or you get into like outraged scroll, maybe take some of it with a grain of salt because I had a completely different impression of this event until I went and did a little bit of research.

Also, by the way, one of the things the documentary covers is how this all happened in 2012. Some guy for the Cleveland plane, whatever it was called, the newspaper there, writes an article, a poorly researched article that makes a lot of these claims, not all of them, but a lot of these claims. And actually the documentarian, he goes and interviews the guy who's the editor of the paper at the time and said, "'Listen, you can't blame this guy.

"'If anybody is at fault for this, it's me. "'I probably could have edited it. "'Clearly there were some inaccuracies in the article in the documentary. The one of the guys who put on the event says when he read that article, he contacted the journalist and was like, why did you write all this stuff? And he goes, well, it's all true. And he goes, none of it's true. And he goes, oh, well, can you prove it's not true? And he's like, yeah, like the guy, apparently the guy in the initial article

didn't even think it was in the Guinness Book of World Records. And he's like, I can send you the fucking I it was in the Guinness Book of World Records. And he's like, I can send you the fucking I'm looking at the Guinness Book of World Records right now. And the journalist is like, Oh, can you send that to me? I'd love to see it. Like he didn't really vet or do a lot of research. And I guess the editor of the paper at the time acknowledged that he didn't include all of, I guess, the wild tales of fancy and an accuracy that spun out of it.

But it opened the door for a lot of other bad reporting. And it's just one of those things that's kind of like proliferated and grown over time because it sounds salacious. But when you start to peel back the layers, you realize that it's not nearly the story that has been presented via social media. I was pretty fascinated by that. Pretty fascinated by that. And it's a good reminder, it's a good reminder, you know, to take what you see on the internet with a grain of salt.

I should probably get outta here. I think that'll do it for the episode. But before I leave you, I gotta hit you with a song of the episode, right? I would be remiss in my duties as a podcaster if I didn't do that. Let's go ahead and do Green Eyed Girl by Ted Hawkins. Man, if you've never heard this song. Congratulations.

That's all I'll say.