A ' what was it box' story in the news

As I suspected: a recent news article reported the box was identified as an “AN/DMQ-1 gondola” balloon reconnaissance payload from the 1950s, part of an operation called “Project Genetrix “,
intended to collect information about the USSR and China. The news report, referencing information and photos from the “Military Communications and Electronics Museum” in Kingston, Ontario and “declassified documents on the CIA website” also says that there were 516 balloons sent up, with only 34 recovered (I guess that’s 35 now).

I have no direct knowledge, but back in the post WWII-early cold war days, before satellites, various countries were known to have launched large balloons with camera pods as payloads, and allow them to drift around the world to collect pictures from places they couldn’t get to in other ways. Maybe the “box” is such a payload that was lost and never recovered. It looks like an appropriately-sized payload container for that purpose. If the military collected it but wouldn’t acknowledge it later, that sounds like it was something they didn’t want to advertise. If it was your side, you didn’t want to admit it, if it was the other side you didn’t want to admit you recovered it and might have learned something about their capability.

I know they (at least someone) did in later days, too (balloons, not necessarily similar payloads), because in the early 90″s I was flying a U-2 at about 70,000 feet near the Sea of Japan when five of them, in trail about 20 miles apart, drifted by above me going east well above my altitude. It was hard to estimate their altitude because there was nothing to judge scale against so they could have been smaller and closer or bigger and farther away, but probably were in the 80,000 foot altitude range. They clearly had to have been launched considerably west of the Korean peninsula to get to where I saw them.

hi
Strangely no comments visible on my iphone, but my ipad shows the comments 🙂
An interesting bit of history thou’ never heard of it before
Cheers
Jerry

No mystery. Just read the comments section at the end of the cbc news story (the above link).