When Brent Medley came home from work, he thought a bomb had landed in his yard.

“I didn't know if someone was trying to pull a prank on me,” says Medley. “I couldn't tell what was going on, so I got out to investigate.”

His curiosity just led to more fear. “The first tag I saw was a warning, ‘Do Not Touch,” says Medley. “It said it could explode, so I thought, we might have a situation on our hands.”

Disregarding pleas from a scared family, Medley picked up the foreign object. It turned out to be a weather balloon made in Finland.
“So I don't know how long it's been in the atmosphere, but there's a balloon that keeps it afloat, and the rubber's very thick,” says Medley.

The National Weather Service says the balloon popped when it reached 100,000 ft in the atmosphere. Bill Newman of the National Weather Service in Topeka says before it broke, it expanded to the size of a garage. “As the balloon goes up, it expands as the pressure decreases,” says Newman.

“It was eventually going to come down,” says Medley. “It just happened to come down here.”

The hydrogen balloon was actually launched from Topeka, and Newman says it’s rare it landed so close.
“Most of the balloons we would launch travel 100 miles to east of here because of high winds,” says Newman.

For Brent, it's just a relief. “Warning and explode were the first two things I saw,” says Newman. As his family bags the device to mail back to the government, it's an interesting end to a first-frightening discovery.

The hydrogen balloons are harmless after they're popped. The National Weather Service collects temperature, winds and pressure information via radio waves while the balloon floats through the atmosphere.