The U.S. Customs and Border Protection has identified a mysterious balloon that fell from the sky in north Texas.
The agency confirms the balloon is a radar system that broke free Monday afternoon around 3:15 p.m. on South Padre Island.
It was found Tuesday hundreds of miles away near Quinlan in Hunt County.
Cell phone video shows the giant deflated balloon draped across power lines after property owners found it early Tuesday morning, about the time strong storms rolled through.
Gentry Ewing with Rayburn Electric Cooperative says linemen also discovered debris nearby after their equipment set off alerts around the same time.
“It’s very unusual. We're not new to storms but this kind of equipment falling on our transmission line kind of out of nowhere is very unusual,” said Ewing.
The equipment was brought back to their Rockwall headquarters where workers began piecing the situation together.
“Today, as we had it here, the kind of scene unfolded on the news that we monitored that – hey, there's this balloon that we saw landed in the same spot -- so we kind of put those two things together. This must be part of that,” explained Ewing.
It turns out, the balloon is a Tethered Aerostat Radar System used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to detect and track suspicious air traffic along the border.
In a statement Monday, CBP said the system, “Experienced a severe wind event resulting in the aerostat breaking free from its tether in South Padre Island, Texas. Due to the damage that occurred from the weather event, contact with the aerostat was lost shortly after breaking free.”
The CBP asked people to report any sightings of the system “that looks like a white blimp.”
It reappeared about 15 hours later and about 500 miles away.
NBC Dallas-Fort Worth was there when federal contractors collected the balloon near Quinlan and when they gathered parts from Rayburn Electric Cooperative that’ll help investigators get to the bottom of what went wrong.
CBP says its Air and Marine Operations are working alongside federal, state and local officials to investigate.
