This is an IHeart podcast.

Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, A production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

On May 5th of 1945, Archie Mitchell and his family went for a picnic outside of Bly, Oregon.

After lunch, Archie's wife took their children for a walk along the creek.

Archie was cleaning up the picnic area when he heard an explosion. He later found out that his wife and kids had stumbled upon a Japanese balloon bomb, and when they touched it,

the bomb had detonated. Between November of 1944 and April of 1945, Japan launched over 9,000

balloon bombs, each about 70 feet tall. They sent them sailing over the

Pacific, hoping to hit the United States and cause mass hysteria. Thankfully, most of them sank

into the ocean, but it just goes to show that when it comes to warfare, not every battle is

fought on the front lines. In fact, sometimes the smallest battles

can be the ones that turn the tides of war. At the beginning of World War II, the Allied forces

knew that disease and rough weather could be as deadly to soldiers as enemy guns. It might

seem simple, but accurate weather data can save lives. The country of Greenland was the perfect

spot to predict the weather in Europe. The German army even joked that Greenland was the

weather kitchen, weather it was made there and then served to Europe over the next day. Greenland

was part of the kingdom of Denmark, and at the time, Denmark was occupied by Nazi Germany.

So there was a real fear that Germans would build weather stations on Greenland, which would

give them a huge leg up in the war. The Allied forces needed to find those weather stations

and destroy them. But this was easier said than done. You see, Greenland's terrain is rugged and the weather is rough.

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