Student group’s lost weather balloon recovered in Weakley County

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WEAKLEY COUNTY, Tenn. — In a story we first brought you in July, a group of students from Kentucky built and sent off a weather balloon, and it was supposed to land just a couple hours later in West Tennessee, but they never found it — until last week.

The high school students were a part of a group project in the Governor’s Scholar Program.

“They advised us that they were going to be launching this balloon with different telemetry items and cameras, and they expected it to land in Weakley County,” Weakley County EMA Director Jamison Peevyhouse said. “The day of the launch, we tried to track it, and we weren’t able to find it that day.”

Nearly 10 months have gone by with no one really knowing where the balloon landed or what happened to it, until last Friday.

“The unit came back online, reported its location, and we drove out to the reported location, searched for it about 20 minutes and we were able to find it,” Peevyhouse said.

What caused the battery to come back to life we may never know, but the video recorded on the two-hour trip was out of this world.

“It actually landed in the cornfield while the corn was probably about two feet tall, which is probably why we couldn’t find it,” Peevyhouse said. “They actually cut the corn on top of it, and it was still laying there in several pieces.”

Peevyhouse said they will get the cameras and footage back to John Woodward with the program later this week.