Utah sheriff stopped 1945 Japanese hydrogen-filled balloon attack


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BOX ELDER COUNTY — Brothers Marion and Wade Hyde heard the most incredible story about their father — a story about the time Japan attacked Utah, and their dad stopped it.

They weren’t surprised.

“When I found out about it, I would just kind of shake my head and say 'that’s the old man.' He’s just right out front getting the job done,” Marion Hyde said.

It began one winter morning in 1945 with a phone call from Blue Creek rancher Floyd Stohl to their father, Box Elder County Sheriff Warren Hyde.

“Sheriff, there’s a strange contraption up here,” Stohl said, according to an article in Coronet Magazine.

“What does it look like, Floyd?” the sheriff asked, according to the article.

“Like a big parachute. Except it isn’t spread on the ground. It’s hanging in the air, sort of.”


It just reached a point where anything like that never surprised me. That was just in his nature. If the job had to be done, he would go ahead and do it.

–Marion Hyde, son


Warren Hyde, by the description, might have immediately realized a Fu-Go, or “windship weapon,” had landed in his jurisdiction.

During World War II, Japan launched thousands of these 30-foot tall, hydrogen-filled balloons. They were carried by the jet stream across the Pacific to the United States. Each balloon carried five bombs, designed to set fires and kill. It was the world’s first intercontinental weapon system.

The FBI alerted law enforcement officials, Warren Hyde included, but intentionally kept the public uninformed to try to minimize panic. The feds desperately wanted to capture one of these balloons intact to gather intelligence.

Warren Hyde jumped in his car and raced out to the ranch northwest of Tremonton.

Hyde, by all accounts, was a cowboy.

Marion Hyde said his dad always wore a cowboy hat, cowboy boots and a six-gun strapped to his side. A big booming voice earned him the nickname, “Big Thunder.”

“He was really a western man,” Marion Hyde said.

(KSL-TV)
(KSL-TV)

The sheriff got to the ranch and chased after the balloon — first in his car, which became stuck in the damp earth, and then on foot. Eventually, he caught up to it and grabbed hold of a shroud line.

“I don't think he ever realized what the consequences could’ve been,” said his son Wade.

“He knew that the bombs themselves couldn’t touch ground…or else he would’ve been history himself.”

Just then, a gust of wind sent the balloon, along with the sheriff and the bomb or bombs, into the air.

Wade Hyde said for the next 45 minutes, the sheriff and the balloon floated up and down.

“He tried to figure out a way of tethering the balloon,” Marion Hyde said, “but it would pick him up again.”

Eventually, the sheriff touched the ground and was able to tie the balloon to a tree. The explosives were destroyed, and the balloon and the attached machine were sent off for analysis.

Marion Hyde, a young child at the time, recalls a jovial gathering in front of the sheriff’s office that day. He didn’t learn the whole story until years later.

He’d heard about his father’s other escapades. There was the time Warren Hyde nabbed one of the FBI’s 10 most wanted sleeping in a car on Main Street in Tremonton, and the time he rescued a deputy and a police officer taken hostage by a jail escapee.

This story, as amazing as it was, just seemed to fit.

“It just reached a point where anything like that never surprised me,” Marion Hyde said. “That was just in his nature. If the job had to be done, he would go ahead and do it.”

“I’d heard about it all my life, but he never talked about it. It was just part of his day’s work,” Wade Hyde said. “It is an incredible story, hard to believe, but it is true.”

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