People have made different kinds of solar balloons. But this one I think was elegant in its design simplicity and cost less than $100. Reasonable lift capacity and flight times too.

I prefer the quadrilateral commission myself...since the balloon was tetrahedral.

Many people declared this a Dorrito or a blue corn tortilla chip. But I'm not sure how they knew what brand of chip it was. It could have been a Tostito or many other brand covered in bean dip. Next time we will have to be sure to put a green patch on it to represent the green chile salsa. Yum. yum. yum.

Plenty of people were more than happy to call it in without any of our members having to hype anything.

From the moment the balloon got away we were afraid that people would say it was a UFO. We tried to tell people, but some folks want to believe anything weird-looking in the sky is a UFO. There is a whole sub-genre in the UFO literature specifically devoted to "triangular UFOs". I think the rationale we had for a tetrahedral design was that it was fairly simple to make, regular, and has sloped edges so it can catch light through the clear top. It makes me wonder if many of these other triangular UFOs are experimental balloons as well. Of course, ours flew during the day because...duh...it's a solar balloon. So it got a little more notice, perhaps.

We at QueLab were a little surprised too, given the amount of hot air balloons that are flown around here. But this one did look a bit different than the typical balloon. Kirtland usually doesn't fly too many odd looking aircraft either. Mainly we see Ospreys, MH53s, etc.

I'm a member of the QueLab makerspace and I was there when the solar balloon got away from us in a sudden gust of wind. If you didn't know what it was, it did look pretty weird. A giant black triangle hanging in the sky. We *tried* to tell people it was a balloon, but some people *refused to believe us*. They told us we didnt' know what we were talking about, that we were lying, part of a cover up, etc. Fortunately we had plenty of pictures of it on the ground, as well as a smaller prototype version, and a tracking system on the balloon. Otherwise, this might have been declared a real UFO by some.