The man from the Forest Service burst into the switchboard room with orders for the young operator. Keep quiet, he told Cora Conner, 16. Stay put.
It was May 5, 1945. Six people lay dead in the nearby Oregon woods, their bodies arrayed "like spokes in a wheel," victims of a bomb attached to a balloon.
Launched in Japan, the balloon had ridden ferocious high-altitude winds discovered by a Japanese scientist.
Now, more is known about the jet stream winds: They detonate storms, such as last winter's record snows; they have conspired in this summer's heat; they might mark the boundaries of winners and losers in a warming world; and someday they might generate electricity.
But in the final months of World War II, they played a different role: They were highways of war.
This month, as the world marked the 65th anniversary of Japan's surrender, the story of the balloon bombing remains little known. The blast in Bly, Ore., had its origins in the work of a gentle Japanese genius.
Wasaburo Ooishi, using balloons and making 1,228 observations from March 1923 to February 1925, became the first scientist to document high-speed winds that howl three to nine miles above Earth, where warm and cold air meet.
He published his pioneering work in Esperanto. But this "universal language" never caught on, and his findings were overlooked.
In the war, U.S. commanders relied on educated guesses about high-level winds. Preparing for a bombing raid in 1944, a team tried to forecast winds 30,000 feet over Tokyo.
"We had very little data," says a memoir by the late Reid Bryson, then a meteorologist stationed in Guam. He and his colleagues estimated that U.S. planes would fly into west winds of 168 knots, or 193 mph.
The general who ordered the forecast called them stupid. Surely they meant 68 knots; do it over. They came back with the same answer. Forget it, the general said, our pilots will measure the real winds.
The result was disastrous, Bryson wrote. "The planes couldn't fly upwind because they were practically standing still \u2026 sitting ducks for the Japanese antiaircraft fire."
The winds were measured at 196 mph. The general apologized.
Since the war, experts have made great leaps in understanding the winds' behavior.
Researchers are building a much more intricate mosaic than the jet stream's likeness on TV weather maps. The mosaic — far from complete — depicts a complex system of winds that circumnavigate the globe in parabolic and serpentine patterns, distorted and buckled by land masses and wild clashes of air.
Most important are the polar and subtropical jets. Both form at boundaries of warm and cold air — the greater the contrast, the stronger the winds. They set off storms by lifting air violently skyward; think of a gust lifting smoke from a chimney and inciting the blaze in a fireplace.
Even when jet stream winds slacken in summer and settle into patterns, the result can be disastrous. Areas close to jet stream storm tracks may suffer relentless rains. Areas south of those boundaries dry out dangerously, allowing heat to build.
That happened this summer in the eastern U.S. and Russia. It hit Europe hard in 2003, when heat waves killed as many as 50,000 people.
Now, jet stream winds appear to be on a subtle and possibly ominous migration, say researchers at the University of Utah and the Carnegie Institution of Washington.
The winds have nudged northward in the Northern Hemisphere and might be gaining in height, perhaps because of global warming. Such long-term shifts would have profound impact on storm tracks and drought zones, say the Carnegie experts, including Ken Caldeira.
Caldeira and co-author Cristina Archer, examining data from 1979 to 2001, found a subtle northward shift in the polar jet. Caldeira and Archer, now at California State University, Chico, also recently published a paper describing the jet stream as a high-speed energy mine, holding about 100 times the world's energy needs.
Archer says tapping the jet stream for electrical power isn't merely a dream. Prototypes are in the works, though it could take a decade or more to resolve technological obstacles.
Such scientists and entrepreneurs are building on Ooishi's legacy.
Ooishi was no maker of bombs. He merely wanted to improve weather forecasts, but Japanese military leaders saw the potential. But the only balloon-bomb fatalities came in the Oregon woods at that May picnic.
Cora Conner's family ran the town phone switchboard, and it was her turn to be on duty. So her mother didn't let her go to a Sunday school picnic with five friends.
The picnicking group saw a fallen balloon. Someone might have touched it, setting off the explosion.
Jack Smith, the first forest ranger to reach the scene, saw the bodies "like spokes" around a crater.
Another Forest Service worker went to the Bly switchboard that day to alert the military. He ordered Cora to stay in the room and not even tell her family.
"I was just numb," she says. "It took me 40 years before I could talk to anybody about this."