Kids watch mystery box fall from the sky

THORNTON - We all know what goes up, must come down. But on Tuesday afternoon, three Niver Creek Middle School students couldn't explain what they saw falling from the sky outside their school.

"My friend said, 'Oh, money,' then we ran over there," Nick Bunney said.

Unfortunately, Nick and his classmates didn't find any money in the Styrofoam box attached to a parachute. Instead, what they found was a weather balloon.

The National Weather Service launches roughly 700 of these balloons from Stapleton each year, but rarely do they land so close to home.

"Generally they can land as far as Kansas or Nebraska, so this is actually like landing right on top of us from where it was released, so this is very unusual," Bryon Louis with the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said.

Louis says the lack of wind caused the balloon to fall 10 miles away. What's not so clear is why the device gave Nick a "shock."

"When we first picked it up, it kinda zapped me. I don't know, it just hit my finger," Nick said.

Louis says the weather balloons are not considered dangerous, and the National Weather Service actually encourages people to pick them up when the find them to send them back.

"If anything I think it could have possibly been the heat from the battery because these batteries do get extremely warm," Louis explained of Nick's injury.

The battery that powers the balloon is water activated and carries between 15 to 18 volts, similar to that of a doorbell.

Louis says the National Weather Service typically gets around 30 percent of its weather balloons back over the course of a year since many of them land in very remote areas.

Nick says this experience taught him a lot about weather balloons, and that he should be a bit more careful with unidentified objects falling from the sky.

"He had to go touch it first," Bill Bunney, Nick's dad, said.

"We talked about that last night, I said if anything ever lands again don't just go run up and touch it. Use a stick, maybe," he smiled.

After paramedics examined Nick's hand, and spoke with his father, Nick was transported by ambulance to the hospital. Nick checked out just fine and returned to school on Wednesday, however, the Bunneys are currently without health insurance, so they're now looking at a hefty emergency room bill.