6A These men have soared higher than any, to 76,000 feet in a balloon. Cmdr. M. L. Lewis, left, and Lt. Cmdr. M. D. Ross terminated flight after four hours aloft. Lt. B. W. Pine, extreme left, assisted the others in a dry run Tuesday, when picture was taken. The Salt Lake Tribune, Friday, November 9, 1956 2 Balloonists Ride Out 10-Mile Drop Continued from Page One took an Air Force X-2 rocket plane 126,000 feet into the stratosphere. The real purpose of Thursday’s flight was to collect scientific data on the fringes of outer space. But Ross and Lewis didn’t have time to make their computations before they started their dive. The ascent, delayed for weeks until the weather was perfect, started at the “stratobowl” here at 7:19 a.m. Everything went perfectly until the balloon hit its high point of 76,000 feet at about 10 a.m. Ross and Lewis, in contact with the ground by radio, then dropped the balloon to 75,000 in order to begin scientific information. Then something went wrong. The balloon, perhaps leaking helium, kept going down. At 10:04 they were at 74,000 feet and 10:06 at 72,000. The gondola was spinning. At 70,000 feet, the drop apparently slackened and the men reported they had “started taking pictures.” “We didn’t get any other work done,” one said, “but it’s very lovely up there.” But they kept falling at rates varying from 1,000 to 3,000 feet a minute. At 62,000 feet, one of them said, “We are in an emergency situation.” They had buckled themselves into their seats, he said, and were beginning to dump ballast in an attempt to regain control of the balloon. They “kicked out everything that wasn’t nailed down.” At 43,000 feet, one of the Navy men said, “This is an experience I would not like to repeat.” And at 34,000 feet a voice said jokingly to a doctor in one of the trailing planes, “I hope your tape recorder is functioning properly.” The plunge had slowed down at that point, but Ross and Lewis had no more ballast to drop. They waited until they were about 25,000 feet above ground and then cut the gondola loose. It hit ground upright and with a gentle bump at 11:20 a.m., an hour and 20 minutes after their fall started. DON HIGGINS, operator of an air service at Ainsworth, Neb., was the first man to reach the balloonists. They were standing outside the gondola. “They didn’t have much to say,” Higgins said. “One of them - I couldn’t tell them apart in their pressure suits - said it was a ‘real experience.’” Ross, who is in charge of the strato-lab project in the office of naval research, and Lewis, officer in the Bureau of Aeronautics, asked Higgins to notify Naval officials that they were not injured.