… Oscar Hillman, Chief of Operations at The Academic Society, AF, which arranged the festival 60val at the end of September. During the 60val, the presidency released helium balloons with contact information and personal greetings from visitors. Almost exactly one month after “the release”, they received an e-mail saying that one balloon had been found by a farmer in Poland.
Who found the balloon?
”All we know is that his name is Jan and that he’s from Polchowo, a small town by the Polish Baltic coast. That means the balloon flew about 270 kilometers as the crow flies, and that’s pretty far. We received a short mail, in which he wrote that he’d found the balloon in his field, with extremely precise coordinates about its landing place. There wasn’t anything other than that.”
You wrote the contact information for AF in English. Did you have some secret hope that the balloon would make it as far as it did?
”Yes, we were hoping that one of them would end up in Poland, Germany, or maybe at least Denmark. It’s great that we got what we hoped for.”
As a reward for finding the balloon, Jan can now choose between an AF-bowtie designed by the Director of Communications, or tickets to one of the upcoming students’ farces. What are your thoughts about that?
”Well, of course we’re hoping that he’ll want to come see one of our farces. It’s up to him if he wants to come, and he will get to choose freely from the farces that are in the works. We probably won’t be able to pay for the travel expense, but we’re hoping that he might be able to combine it with some other reason to come to Sweden.”
Has any other balloon been found?
”No, he’s the first one to get in touch with us. We don’t know how long a helium balloon can stay afloat, or how long this one has been lying in Jan’s field. Hopefully this is when they start dropping, and then maybe we’ll have more people contacting us for their prices soon.”
Are you planning to stay in touch with Jan?
”Yes, or at least long enough to see if we can get all the information we want about the balloon, and hopefully a picture or something like that. It would be fun to know which one of our personal messages that made it there.”
Text: Samuel Skoog
Pictures: Private and the Academic Society
Translation: Marie Eriksson
