Balloon Fest 1986

Balloon Fest 1986

Author: Citation Needed Media November 12, 2025 Duration: 31:56

Balloonfest '86 was a fundraising event in Cleveland, Ohio, United States, held on September 27, 1986, in which the local chapter of United Way set a world record by releasing almost 1.5 million balloons.[2] The event was intended to be a harmless publicity stunt. However, the released balloons drifted back over the city and Lake Erie and landed in the surrounding area, causing problems for traffic and a nearby airport. In consequence, the organizers faced lawsuits seeking millions of dollars in damages,[1] and cost overruns put the event at a net loss.[3]


Ever wondered how confidently incorrect a person can become after a ten-minute internet deep dive? Citation Needed is a comedic exploration of that exact phenomenon. Each episode, the hosts from Citation Needed Media pick a topic-which could be anything from the history of a bizarre invention to the biography of a semi-forgotten public figure-and their sole source material is a single Wikipedia article. They then proceed to discuss, dissect, and wildly extrapolate from that one page, adopting the unearned authority of online experts. The result is a hilarious and often insightful collision between earnest curiosity and total improvisation, revealing just how fragile our shared understanding of culture and society can be. You’ll hear genuine attempts to parse dense, dry information immediately derailed by personal tangents, absurd hypotheticals, and the inevitable realization that the wiki text itself might be deeply flawed. It’s a podcast that celebrates the joy of learning something new while simultaneously mocking the platform where most of us go to do it. The conversations are loose, funny, and surprisingly informative, not because the hosts are actual experts, but because they’re so willing to follow a strange fact down a rabbit hole and see what they find. Tune in for a unique blend of casual research and comedic commentary that holds a mirror to our own online habits.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Citation Needed
Podcast Episodes
1769 Transit of Venus [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 34:22
A transit of Venus across the Sun takes place when the planet Venus passes directly between the Sun and a superior planet, becoming visible against (and hence obscuring a small portion of) the solar disk. During a transi…
Isabella of France [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 33:22
Isabella of France (c. 1295 – 22 August 1358), sometimes described as the She-Wolf of France (French: Louve de France), was Queen of England as the wife of King Edward II, and de facto regent of England from 1327 until 1…
Celestial Seasonings and Other Culty Companies [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 42:32
Celestial Seasonings founders Mo Siegel, Peggy Clute, Wyck Hay, and Lucinda Ziesing started gathering herbs and flowers in the mountains around Boulder and selling them to local health food stores in 1969.[2][3]
Cleopatra [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 37:57
Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator (Koinē Greek: Κλεοπάτρα Θεά Φιλοπάτωρ[note 5] lit. Cleopatra "father-loving goddess";[note 6] 70/69 BC – 10 August 30 BC) was Queen of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt from 51 to 30 BC, and it…
Julius Caesar [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 28:21
Gaius Julius Caesar (/ˈsiːzər/, SEE-zər; Latin: [ˈɡaːiʊs ˈjuːliʊs ˈkae̯sar]; 12 July 100 BC – 15 March 44 BC) was a Roman general and statesman. A member of the First Triumvirate, Caesar led the Roman armies in the Galli…
The Amish [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 31:17
The Amish (/ˈɑːmɪʃ/; Pennsylvania German: Amisch; German: Amische), formally the Old Order Amish, are a group of traditionalist Anabaptist Christian church fellowships with Swiss German and Alsatian origins.[2] They are…
Poisoned Booze [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 31:47
Several stories including: In 1927, most of the industrial alcohol in the United States had been poisoned under the order of the government.[9] The government had created a blend that contended with the bootleggers' chem…
The Great Gatsby [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 45:52
The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millio…
The Terra Nova Expedition, [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 40:50
The Terra Nova Expedition, officially the British Antarctic Expedition, was an expedition to Antarctica which took place between 1910 and 1913. Led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott, the expedition had various scientific an…
Large Hadron Collider [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 36:30
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider.[1][2] It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10…