North and South Korea hasn’t had the best of relationships with one another for many, many years. In fact if you read stories and reports about North Korea, it seems that the government practices very heavy propaganda in which they constantly remind its citizens about the perils beyond the borders of its country.However one man by the name of Park Sang Hak has spent years trying to fight the propaganda by sending in balloons over the border, and within each balloon contains materials like USB sticks that have been loaded with Wikipedia entries, DVDs of popular TV shows, anti-government leaflets, and sometimes even American dollar bills which can be used to buy food on the black market.
As it stands, Park is on a tour of North California and is currently seeking tech savvy benefactors who will help him improve his balloon design, preferably with GPS built into it so that they know where their balloons are landing.
Based on the current design, which is basically a long and thin balloon pictured above, they only successfully make it over the border by a few kilometers, although on occasion it has managed to float all the way to Pyongyang which is about 125 miles from the border.
According to Park, “I believe that if we can get 100 times more balloons, then we will make [North Korean dictator] Kim Jong Un paranoid—sending more and more balloons to North Korea is more effective than sending a bomb on North Korea. The thing is that if South Korea or the United States Air Force dropped a bomb, there’s a way that [North Korea] would react to it, but the thing is with leaflets there’s no way to react.”