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NATCHEZ — A hot air balloon system and trailer stolen from Natchez five years ago were recovered Thursday, coincidentally on the first day of the 2024 Natchez Balloon Festival.

Unfortunately, the balloon and trailer had apparently been dumped in a heavily wooded area of Woodville where they sat rotting for that entire time and are not in the best shape.

Fortunately, there were plenty of fellow balloonists close by to help retrieve the balloon and inflate it to assess the damage Friday morning.

“It’s a lot of work to be done,” said Mike Hanson, the owner of the hot air balloon who lives in Winona about a three-hour drive from Natchez.

Hanson said he still needs to get the system to a repair shop and see what can be salvaged.

“I think I’m going to rebuild the basket because it needs it,” he said. “We’ll see what happens.”

Hanson said he’d received a phone call Thursday from the wife of a man who stumbled on the trailer while out scouting hunting ground in Woodville.

“He came up on the trailer in the woods a couple of months ago, opened it up, saw the balloon and didn’t know what to do,” Hanson said. “He called his wife and she thought about it and thought about it and called the police and gave them the tag number and that gave them my name. She went on Facebook and found me. Stalked me. She went all the way back five years to when the balloon was stolen. She called me yesterday afternoon around 3 p.m. As soon as I hung up the phone with her, the first person I called was Chris Trippe and told him. He thought I was joking.”

Whoever stole the unmarked 12-by-6-foot trailer out of the parking lot of the Western Auto store in Natchez in 2019 likely did not know there was a hot-air balloon inside.

Trippe had been doing maintenance on the hot-air balloon and left the trailer containing the balloon system in the Western Auto parking lot, where it went missing. He estimated the system was worth around $60,000.

A report was made with the Natchez Police Department and pictures were posted on social media, but without any luck.

Trippe and Bill Cunningham, the Meister of the Natchez Balloon Festival, had quite the story to share Friday morning of their balloon retrieval efforts.

“It was like a jungle,” Trippe said of where the balloon was found.

They had to cut through trees and greenery with chainsaws and a tractor to reach it, Cunningham said, and when they did it was evident that “a raccoon or possum or something” had eaten a hole through the floor of the trailer and had gotten inside.

“So, this morning we can choose to fly or we can go help Mike inflate his balloon and see what is left of it,” Cunningham said to a group of balloon pilots during their flight briefing at Magnolia Bluff’s Hotel.

Cunningham said that a Google Earth search shows traces of the trailer obscured by greenery. If you toggle it back five years, the earliest it was visible was in 2019, when the trailer went missing from Natchez.

“It was clear then,” he added. “Now it’s all overgrown and obscured by 20-foot trees.”