It was the summer of 2001, in a small rural town in Northern England, when something very remarkable happened.
On this day, Laura Buxton was at a party for her grandparents’ golden wedding anniversary.
Laura seemed to be just an average girl from an average rural town, but something very strange happened that day. She decided to do something silly.
She got a red balloon and wrote, “Please return to Laura Buxton” on one side and her address on the other side.
Laura and her friends just thought they were being silly. They thought the balloon would float just a little way down the road and fall to the ground.
But it didn’t just go down the road. It floated all the way out of town, into the next town, then further to the next town, and on and on until it floated to the other side of the country. By the time it finally floated back down, the balloon was 232 kilometers away in the South of England.
It landed in a tree between two houses. A neighbor picked it up and was about to throw it into the trash when he saw the address and message written on the balloon. “Laura Buxton, Oh my God,” he thought.