**April Fool's 2023 is a wrap. This tag is officially sold out! And if you're of the serious variety, no this tag was not cut from the actual balloon that made headlines; what it was cut from will remain a mystery! The original item description and totally fabricated story is below.**
 
Straight off the ocean floor, the fresh catch of the day are 100 tags cut from the solar cells off a high altitude, mainly meteorological, maybe militarized Chinese observation balloon.
 
This bag of gas made headlines earlier this year when it was blown off course and over the mainland US. The balloon studied the weather over the US for about a week before an F-22 reached out and touched it with an AIM-9X.
 
But the story doesn't end there. Shortly after it was downed, the US Govt quickly arrived on scene to scoop up the remains of this craft, but they grossly underestimated how large the debris field was. After several days of recovery efforts, and having scoured the sea floor for the delicate bits, the feds left and hired a local company, Hot Scrap, LLC to finish the clean-up efforts. The experts at Quantico determined that the solar cells/panels the balloon used to gather sunlight were infact off-the-shelf panels and had zero national security risk implications.
 
And that's where we come in. In mid Feb, we were contacted by a gentleman and JE tag collector who was part of the crew at Hot Scrap who asked us if we'd like to offer a limited tag run cut from one of these panels. We quickly hopped in the JE Bus and headed East to claim a small section of a panel for this run.
 
These glass (yes, glass) tags were cut on the waterjet and have a printed design on them. The black color is the solar film on the back of the tag. In an effort to keep this run as true to the story of the craft as possible, we used BVR's China Branch to iron out the card art. I personally have no idea what the front says, but I've been told its spot on.
 
We only managed to get 100 tags from this panel, so act quick if you want to score a piece of the slowest material we've ever released.
 
We’d like to thank Rex at Hot Scrap for reaching out to us and giving us first shot at this exclusive material! He is a stand-up guy who is almost certain the panel he sold us is part of the debris from this balloon.