AUBURN — Back in the day, it was a typical class project.

Eager elementary school kids learning about jet streams, winds and the atmosphere released helium-filled balloons with nice notes attached asking people to drop them a line to let them know where their school project ended up.

If anyone replied, it was likely from the neighboring street, sometimes the neighboring town.

But from five states and 500 miles away?

“I was so surprised. Like, my jaw dropped. I never would have thought it would make it all the way to Maine,” Connor Lasco, a 12-year-old middle school student from Sayre, Pa., said Monday night.

That was Lasco’s reaction Sunday morning when he opened his email to discover someone actually answered the note he attached to a Mylar helium balloon he released Saturday afternoon about 3:30 p.m. As the Valentine Day balloon drifted away on the gusty wind, the seventh-grader and his parents speculated where it would land.

Nearly 500 miles northeast in Maine most definitely wasn’t one of the options. And surely he never expected it to land in the yard of another 12-year-old eager to answer his note not even four hours after he released it.

Evy Bilodeau and her family were returning home after snowmobiling during the afternoon when a shiny object in the bushes at the end of their driveway caught her eye.

“I couldn’t wait to answer it,” said an excited Bilodeau, 12, of finding the balloon near her North Auburn Road home around 7 p.m. that same night. “I thought it had been traveling for a month and I wanted to do it right then because I figured he’d been waiting all this time and here it had only been three hours.”

Over the last two days, the 12-year-olds exchanged emails about their amazing balloon connection, friended one another on Facebook and discovered they have a lot in common, including their passion for The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins and their moms being teachers.

Lasco said his class was studying wind currents and his parents told him about how they released balloons for class projects when they were kids. Rachel Lasco, now a second-grade teacher, said she encouraged her son to write a note, attached it to the balloon his brother got for Valentine’s Day, release it and see what happened. Based on her own experience, she never expected him to hear back from anyone.

“We joked that we never thought it would even make it to the next town,” Rachel Lasco said.

But according to John Cannon, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Gray, the fact the balloon traveled to Maine isn’t really the surprising point of the story. Cannon said specially-designed weather balloons released from Pennsylvania travel to Maine all the time after getting caught in the strong jet stream moving up the northeast. And Saturday’s travel time was possibly due to the strong weekend winds that sometimes topped 100 miles per hour.

What is amazing, however, is the fact that it was just a Mylar balloon and one that had been floating around the house several days before being released into the atmosphere.

The balloons used by the National Weather Service are large, heavy-duty latex balloons designed to hold ample helium to rise up to 100,000 feet and travel hundreds of miles.

“This was a one-in-a-million thing and we were lucky enough to be part of finding it,” said Bilodeau’s mom, Stacey, a teacher at Sherwood Heights School in Auburn. She said the balloon launch could be a new and interesting way to find a pen pal.

[email protected]