Joke or not, this is actually true. This was when the witches had just been brought in from the astral to be reborn into the secret HQ/other physical and they were testing the small white saucers. 

A few of them were shot at which resulted in those incidents with strange balloons over Alaska and other places, where one plane also went down. 3D surface can't represent saucer models well so they look like balloons most of the time, and react accordingly in visuals, but if they shoot at someone with the ray gun, that also takes effect.