WRIGHT-PATTERSON AFB — The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is showing its claws in the fight against giant balloons with an equally sized solution: giant cats as fearsome as they are cute.

According to research scientist Colonel David Gilchrist, the Amazingly Large Feline (ALF) program is ready for this mission. Gilchrist said that AFRL originally developed the big kitties to fight off unmanned aerial vehicles. However in tests, the mousers “just gave the UAVs kind of a bored look, and then flopped on the ground.” His team hopes that the size of adversary balloons will hold the feline attention long enough to swat away the aerial intruders.

“It will work if we can get the cats to focus for one minute, even 30 seconds,” Gilchrist said, “but that’s proving to be one of the toughest research problems in the history of the US military.”

To test the idea, AFRL built a giant mock-up of Washington D.C. at Fort Irwin, California, as a kitty proving ground. In the first test, an ALF cat with call sign “Captain Whiskey McWhiskers” successfully pounced on a tethered large balloon and validated the concept.