Yea well that wasn’t as big a deal as we all thought:
FORT COLLINS, Colo. — For hours on Thursday, people around the country were gripped by television images of a homemade, silver balloon careening through the skies near here, whooshing over fields and trees and yards with a 6-year-old boy believed inside.
A search party was readied — on foot, on horseback, in helicopters loaded with infrared sensors — to scour the aircraft’s path of more than 60 miles, some terrified that the boy might have fallen from his accidental perch.
In the early afternoon, the balloon landed near Denver International Airport, but the boy was not in it. At last, near dusk, he was found, hiding in a box in his family’s garage attic, fearful his father would be angry at him for touching the flying machine his father had built in their backyard.
The boy’s journey, it turned out, had never begun.
“Quite frankly, I couldn’t stand,” the boy’s father, Richard Heene, said of the moment his youngest son, Falcon, suddenly reappeared inside the family’s home in Fort Collins. “I just hit the floor with my knees,” Mr. Heene said, as Falcon, chomping pizza and occasionally grinning, stood among the throng of reporters in the family’s front yard. “He scared the heck out of us.”
It was a cheery ending to a peculiar story, one that sent those watching it unfold on television through emotions from horror mystification to relief.
By nightfall, questions were emerging about the public costs of the saga, which interrupted departures from the Denver airport, and about how Falcon had managed to stay hidden in the attic as the authorities twice searched the family home.
But Mr. Heene — whose family (including three young boys) had been the focus of national attention before, appearing on a reality television show on ABC, “Wife Swap,” and has been interviewed by local news media for their love of chasing storms — said that all was exactly as it appeared. One of his older sons had seen Falcon near the helium-filled aircraft Mr. Heene had long been building, just moments before its tether came loose and it flew off. And, so, he said, all day, the family — and the nation — believed that the boy was in the craft.
While the whole thing was happening, it was certainly a surreal experience. And, the Wife Swap angle just adds to the weirdness.
More to come, I’m sure
