Balloon Boy's 'flight' grips viewers across the globe

As the children of maverick science enthusiasts and storm chasers, the Heene boys are a mischievous bunch.

Bradford, 10, Ryo, 8, and Falcon, 6, travel with their parents, for whom a vacation means breaking out the video camera in the eye of Hurricane Gustav. The family often sleeps in their clothes so as to jump and pursue a storm at a moment’s notice. They moved to Fort Collins, Colo., to facilitate tornado-chasing, father Richard Heene told CNN yesterday.

The flat-out lifestyle has helped foster an appetite for publicity – they appeared on Wife Swap, a U.S. reality show that had mother Mayumi Heene switch spots with a more conservative mom from another family – that the boys appear to have inherited. They star in an online rap music video, Not Pussified, glorifying their feral ways.

And so began the theories Thursday at 11 a.m. mountain time when Falcon disappeared from the family’s
suburban home around the same time as the homemade, aluminum foil helium balloon he’d been playing near flew away. With the UFO-like balloon rising thousands of feet in the air, officials feared the worst – that Falcon was inside its small four-foot-wide compartment.

It sparked a search that quickly gripped viewers across the world. On Twitter at times, 1,000 tweets a minute were about the so-called Balloon Boy, while networks followed the balloon’s every move.
“You have a situation where a six-year-old may die, and yet it was so fascinating to watch. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some simultaneous guilt and exaltation while you watch,” said Stuart Fischoff, a professor emeritus of media psychology at California State University, who flipped between CNN, MSNBC and Fox, watching the event unfold.
“Is the kid inside? Will he or won’t he be saved? Will it or won’t it crash?
About two hours after the balloon took flight – the vehicle was developed in honour of the parents’ wedding anniversary as an experiment into the family’s ongoing efforts to create a flying saucer car – it came down in a field 60 kilometres away.
But Falcon wasn’t inside.

ABC Wife Swap site

Photo of the Heene family, which media reports indicate owned the saucer-shaped balloon that flew away from the family home Thursday in Colorado

“Of course, when he wasn’t there, it turned the page on that particular drama,” Prof. Fischoff said.
Another search was struck up. Photos hit the airwaves showing the flying saucer-like balloon and an object that appeared to be falling from it.
Then, just after 4 p.m. mountain time, word came from the local Sheriff’s office. Falcon wasn’t in the balloon. He wasn’t in something that had fallen from it, either. Instead, after being admonished by his father for playing near the balloon, he had hidden in a box, tucked securely away in the attic of the family’s garage.
“I was in the attic. The reason why I went up there is my dad yelled at me and didn’t want me playing in the flying saucer,” the six-year-old, sitting with his family, told Wolf Blitzer on Larry King Live.
Source theglobeandmail.com