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Re: 6 year old stuck in helium UFO
^^ Haha yeah, that thing did look pretty badass. Screw the kid, I wanna fly it. Russ, I think it was more the kids let the thing go by untying it & didn't want to get in trouble. You could be right though. Strange family though I'm sure.
Re: 6 year old stuck in helium UFO
Colorado Balloon Family Bristles Skeptics
Richard Heene: Suggestion That Falcon's Disappearance Was a Hoax Is 'Pathetic'
By RUSSELL GOLDMAN and SARAH NETTER
Oct. 16, 2009 —
The parents of the 6-year-old Colorado boy who was at one time believed to have been soaring across Colorado in a "homemade flying saucer" continue to face questions about whether the entire incident was a publicity stunt.
"To have people say that, I think, is extremely pathetic," Richard Heene told "Good Morning America" today, his arm wrapped around son Falcon. "We were holding on to every second, every second, just hoping he might come out OK."
Falcon was found hiding in a cardboard box in the attic above the garage more than two hours after the balloon-like aircraft launched from the family's Fort Collins, Colo. backyard and soared across Colorado.
Larimer County Sheriff Jim Alderden said investigators had initially believed that the family was telling the truth, based on their interviews and body language.
"They were completely convinced this was the real deal and not a hoax," he said.
But skepticism about the incident was fueled, in large part, by the family's appearance on CNN's "Larry King Live" Thursday night in which Falcon said "we did this for a show."
Toward the end of a lengthy interview, guest host Wolf Blitzer asked Richard Heene to ask his son, who could not hear Blitzer, what he meant by the comment. Heene briefly suggested Falcon might have been talking about the family's two appearances on the ABC reality show, "Wife Swap."
"Certainly, that statement that was made last night on the interview raises the questions again," Alderden said. "We do intend to go back and try and re-interview the family."
On "Good Morning America" today, Heene again defended himself and his family and said they were truly concerned they had lost their little boy.
"I'm not selling anything. This is what we do all the time," he said. "I don't have a can of beans I'm trying to promote. This is just another day in the life of what we do."
Boy Said He Feared Getting in Trouble for Messing With Father's Aircraft
Falcon said little during the family's "GMA" appearance, briefly running off camera to vomit several times, a side effect of his asthma, Heene explained.
But his older brother, Brad, who initially alerted his parents that he thought his younger brother might have been in the balloon, said that he was "really scared" and feared Falcon might be electrocuted if the balloon hit power lines.
Home video released by the family shows Richard Heene visibly upset as the balloon lifted into the air, its tethers not properly secured. Then, the family said, they learned it might have had precious cargo.
"I just saw him go under the flying saucer," Brad said. "I saw him go under it and the door shut."
Heene and law enforcement officials told reporters Thursday that Falcon had retreated to his hiding space after his father scolded him for fiddling with the experimental aircraft tethered in the family yard.
"I was in the attic and he scared me because he yelled at me," Falcon told reporters. "That's why I went in the attic."
"I'm really sorry I yelled at him," Richard Heene said, standing with his wife and three sons. "He scared the heck out of us."
Richard Heene Said Aircraft Meant for Commuter Travel Someday
Heene, a former weatherman, said he built the 20-foot-long, dome-shaped aircraft for commuter travel.
"We were working on an experimental craft -- I call it the 3D LAV, a low-altitude vehicle for people to pull out of their garage and hover above traffic for about 50 to 100 feet," Heene said later. "It's still the very early stages of the invention."
As millions of other people watched live video footage of the balloon on TV, many of them thinking Falcon was inside, the aircraft appeared to visibly deflate, spin and rock from side to side. When it landed near the Denver airport, sheriff's officials tethered it to the ground and cut it with sharp tools to deflate it.
But they reported no sign of the boy or a box that had been attached to the balloon.
Believing Falcon may have fallen out of the aircraft, investigators searched a miles-wide area looking for him.
Volunteers walked through the treeline near the family's home, calling out the boy's name.
"Falcon is a great kid, very adventurous, and has no fear factor," neighbor Tina Sanchez said. "For him to climb into this balloon would not be out of character."
ABC News' Michael James and Clayton Sandell contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2009 ABC News Internet Ventures
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Aheado … id=8842957
- A Private Eye
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Re: 6 year old stuck in helium UFO
You can see the 'oh for fucks sake' look in his mum and dad's eyes when he says that 
Talk about awkward.
Re: 6 year old stuck in helium UFO
Exclusive: I Helped Richard Heene Plan a Balloon Hoax
For the first time, 25-year-old researcher Robert Thomas reveals to Gawker how earlier this year he and Richard Heene drew up a master plan to generate a massive media controversy using a weather balloon. To get famous, of course.
Thomas spent several months earlier this year working on developing a reality science TV show to pitch to networks — the "show," Thomas says, that Falcon was referring to when he told CNN "We did it for the show." Among the ideas that Heene, Thomas and two others came up with for their reality TV proposal — and one that he says most intrigued Heene — involved a weather balloon modified to look like a UFO which they would launch in an attempt to drum up media interest in both the Heene family and the series he was desperate to get on the air. Still, Thomas never imagined that Heene would involve his six-year-old son in what he is certain was a "global media hoax" to further Richard Heene's own celebrity. Thomas' story of his time with Heene, based on an interview with Ryan Tate, follows below. It's a fascinating account and after he publicly offered to sell his story, we paid him for it.
I came to Fort Collins for school — Colorado State University. I was a Web entrepreneur, starting a few small companies that evolved into a larger scale project called Extropedia.org, an open source online encyclopedia for advancing humanity through technology and science.
Doing research for the project on Google and YouTube, I stumbled upon Richard Heene and his video series Psyience Detectives. I was surprised to find this potential collaborator in the small city of Fort Collins. Since a very young age, I've been fascinated with electromagnetics, applied physics and how technologies developed out of those concepts could that change the world. Richard was studying basically the same thing. He asserted, for example, that tornadoes and hurricanes are not a result of changes in pressure but of magnetic polarity changes within the Earth.
I sent him an email in March, talking about Extropedia, a web site I founed and hope to re-launch soon. (Click here to read some of Thomas' email exchanges with the Heene family). Things progressed. Soon I was dropping in unannounced, having dinner. I'd bring various patents from the 50s and 60s that showcased technologies far more advanced than what we use today, and we discussed why they weren't being used. That was when Richard first started telling me about his conspiracy theories — which would eventually reveal themselves to be both extreme and paranoid.
Hunger for Stardom
There was something else at work, though. Oddly enough, Richard's sampling of stardom from being on Wife Swap — twice — gave him a sense of seniority in our scientific conversations. They became less and less about what I had to contribute and more and more about what Richard wanted.
And he wanted nothing more than to get another reality TV series. Richard had an ongoing dialog with someone at ABC who helped produce Wife Swap. Richard was pitching something along the lines of "MythBusters-meets-mad scientist." There would be these esoteric abstract experiments attempting to prove or disprove various theories. My job was to help him prepare a formal proposal. For each of 52 weekly episodes, to explain specifically what the subject would be, and why. (See the full proposal here.)
As the days progressed I became basically a stenographer. Richard was very hyperactive, and I would type out his ideas as quickly as I could. It was five hours of us brainstorming, or really Richard pouring his ideas out, then an additional ten hours of me taking his thoughts, cleaning them up, and making them linear and easier to understand. I would hyperlink the various scientific theories he mentioned for the people at ABC. I was to be paid $15 per hour, per a verbal agreement. More crucially, if and when and the reality series and was picked up by ABC, I would be one of his lead research assistants on the show.
I was very receptive to the idea of filtering esoteric science for the general population. A show would allow us to take the TV network's money and use it to fund real experimentation, to buy equipment unavailable to me as a student and an entrepreneur. We could experiment with electromagetics, crystal formation and new types of materials.
Richard, on the other hand, was often driven by ego and fame. He was all about controversy, hoping to whip up something significant enough to eliminate our reality TV competitors. He wanted episodes that would shock people and maximize his exposure. And he'd been trying for months. On several occasions, he sat down and told me he'd do whatever it took to make it happen — to win. He eventually resorted to extreme measures.
The UFO Idea (And the End of the World As We Know It in 2012)
One night, when Richard and I were sitting and talking, he brought up Wife Swap, and specifically a confrontation he had with a woman on the show who claimed to be a psychic. They very much disliked one other. Richard said, "Well, think about it. We were the 100th episode of Wife Swap. And why are we the most recognized Wife Swap family and episode? It's because of the controversy. I don't care what people say about me as a person, but the fact of the matter is that they know who I am."
And then we delved into the area of UFOs. I was reading a book on witness reports of Roswell at the time, just out of curiousity — I've never concluded whether it really took place or was an elaborate hoax. And Richard said, "how much do you want to bet we could facilitate some sort of a media stunt that would be equally profound as Roswell, and we could do so with nothing more than a weather balloon and some controversy?" (See item 16 here.)
Can we attract UFO's with a homemade flying saucer? We will modify a weather balloon, so that it resembles a UFO and will electrically charge the skin of the craft (Biefield-Brown Effect). We will capture the footage on film, and will utilize the media as a means with which to make our presence known to the masses. This will not only provide us with incredible footage, but will also generate a tremendous amount of controversy among the public, as well as publicity within the mainstream media. This will be the most significant UFO-related news event to take place since the Roswell Crash of 1947, and the result will be a dramatic increase in local and national awareness about The Heene Family, our Reality Series, as well as the UFO Phenomenon in general.
I clearly remember Richard telling me that, if we accomplish this, it would be the most controversial and widespread UFO news story since Roswell in 1947. (See audio at top of post.)
But he was motivated by theories I thought were far-fetched. Like Reptilians — the idea there are alien beings that walk among us and are shape shifters, able to resemble human beings and running the upper echelon of our government. Somehow a secret government has covered all this up since the U.S. was established, and the only way to get the truth out there was to use the mainstream media to raise Richard to a status of celebrity, so he could communicate with the masses.
As the weeks progressed, his theories got more and more extreme and paranoid. A lot of it surrounded 2012, and the possibility of there being an apocalyptic moment. Richard likes to talk a lot about the possibility of the Sun erupting in a large-scale solar flare that wipes out the Earth. It got to the point where he was really pressing me, saying we're running out of time, we're running out of time, the end of the world is coming. And we have to take necessary precautions to make sure that we're not among the majority that's going to be killed.
It got to the point where I was just nodding my head and going along with what he said, because it was easier than trying to debate with him. (See audio at bottom of post.)
Falcon's Fishy Flight Incident
When my friends called me about the whole balloon episode I was working. I had just moved to a new place and didn't have my television set up. I probably would never even have heard about this, except that a good friend of mine remembered me telling him about Richard several months ago. He told me, "Rob, you need to turn on the tv immediately! That Richard guy you worked with just pulled a massive publicity stunt!"
Richard's story doesn't add up. He is saying he thought Falcon was in the balloon, and that Falcon ran and hid as a result of Richard yelling at him. I've spent a lot of time with them, and Falcon is, first of all, not afraid of his father. I've never once seen Richard's children afraid of him — and I've definitely never seen Falcon go hide. He was one of the most social of the three children.
Secondly, Falcon supposedly hid in that attic in the garage. I've spent a lot of time in his garage, which has a drill press and various welding tools. It's unorganized and chaotic. There's really not so much an attic as some support beams connected with plywood. Being an adult of average height, I couldn't get up into the attic if I'd wanted to, so I don't know how a six-year-old child could have gotten up there. There's not an easy way to access that overhang. Maybe if I'd lifted that child up into the attic, he might have been able to rest up there, but not comfortably.
My doubts and concerns about that story were verified when Falcon's parents asked him on CNN, "why didn't you come out?" And Falcon said, "you guys said we did this for the show." Lights went off in my head. Bells were ringing; whistles were whistling. I said, "Wow, Richard is using his children as pawns to facilitate a global media hoax that's going to give him enough publicity to temporarily attract A-list celebrity status and hopefully attract a network."
The Price of Desperation
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and I think in this case the desperation was too much for Richard to bear. Richard's construction business wasn't doing too well. It's hard to find people interested in spending money on the aesthetics of their home when they're worried about their mortgage.
A lot of the work I did with the Heene family related to passing out fliers, putting them on people's front doors. The fliers advertised a roofing business and a general handyman business. As the months progressed, Richard's paranoia increased exponentially and my paycheck decreased exponentially. The work I put in for the ABC proposal was never compensated. Richard implied he didn't have the money to pay me. But he would always reassure me, "It's all going to pay off in the end."
But, in "the end," Richard didn't think about the implications of his behavior. He certainly didn't consider the people that were praying for his child, and the hundreds, maybe thousands of people that were inconvenienced in pursuit of this balloon. The thousands of dollars of taxpayer money spent on things that weren't necessary.
Bluntly, I think Richard's ego blinds him to his brilliance. The only thing inhibiting him from progressing is a steadfast determination to become famous and live a Hollywood lifestyle. Someone needs to slap him in the face and say, "Wake up! This is not what's important." He has an amazing family that has already been subject to a tremendous amount of criticism. I especially feel bad for Falcon. He's going to be known as Balloon Boy the rest of his life. That's not something you want to tell a girl on the first date.
For me, it's been quite the experience. I don't regret any of it. I learned a lot from Richard. Not necessarily what I should do but rather what I should not do, in my career path and in my goals. It allowed me to question, "What do I find of value in the world?" And I was led to the conclusion that the only thing that matters to me is my friends and family and loved ones. Everything else is details. If the world were going to end tomorrow, like a lot of Richard's theories on 2012, who would you go to? Would you go to a bunch of investors for some company or a reality show? Or would you go to your family and friends?
Here are two audio clips from Ryan's interview with Thomas:
(Richard and Falcon Heene pic via AP, reptilian humanoid pic via; 2012 apocalypse image via)
The author of this post can be contacted at tips@gawker.com
Re: 6 year old stuck in helium UFO
Colorado Authorities: 'Balloon Boy' Flight 'Was a Stunt'
Sunday , October 18, 2009
Larimer County Sheriff Jim Alderden announced at a press conference on Sunday that Colorado authorities have ruled the "balloon boy's" flight a hoax.
"It has been determined that this is a hoax. We believe we have evidence at this point to indicate that this was a publicity stunt," Alderden told reporters.
Authorities believe the alleged plot was hatched in an attempt by the Heene family "to better market themselves for a reality show at some point in the future," Alderden said. "They were lying."
The Larimer County Sheriff's Office will recommend charges of conspiracy, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, false reporting to authorities, and attempting to influence a public servant against the Heenes.
No charges have been filed yet, and neither Richard or Mayumi Heene are under arrest. Some of the most serious charges each carry a maximum sentence of six years in prison and a $500,000 fine.
Alderden said all three of the Heenes' sons knew of the balloon hoax, but likely won't face charges because of their ages. One of the boys told investigators he saw his brother get in the balloon's box before it launched.
Authorities believe the family planned the hoax for at least two weeks prior to Thursday's saga. "On the bizarre meter, this rates a 10," Alderden said.
"These people are actors. Not only have they appeared in several reality shows...the way they established their relationship was at an acting school in Hollywood. They put on a very good show," Alderden said. "Clearly we were manipulated by the family."
Acknowledging that the media grew wary of the Heenes' story before Sunday's announcement, Alderden insisted that his office built an investigation based on facts.
"There was a lot of skepticism, a lot of conjecture," Alderden said, "but we have to operate on facts." Officials, alarmed by a series of bizarre television interviews given by the Heene family, carried out an investigation with "the goal of getting a confession" from the family, Alderden said.
Richard Heene, while shopping with his wife and three sons at Wal-Mart, told the media on Sunday afternoon that the balloon saga and the media coverage had become "so convoluted."
Richard Heene says he's "seeking counsel," though it was unclear whether he was talking about hiring an attorney. Heene says his wife is holding together better than he is.
Richard and Mayumi Heene met with Larimer County investigators for much of Saturday afternoon to discuss Thursday's events, during which they claimed their six-year-old son Falcon vanished into the rafters of his garage while the world thought he was zooming through the sky in a flying saucer-like helium balloon.
Suspicion that the balloon saga was a hoax arose almost immediately after Falcon was found hiding in a cardboard box. Heene, a storm chaser and inventor whose family has appeared on the reality show "Wife Swap," and his wife had said one of the boy's older brothers had told them that Falcon was aboard the homemade balloon when it took off.
Alderden initially said there was no reason to believe the incident was a hoax. Authorities questioned the Heenes again after Falcon turned to his dad during a CNN interview Thursday night and said "you said we did this for a show" when asked why he didn't come out of his hiding place.
But an anonymous student told Web site The Business Insider that he worked with Heene in 2009 on potential reality show proposals to pitch to ABC.
The student said he and Heene pitched a show that would include several pranks, one of which was similar to the high-flying balloon incident, according to The Business Insider.
Falcon got sick during two separate TV interviews Friday when asked again why he hid from his family.
After the sheriff spoke to reporters, Richard Heene and his wife walked out of his office after meeting with officials for several hours. As reporters yelled questions, all Heene said was, "I was talking to the sheriff's department just now." He then walked to his car with his wife and a friend, and they drove away.
Child Protective Services had also reportedly been asked to interview the Heene family and Alderden said they would "probably open an investigation."
He called the move to contact CPS 'standard' in cases involving children.
It wasn't clear where the family was late Saturday night. By 9 p.m., an Associated Press reporter at the family home said the couple hadn't returned after leaving the sheriff's office. Their three sons were believed to have been at home being watched by sheriff's officials earlier in the day, but their whereabouts also weren't known to reporters in the evening.
The day began with Richard Heene knocking on the windows of journalists camped outside his home and promising a "big announcement." A few hours later, he did an about-face when he told reporters that they should leave questions in a cardboard box on the front doorstep.
As Heene walked away, a reporter shouted, "Can you tell us once and for all if this is a hoax?"
"Absolutely no hoax. I want your questions in the box," Heene said, waving a cardboard container before going back into his home.
A circus-like atmosphere formed outside, including men holding signs and occasionally yelling "balloon boy." One sign read, "Put balloon boy on TV: America's Most Wanted."
Other gawkers carried aluminum-foil stovetop popcorn makers that resembled the a flying saucer-like helium balloon launched from the family's backyard Thursday, with 6-year-old Falcon Heene believed to be onboard.
The Heenes have said the balloon was supposed to be tethered to the ground when it lifted off, and no one was supposed to be aboard. A video of the launch shows the family counting down in unison, "3, 2, 1," before Richard Heene pulls a cord, setting the balloon into the air.
"Whoa!" one of the boys exclaims. Then his father says in disbelief, "Oh, my God!" He then says to someone, "You didn't put the (expletive) tether down!" and he kicks the wood frame that had held the balloon.
Falcon's brother said he saw him inside the compartment before it took off and that's why they thought he was in there when it launched. Heene said he had yelled at Falcon before the launch for getting inside.
Over the years, Richard Heene has worked as a storm chaser, a handyman and contractor, and an aspiring reality-TV star.
He and his family appeared on the ABC reality show "Wife Swap," and the show's producer said it had a show in development with the Heenes but the deal is now off. TLC also said Heene had pitched a reality show to the network months ago, but it passed on the offer.
Despite his attempts to get on TV, Heene insisted Saturday that he didn't know what kinds of questions were being asked about him because he didn't have cable.
"I'm going to place the box out front. Please write your questions down, because friends are telling me they're saying this and that. I have no idea what the news is saying," Heene said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
