While father Richard Heene was vehemently denying hoax rumors on the Today Show Thursday, balloon boy Falcon Heene was busy throwing up on camera. Since the so-called ‘Balloon Boy’ went missing yesterday after the Heene family’s experimental balloon got loose, the family has been dodging pointed accusations the whole incident was a hoax to drum up publicity.
The whole nation was caught up in the drama yesterday when the Heene family’s youngest son was suspected of having taken off in an experimental hot air balloon. For hours, viewers watched the drama live on television, fearing for the boy’s life. When the balloon finally floated to the ground with no boy inside, some began to wonder if the whole incident might be a hoax. Balloon boy Falcon Heene showed up shortly after alive and well – he’d been allegedly hiding out in the family garage.
Richard Heene, Falcon’s father, hosts an Internet series called The Psyience Detectives and the whole family appeared previously on an episode of Wife Swap. Rumor has it mom and dad have been trying to land their own reality TV show as well, even allegedly pitching themselves to Jon & Kate Plus 8 creators TLC.
In an interview on Larry King Live Thursday night, Falcon Heene landed the whole family in trouble with his confused response to the question of why he didn’t emerge from his hiding place when everyone was searching for him. The poor boy looked at his parents and said, “You had said we did this for a show.” That’s a red flag statement if we’ve ever heard one.
Balloon boy’s dad took to the Today Show Thursday morning to flatly deny rumors the family engineered the drama around their allegedly missing son to land media attention. “What do I got to gain out of this? I’m not selling anything… absolutely not. This is not some kind of hoax,” Richard Heene told Meredith Viera.
Meanwhile poor Falcon Heene was looking distinctly unwell and eventually had to throw up in a bucket halfway through the interview.
Do guilty consciences cause stomach upset?
>> Previously: Balloon Boy Found Alive Hiding in Family Garage
Says this story: “Meanwhile poor Falcon Heene was looking distinctly unwell and eventually had to throw up in a bucket halfway through the interview.”
That unfortunate child, who we’ve been told is usually ebullient and rambunctious, seemed during the interview to be paralysed by fear. Realising that his parents’ tall story was running out of buoyancy, his sympathetic tummy automatically jettisoned some ballast in the style of the balloonists of yesteryear. Let’s await further cathartic developments.
Oh Leigh, you deserve some applause for that one. 🙂
Oops—here correcting my use of an apostrophe:
Thanks, LA Vess, for that. But I might as well point out, before somebody else does, that the consensus of the fourth estate is that the balloon was filled with helium, not with hot air. Whereas the Heenes’ version of the events . . .
Anyway, if the couple’s latest leaky story about the leaky balloon is eventually shown to be true then the child will deserve a medal if he resisted the urge to leak during his five hours hiding in a roof.
My mind simply boggles at your mastery. 🙂
Dear LA Vess: Oh stop it, as one of my favorite stand-up and sit-down comics likes to say when he walks on to the stage at the start of each edition of _Real Time with Bill Maher_. The truth is that the material is fairly explicitly written for me already, just as it has been for Sarah Fey when she has relayed to the world some of Tina Palin’s classic utterances. (Didn’t I say that right, Charleee?) I simply embellish.
What I dread (not!) is the day that the supply of material runs out. Then my wings will take dream, because history will have entered the era of the ideal world.
Anyway, back to the Heene household’s helium hokum: Richard is sometimes dubbed an “inventor”. How true that label probably is. Eat your hearts out, Joseph Smith, Erich von Däniken and so on.
The main victim seems to be six-year-old Falcon (and perhaps Mayumi is another, but that’s a slightly different story). The petrified lad has probably being urged to do more inventing than he was led to believe would be needed. When he twice lost his breakfast as testament to his father’s terminological inexactitudes (my thanks go to the memory of a certain more infamous Richard), the world thought: “Out of the mouths of babes.”