The Helium Balloon

This is just nuts, but fortunately the boy wasn't in the balloon:


From 9News Colorado:

Crews searching for box that was on bottom of aircraft
posted by: Sara Gandy written by: Jeffrey Wolf 1 min ago

LARIMER COUNTY - Authorities are searching for a box that was attached to the bottom of an experimental aircraft that took off from a Fort Collins home with a 6-year-old boy inside on Thursday morning.
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The homemade aircraft made an apparent soft landing northeast of Denver International Airport on Thursday afternoon, but rescue crews found no sign of the boy when they reached the aircraft.

When it landed five miles east of Prospect Reservoir, 9NEWS could not see any child rescued from the basket of the balloon, but earlier Fort Collins Police had said they were certain he was still inside.

Police believe the boy, Falcon Heene, was inside the box when the aircraft lifted off around 11 a.m.

Police say there are pegs on the bottom of the aircraft that indicate that a box was attached at some point.

The experimental aircraft, which is a type of balloon filled with helium, was up for nearly three hours and appeared to start to rapidly deflate shortly after 1 p.m.

According to the Larimer County Sheriff's Department, the 6-year-old boy's parents had been building an experimental aircraft which had a large helium balloon attached to it at their home on Fossil Ridge Road in Fort Collins.

On Thursday morning, according to the family and officials, the boy got onto the aircraft and detached the rope holding it in place.

The aircraft was a dome-shaped, 20 foot, 5 foot aircraft covered with foil. As it was flying, it was going about 20-25 mph.

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Follow-Up: The boy was found hiding in a cardboard box in an attic above his garage. Would not want to be him right now!

Ah, I heard about this too. It's a good thing that he was found, but it was very weird hearing about this right after coming back from seeing the Pixar movie Up.

^^ Read this on CNN.com. Love this comment:

He said the aircraft was intended to hover around 20 feet in the air and was not intended to carry people.

"Obviously, something went wrong with that."

To be found here

I was reading Perez Hilton and I saw a link to a YouTube video. It was the boys family family being interviewed on CNN. According to the father the boy was 'hiding' in the garage, and even after the persistent calls of his family, he did not come back.

When the little boy's 'shocked' father asked him why he didn't come out when they called his name, the little boy let it slip, "We did this for the show"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI6UONWCq7A&feature=player_embedded

The interviewer later asked the boys father what his son meant by, "We did this for the show". His father was 'appalled' and got really upset.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxtFXtiUbbw&feature=video_response


According to Perez Hilton, this family have been on ABC's Wife Swap twice but I do not know if this is true.

I watched the WHATTHEBUCK video of this incident on youtube and it was really funny
It was after the boy had been found and he was on the show.