Runaway Balloon

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is waiting for summer
No sign of boy said to have floated off on balloon - Yahoo! News

Yahoo
FORT COLLINS, Colo. – A giant silvery helium balloon floated away from a yard in Colorado with a 6-year-old boy believed to be inside and slowly touched down in a field two hours later with the child nowhere in sight, setting off a frantic search for the boy.
The saga captivated people around the country as they stopped to watch the jaw-dropping sight on television of the balloon gliding through the air. The flying saucer-like balloon tipped precariously at times before gliding to the ground in a field, the culmination of a two-hour, 50-mile journey through two counties.
Larimer County sheriff's spokeswoman Kathy Messick said one of the boy's two older brothers saw 6-year-old Falcon Heene get into a box that was attached to the balloon with pegs. The box was not found when the balloon landed; video appeared to show something falling from the balloon at some point after it launched.
The balloon was owned by the boy's parents, Richard and Mayumi Heene, who are storm chasers and also appeared on the ABC reality show "Wife Swap."
Kevin Kuretich, of the Colorado Division of Emergency Management, said authorities were searching the ground along the path of balloon. "We're searching for the boy from the point where this took off to where it landed," Kuretich said.
He said it also had some kind of electric power unit which was run by double-C batteries. He said the balloon did seem to big enough to carry a 6-year-old. Messick also said investigators are looking into every possibility, including whether the boy was ever in the balloon. Yellow crime-scene tape was placed around the home.
Jason Humbert saw the balloon land. He said he had gotten a call from his mother in Texas who told him about the balloon. He said was in field checking on oil well when he found himself surrounded by police who had been chasing the balloon, which came to a rest 12 miles northeast of Denver International Airport.
"It looked like an alien space ship you see in those old, old movies. You know, those black and white ones. I came down softly. I asked a police officer if the boy was OK and he said there was no one in it," Humbert said.
Neighbor Bob Licko, 65, said he was leaving home when he heard commotion in the backyard of the family. He said he saw two boys on the roof with a camera, commenting about their brother.
"One of the boys yelled to me that his brother was way up in the air," Licko said.
Licko said the boy's mother seemed distraught and that the boy's father was running around the house.
In a 2007 interview with The Denver Post, Richard Heene described becoming a storm chaser after a tornado ripped off a roof where he was working as a contractor and said he once flew a plane around Hurricane Wilma's perimeter in 2005.
Pursuing bad weather was a family activity with the children coming along as the father sought evidence to prove his theory that rotating storms create their own magnetic fields.
Although Richard said he has no specialized training, they had a computer tracking system in their car and a special motorcycle.
The Heene family appeared twice on the ABC reality show "Wife Swap," most recently in February.
"When the Heene family aren't chasing storms, they devote their time to scientific experiments that include looking for extraterrestrials and building a research-gathering flying saucer to send into the eye of the storm," it says.
While the balloon was airborne, Colorado Army National Guard sent an OH-58 Kiowa helicopter and was preparing to send a Black Hawk UH-60 to try to rescue the boy, possibly by lowering someone to the balloon. They also were working with pilots of ultralight aircraft on the possibility of putting weights on the homemade craft to weigh it down.
But the balloon landed on its own in a dirt field. Sheriff's deputies secured it to keep it in place, even tossing shovelfuls of dirt on one edge.
The episode led to a brief shutdown of northbound departures from one of the nation's busiest airports, said a controller at the Federal Aviation Administration's radar center in Longmont, Colo.
FAA canceled all northbound takeoffs between 1 p.m. and 1:15 p.m. MDT, said Lyle Burrington, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association representative at the center. The balloon was about 15 miles northwest of the airport at that time.
Before the departure shutdown, controllers had been vectoring planes taking off in that direction away from the balloon, Burrington said.
Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Laura Brown said the agency tracked the balloon through reports from pilots.
Neighbor Lisa Eklund described seeing the balloon pass.
"We were sitting eating, out looking where they normally shoot off hot air balloons. My husband said he saw something. It went over our rooftop. Then we saw the big round balloonish thing, it was spinning," she said.
"By the time I saw it, it traveled pretty fast," she said.
The story gripped the television news networks, which set aside other programming to follow the balloon and speculate on the safety of the boy.
"It's got everybody freaked out," said Fox News Channel's Shepard Smith, "and why wouldn't it?"
 
Anyone else reminded of 12 Monkeys when they first read this?

Boy in the well and all that.

Anyway, they still seem to think that he may be on the ground.
 
Told you guys it was some 12 Monkeys shit.
 
So, now that falcon has failed to fulfill his destiny..


How much do those balloons cost?? I'm going to get one, slap on an alien mask and fly over every trailer park I can find, talking shit the whole way.
 
now seeing the home video of it taking off i think it was all setup, you can tell the dad is a bad actor lol
 
and the damn kid said himself he didn't come out because 'you told me not to because of the show'. You being the parents.
 
"Thank God they found balloon boy, I was afraid Micheal Jackson was ordering takeout from Heaven."
 
I think thered have to be a runaway oil rig drill for MJ to be ordering take-out from beyond the grave.
 
just heard on the radio that the kids told ther friends at school 2 weeks before and they were all giggling about how cool this would be. lol. 1am sun. morning cops and child services invaded the house and took evidence, now the family is in a hotel...
 
they'll be in jail soon.... faking a 911 call = federal offense.
 
They had better make them pay for the assets used for the search. Operating a Blackhawk times two is not cheap.
 
Thats what theyre tallying up. Submitting their findings next week supposedly.
 
He wants the money to build a shelter for the end of the world in 2012 when the sun explodes. I saw it in an article on my phone. Ill have to dig it up.
 
comicannefrankblah.png
 
^^^^^ omfg lmfao.


but so far, it looks like I lucked out and missed maybe one of the dumbest report on the news.

In other words .I'm completely lost on this subject.
 
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