Balloon Boy's Dad Ratted Out?

[goldenboy]

OK. Gawker's got an interesting account here...if you actually care about Balloon Boy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balloon_boy) anymore.



http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01503/Falcon-balloon-boy_1503186c.jpg
Just the Bullet Points: How a Former Assistant Ratted Out Balloon Boy's Dad

Wow. Ready to have your mind blown? A former research assistant who slaved for Richard Heene is revealing the deceptive, tragic master plan that Heene concocted to manufacture a media thunderstorm. This...is completely insane (http://gawker.com/5383858/exclusive-i-helped-richard-heene-plan-a-balloon-hoax). Here's a bullet-point summary:


• Robert Thomas is a self-identified "web entrepreneur" and researcher who worked with Richard Heene at Colorado State University. Thomas loved working with science and electromagnetics since he was a kid, and discovered Heene through his wacky YouTube series.

• Both guys shared interests in mad-scientist questions about the earth's magnetic properties and effects on nature. Thomas starting helping Heene out with his ideas and failing small business, passing out fliers for him.

• Heene went on Wife Swap, went kinda crazy, and developed a superiority complex. Their friendship became less about a shared interest in science and more about Heene and his increasingly megalomaniaical bats**t ideas. Most of them had to do with getting on TV again.

• Heene wanted to shop his idea around to a producer he was in contact with from Wife Swap.

• Heene's pitch was: a zany science theory at the beginning of each episode, and at the end, they'd prove or disprove it.

• Heene was crazily firing episode ideas away a mile a minute, one after the other. Robert, who was writing all these ideas down for Heene, was given $15/hour and was promised a lead assistant position on the show by Heene.

• Heene thought they'd use the show to further science. Heene was obsessed with becoming a famous nutty professor. That's where the divide happened. Or as Richard wrote: "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."

• Heene's big idea to launch the show: to manufacture a UFO controversy bigger than Roswell, bigger than anything the world had ever seen before.

• The breaking point: Heene told his then-assistant of Reptilians who could shape-shift that were running the shadow government, and that his fame would enable him to communicate with the masses and expose said Reptillians. He also told Thomas the world was gonna end in a solar flare in 2012, and that they were running out of time.

• Thomas never got paid for the TV work he did with Heene. He passed out a lot of fliers for Heene's general contractor business, which wasn't bringing in cash. Probably because Heene spent too much time on his conspiracy theories and fame attempts. Heene reassured Thomas that it'd pay off. Thomas saw the crazy and got out of dodge.

• On Thursday, he sees the balloon go up. And the Heene's lie about the kid. And a friend, remembering a story Thomas once told him about this guy he worked with, called him up and told him he had to turn Heene in.

• Thomas notes: Heene's attic is too small and difficult to access for a small child to hide in without assistance. Also, that Falcon was the most social, and that those kids never got disciplined by Heene. He never would've hid and feared retribution.


And that's how it went down.
Just the Bullet Points: How a Former Assistant Ratted Out Balloon Boy's Dad - richard heene - Gawker (http://gawker.com/5384046/just-the-bullet-points-how-a-former-assistant-ratted-out-balloon-boys-dad)



This seems like the kind of story that would eventually be turned into a kooky indie comedy in a few years.

[Miffed67]

You know, something about that whole thing just stinks, to me. I don't believe for a second that it was just an accident. And then, Friday morning when the family was on GMA and The Today Show, it seemed like they were trying to get the kid to admit that it was all his fault! The damn kid was so upset he threw up on national TV, iirc! That guy is just a doodyhead, as far as I'm concerned....walking billboard for forced sterilization! (AKA - Some People Shouldn't Be Allowed to Become Parents.)

[goldenboy]

Well, the latest I heard was that they were actually gonna charge both parents with conspiracy and contributing to the delinquency of a minor, among other things. Apparently the parents met in an acting class, appropriately enough.

[goldenboy]

The first great balloon hoax

The Heene family aren't the first to come up with a balloon-based con: Edgar Allan Poe did it in 1844, writes Aida Edemariam

Quite why the Heene family of Colorado thought pretending to lose their son in the basket of an airborne helium balloon was a good idea is unclear. But as they contemplate possible criminal records for conspiracy and contributing to the delinquency of a minor, they can at least take comfort in the fact that they have distinguished company when it comes to balloon hoaxes.

On 13 April 1844, the New York Sun published a breathless account of a great step for mankind: "The air, as well as the earth and the ocean, has been subdued by science, and will become a common and convenient highway for mankind . . . The Atlantic has been actually crossed in a balloon . . . and in the inconceivably brief period of 75 hours from shore to shore!"

In a precursor of the reality shows to which the Heenes apparently aspired, the Sun ran excerpts from the faked diary of the Victoria's navigators, which ended just after their "sighting" off the coast of South Carolina. (In reality, the Atlantic would not be crossed by a balloon until 75 years later, when the rather less romantically named British dirigible R-34 landed in New York City after an 108-hour flight.)

The account was cooked up by Edgar Allan Poe, a hoax-lover in an age of hoax-lovers; he perpetrated five others. Poe seems to have rather enjoyed the fuss: "On the morning (Saturday) of its announcement," he later wrote in the Columbia Spy, "the whole square surrounding the Sun building was literally besieged, blocked up from a period soon after sunrise until about two o'clock PM . . . I never witnessed more intense excitement to get possession of a newspaper. . . I tried, in vain, during the whole day, to get possession of a copy."

But the excitement was not allowed to get out of hand. Two days later, the Sun printed a retraction: "BALLOON – The mails from the South last Saturday night not having brought a confirmation of the arrival of the Balloon from England . . . we are inclined to believe that the intelligence is erroneous." And so the first great media balloon hoax was punctured.

Poe had created the report by supposedly "copying verbatim from the joint diary of Mr Monck Mason and Mr Harrison Ainsworth", also crediting them for "much verbal information respecting the balloon itself, its construction, and other matters of interest . . ."

Extract from the diary

New York Sun, Saturday, 6 April 1844

We commenced the inflation this morning at daybreak; but owing to a thick fog, which encumbered the folds of the silk and rendered it unmanageable, we did not get through before nearly 11 o'clock.

At half-past 11, still proceeding nearly south, we obtained our first view of the Bristol Channel; and, in 15 minutes afterward, the line of breakers on the coast appeared immediately beneath us, and we were fairly out at sea.

We were all now anxious to test the efficiency of the rudder and screw, and we put them both into requisition forthwith, for the purpose of altering our direction more to the eastward, and in a line for Paris. By means of the rudder we instantly effected the necessary change of direction . . . Upon this we gave nine hearty cheers, and dropped in the sea a bottle, enclosing a slip of parchment with a brief account of the principle of the invention.

Hardly had we done with our rejoicings, when an unforeseen accident occurred which discouraged us in no little degree. The steel rod connecting the spring with the propeller was suddenly jerked out of place, and in an instant hung dangling out of reach. While we were endeavoring to regain it, we became involved in a strong current of wind from the East, which bore us, with rapidly increasing force, towards the Atlantic. We soon found ourselves driving out to sea at the rate of not less, certainly, than 50 or 60 miles an hour, so that we came up with Cape Clear, at some 40 miles to our North, before we had secured the rod . . .

It was now that Mr Ainsworth made an extraordinary, but to my fancy, a by no means unreasonable or chimerical proposition – that we should take advantage of the strong gale which bore us on, and in place of beating back to Paris, make an attempt to reach the coast of North America.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/oct/20/edgar-allan-poe-balloon-hoax

[Marauder]

This whole thing is so absolutely ridiculous! I feel so bad for the wife AND the kids of that insufferable twit of a man. I remember him on Wifeswap. Dude was CRAZY!

[teentitan]

So the parents were handed their sentence today. 90 days for dad and 20 for mom and neither can financially profit from the event for the next 4 years.
I think these two got off way to light. They should have been given a minimum of 1 year for him and 6 months for her! How many crazies out there are going to try something similar if all they get is a mild slap on the wrists?

Balloon boy parents get jail time - World - Canoe.ca (http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2009/12/23/12248141-ap.html)