Balloon Boy revisited
Ten years ago, the nation was transfixed by the story of Falcon Heene, the boy trapped in a runaway balloon, said journalist Robert Sanchez in His father still insists it wasn’t a made-for-TV hoax.
ON THE SECOND day I visited Balloon Boy’s father, he was standing in the back of a pickup truck, inflating balloons and letting the family dog bite them. Now, 10 years after their helium-filled balloon took off from their Fort Collins, Colo., backyard, the Heenes—Richard, his wife, and their three sons—live in a camper trailer parked on the side of a twisting country road in New Hampton, N.Y.
A 160-year-old farmhouse slumps just a few yards away, a spray of mold running up the white siding. The house is a renovation project the Heenes are working on for an investor in Florida, where the family had been living since Richard pleaded guilty to one felony charge of attempting to influence a public servant in relation to what came to be known as the Balloon Boy Hoax. Richard served 30 days in jail and 60 nights of work release, and soon after moved his family 1,900 miles from Colorado to Florida.
The Heenes’ trailer was parked between two homes; one neighbor had already called the police because one of the three Heene boys and a friend were trespassing on private farmland. The officer pulled up to the trailer. Richard apologized and explained that the family was new to town and the boys were just doing a little exploring. “You can’t win with cops, man,” Richard says, recalling the visit, but not really talking about that particular interaction with the police. There was one positive takeaway from the encounter: At least for now, it seemed, no one recognized the names of Richard and Mayumi Heene or those of their sons: Bradford, 20; Ryo, 18; and Falcon, aka Balloon Boy, 16.
Richard is 58 now. He’s managed to retain enough of his energy to still seem youthful—if not in body then at least in spirit. It’s something he credits to raising three boys, to swinging a hammer for a living, and to his myriad inventions, which range from his Bear Scratch back scratcher to his HeeneDuty Truck Transformers to his Head Banger Energy Shots to the BlowJab fan designed to fit inside a man’s pants.
For her part, Mayumi is omnipresent, the glue of the family who prefers to work in the shadows. After their marriage and the birth of three sons, it was obvious to anyone that Mayumi was the silent force that kept everything together. “She’s traditional Japanese, which means she takes the caretaker role very, very seriously,” a family friend says. “She lives to serve Richard and the boys. She would never want embarrassment or shame for any of them.”
N THE FALL of 2009, the Great Recession was hammering American families, and people were out of work and struggling. Richard’s remodeling and home renovation services were luxuries most people couldn’t afford; Mayumi was running an at-home video-editing business, but that work had slowed, too. Richard had been trying to come up with an invention that could make some money, and had dreamed up a helium-filled, foil-backed balloon. With a successful launch, Richard imagined dozens of inventors building their own dirigibles and racing them across a desert, maybe in Arizona or Utah. If he could get enough balloons for the competition, Richard thought, he could find sponsors and maybe some airtime for the event.
The Heenes used whatever spare cash they had to buy the supplies and started building. The balloon was 20 feet in diameter and was constructed using 16 pie-shaped plastic sheets and two rolls of duct tape.
IWhen Richard emptied five tanks of helium into the balloon for a test run on Oct. 15, it expanded and began to take the shape of a Jiffy Pop popcorn container. Richard then hooked a stun gun to the basket and ran a million volts of electricity across the balloon’s surface. The plan was to tether the balloon to the ground, release it about 13 feet into the air, and then use the electricity to maneuver the balloon. A video camera was set up on a tripod. As they stood in the backyard, the Heenes counted down from three, Richard pulled a release pin, and the balloon slowly floated toward the tops of the trees out back. The Heenes cheered.
The balloon kept going.
Richard yelled at his wife and kicked the wooden frame on which the balloon had been sitting. It wasn’t until about 30 seconds later, Richard and Mayumi claim, that they realized Falcon wasn’t in the yard. He’d been playing inside the balloon’s basket all morning; earlier, Bradford filmed Falcon climbing around the plywood basket and their father yelling for the boy to stay away. Now Bradford was screaming at his parents: “Falcon’s in there! Falcon’s in there!”
Richard’s first call was to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), law enforcement reports say. Within minutes, Larimer County sheriff’s deputies began arriving at the Heenes’ rented house. They searched the family’s bedrooms, the basement, and the home’s garage. About an hour after the balloon’s launch, footage of its flight was broadcast across the country on cable news channels.
Television and newspaper reporters flooded the Heenes’ neighborhood. Nearly 90 minutes after Mayumi’s 911 call, with an entire nation watching, the balloon began deflating. As the balloon plopped onto the ground in a freshly planted field about 50 miles from the Heenes’ home, deputies and an ambulance converged. They searched the craft. Falcon wasn’t there.
A deputy reported seeing an object fall out a few miles earlier. “It was the worst moment of my life,” Richard says. With deputies still searching, Richard and Mayumi cried in the living room. As one investigator was making a call from the