I subscribe to those "CNN Breaking News" e-mails.  A few minutes ago I got one, which reads, in its entirety, "A 6-year-old climbed into a balloon-like experimental aircraft built by his parents and floated into the Colorado sky."

Sounds like some sophomore-level creative-writing-class short story, don't it?

This has got to be the weirdest news story of 2009.

I truly and sincerely hope that the poor little kid is okay.  I also hope that, once he's found okay, he gets put in time-out until it's time for him to get a driver's license.

Question #1:  Why wasn't he in school?

Emmeran wrote:

Question #1:  Why wasn't he in school?

Question #2: What is it with kids today? When I was a kid, we had to fill our hot air balloons with our own breath. We didn't get these mamby-pamby helium-thingies.

jesusluvspegging wrote:

George Orr wrote:

If the little shit turns out to have been hiding under some furniture or playing XBox at a neighbor's this whole time, I hope his spanking gets live coverage.

I don't think he was ever in it.

Yeah, that balloon didn't look as though it would have enough lift to get even a kid off the ground.

In the attic of the garage.

Kids.

Can't live with them, can't find a pan big enough to fry them.

Taint wrote:

Emmeran wrote:

Question #1:  Why wasn't he in school?

Question #2: What is it with kids today? When I was a kid, we had to fill our hot air balloons with our own breath. We didn't get these mamby-pamby helium-thingies.

At least you had balloons.  We had to tie ourselves to rocks and fling ourselves off cliffs.  Every hour.

Every once in a while I forget why I chose to remain childless.  Stories like this are nice reminders.

You breeders have my sympathy and my moral support.  I don't even mind that you get tax breaks.  But don't ever ask me to babysit.

And the kids were out of school because of a teacher "Work day".

It's a fucking crying shame the public servants can't be like the rest of us and put in a few weekend days for the extra shit that needs to be done, doubly so here in Cali where they get paid more than us and can retire with a 75% pension at 50.

My kids are definitely going into public service, if nothing else because my 401k leaves them little choice.

jesusluvspegging wrote:

Link to YouTube page

I'm not sure how to get youtube embeds to go to a certain point in the video here, so skip up to 23 seconds to hear the boy admit that "we did this for a show."

Then Wolf calls him on it and the man obviously lies:

Link to YouTube page

Somebody cracks ass at around the 44-45 second mark in the top video.

Last edited by Banjo (2009-10-16 11:55:04)

The parents made a youtube show called "The Psyience Detectives"

Last edited by jesusluvspegging (2009-10-16 12:28:39)

I just got done watching a protracted press conference with the community's top cop.

He says that according to all the police and other public servants who spent the day in the house with the parents*, the parents at no time showed any signs that they were being deceitful.  "Not verbally, by action or in body language," was about the way he put it. 

He seems to be about the only person on their side at the moment, but I'm inclined to take his word since he was there.

Now the boys, on the other hand, are aged ten, eight and six.  They have experience with being in front of cameras ("Wife Swap," Lord preserve us) and with seeing themselves on TV.  Maybe they miss it.  Would you put it past 'em?




*Searching for the hiding boy and not finding him for roughly six hours...shades of JonBenet Ramsey.

Mom and Dad met in acting school.

First call went to the FAA, second to a television station, then 911

jesusluvspegging wrote:

Emmeran wrote:

Mom and Dad met in acting school.

First call went to the FAA, second to a television station, then 911

Got a citation on that?  'cause that's awesome.

I heard the same thing in the aforementioned press conference.  Story is, the dad knows folks at the FAA and thought they'd be more help than the Sheriff's Office; and he called the TV station because it has a helicopter.  Just sayin', that was the explanation.

This is the first I've heard about the acting school business.  People have certainly done crazier/stupider things for a little media attention, but I'm still holding on to my theory that if it really was a hoax, it was the kids and not the parents.

oh, and they are all over YouTube - mountains of annoying footage.  Including, oddly enough, the footage of this event - which seems to have been posted very quickly considering the situation.

jesusluvspegging wrote:

http://imgur.com/ALSQO.jpg

I award you one internet.

The press conference in question. Mr. Policeman (who also can't find a hyperactive child in a small house) seems to be convinced of their innocence.

Looks like charges will be filed.

I want to know why the kid kept puking. Is he not fit for the spotlight, or did papa drug him to keep him in hiding?

It's like, "LOOK AT MEEEEEE!".

So now they're being looked at. Cops are looking all through their house.

Bully for them.

They'd have been better off wrapping their house in aluminum foil, like these folks.

I kept waiting for the popcorn to come out.



Auto-edited on 2020-08-02 to update URLs

Won't you take me to... crazy-town?

An associate of Heene's, Robert Thomas, has told sheriff's investigators that he helped record Heene's ideas for a TV show, said Thomas' attorney, Linda Lee.

Lee said Monday that Heene was "obsessed" with trying to land a TV show and become famous.

"Heene believes the world is going to end in 2012," she said. "Because of that, he wanted to make money quickly, become rich enough to build a bunker or something underground, where he can be safe from the sun exploding."

Balloon boy sighted in the neighborhood of opsec and R_T!  Only this balloon cost you and me $3 billion.

Life is weird.  I worked 2 contracts over several years for Desco, Tcom and Airship Industries (as an IT monkey, I know jackshit about gasbags or radar systems).  I spent a good bit of time down in Weeksville N.C.  People don't realize that back in the late 80s early 90s there were quite a few tethered aerostats deployed.  Customs had the Cari-ball and Sowrball projects, several were sold to Middle Eastern countries (Kuwait got some great pics of Saddam's armor as it rolled over them), the Navy was testing ship-tethered ones (bad idea).  Everyone thought this was a concept that was here to stay, but they kept breaking tethers and by the mid 90s the industry was almost nonexistent.

Last year I walk out into my back yard and see a big one flying not at 3000 feet, but at 10,000, later joined by a second.  Cool, thinks I, they've solved some engineering problems... aerostats are back!  No one has ever accused me of optimism so in this case I'm just an idiot.