The Balloon Boy Dad Still Wants You To Think That He Wasn’t The Mastermind Of A Hoax
It’s been a minute since we’ve heard from Balloon Dad, the fame whore father who pretended that 6-year-old son was in a homemade balloon contraption that floated through the sky in Colorado. We all watched it live on television to see if we were going to witness the world’s first homemade floating balloon catastrophe. It was a wild afternoon in American history. It was like a dumb version of watching The Challenger. And it turned out it be even more dumb because the Balloon Boy was hiding the attic the entire time, and it was just some family’s desperate prank to stretch out their Wife Swap fame.
So 10 years later, Balloon Dad, Richard Heene, is back, baby! And while on Good Morning America, he said that he wants everyone to know that the Balloon Boy incident was, in fact, not a hoax. Ummm. Excuse me, Richard, but what about the time your son said on national television that they did it for show, or when your wife came clean about it being a hoax?!
According to People:
The incident was deemed a hoax by authorities — and Richard Heene and wife Mayumi served jail time after pleading guilty to related charges— but the family still insists a decade on that Falcon’s flight was no lie, and that they truly feared their son was inside the flying saucer.
Richard went on to complain that this incident has cost him money that he could have made by being an inventor, and it’s really rude that people don’t trust him even though he pretended his son was in a life-threatening situation to get some easy attention.
The father of three continued, telling the outlet that the headline-grabbing incident resulted in many a missed opportunity over the years for the inventor.
“I’ve lost a lot of opportunities. I’ve had people contact me about things I’ve invented and [it] went south because they find out who I am,” Richard said. “And the thing that gets me is the media never tells my side of the story.”
Richard didn’t explain what really happened (in his head), but he does have a website where he talks about that, I guess. Race you to it?! Mayumi Heene also said on Good Morning America that she only said it was a hoax because she was afraid of losing her children and getting deported.
Balloon Boy is now Balloon Teen and is still trying to make his heavy metal band happen.
Since Balloon Dad is trying to get more attention, somebody tell him that this is not the way to do it. Somebody should tell him that he’ll really get a lot of attention if he builds an even bigger flying balloon, gets into it, and then floats off into space to never be heard from again. Then he’ll really be famous!
Here’s the full interview on GMA:
And if you want to float down Memory Hoax Lane, here’s a 6-year-old Balloon Boy admitting it was a hoax on national television.
Pic: ABC