One For the Money, Two For the Show: Balloon Saga Floats Wife Swap’s Richard and Mayumi Heene into the Reality TV Hall of Shame

Here in the state of Colorado, we are a reluctantly jaded bunch. Visitors to Colorado know that things are different here. It’s like a well-kept secret that the weather, due to the high altitude, is quite agreeable. Even in the dead of winter, we may get snow, but it only lasts on the roads a couple of days at best. On a sunny day following a snow, the roads are usually clean as a whistle by nightfall. But we residents of the area, with its laid-back living and genuinely friendly mélange of natives and transplants, are not naïve. In fact, we are all too used to strange things happening here, at the feet of the Rocky Mountains.

That brings us to the jaded part. Jon Benet Ramsey was killed here. The tragedy of Columbine happened here too. We had a lady practically burn down a forest as she carelessly burned some love letters. We recently had a gentleman come home to find an intruder wearing nothing but the man’s boxer shorts! The intruder was in the process of doing his laundry. We have other bizarre stories that have not, for whatever reason, captured the public’s imagination. No, we are not naïve. While the Rocky Mountains can maintain a blind eye to such things, we, the citizens, cannot.

So, when our local news brusquely cut into the soap operas to tell us the impossibly horrifying story of a six-year old boy being trapped in a runaway balloon, sure we were skeptical, but we brushed that aside. This is a child we’re talking about. As a society, we don’t want to think that people would involve their children in their schemes. It’s a line we can’t imagine crossing, and think that same line is there for all of us. Maybe most of us would stop short of that, no matter how desperate. But that leaves others who would, will, and have use their kids to gain whatever it is they are looking to get done.

In Colorado, we were watching with our eyes glued to the television or ears pressed to radios as reports came in. There was an eerie kind of dead silence. No phones were ringing. No one talking. Just the silence. Personally, I remember that eerie silence. It has happened before – the afternoon Michael Jackson died and on 9/11 (not to compare the two, of course). Quiet as we were, mentally and collectively we decided to make sure the kid was okay before we cried foul. It certainly didn’t look like there could be a child in that balloon, but we figured we’d just see. God forbid he fell out! And as soon as that peculiar, spaceship-shaped balloon touched ground after its 60-mile journey, there was a nervous kind of relief. We just hoped for the best until we had a reason not to.

Approximately three hours after the mysterious launch, the Heenes joyously announced that Falcon is safe. He was never in the balloon, after all. He was hiding in the rafters of their garage. Imagine that! This convenient miracle is what really started the skeptical wheels turning.

First of all, who are these people? The Heenes are a Colorado family who participated in two episodes of Wife Swap. They are amateur storm chasers. Richard Heene considers himself a “fringe” scientist and says he would like to build a spaceship. Heene is an ardent follower of the 2012 belief that the world is soon coming to an end – so much so that he participated in the YouTube documentary, 2012 - The Best Evidence by The Psyience Detectives. Guess he’s planning an escape! Add a super-devoted wife, Mayumi, and three adorably incorrigible single-digit aged boys (including the six-year-old who would soon become known as Balloon Boy, Falcon Heene) and how could Wife Swap resist? They couldn’t. And they didn’t.

Perhaps this is what set off that light bulb over Richard Heene’s head. What the public did not know at the time was Richard and Mayumi actually met in acting class. He’s pounded the pavement as a struggling actor, meeting with little success. Wife Mayumi put thoughts of Hollywood away when she gave birth to their first child. Richard decided to pursue additional avenues to the top. He stepped up his interest in science (or, more accurately, pseudoscience) and made other outlandish claims, as well as several failed inventions. We have since learned that Richard was negotiating with the same production company that produces Wife Swap for the Heenes to have their own reality show.

It took a while for local authorities to smell a rat, but when the whiff came, it was strong. The story of Falcon and the balloon became worldwide news almost immediately. With that many eyes watching, it’s no wonder that some of those eyes wondered aloud how a child could fit in a balloon so small (according to CNN, the balloon was 20 feet in diameter and 5 feet in height ). Where exactly would he be? Falcon’s brother supposedly told Richard that he saw Falcon climb into the basket of the balloon, and the balloon mysteriously launched immediately after. Problem: a home video surfaced of Richard carefully inspecting the balloon (including the basket), and then he and his family jubilantly counting down to launch the balloon. This certainly did not look like an accident.

Then, after Falcon’s supposed disappearance, Richard Heene said the family called the Federal Aviation Administration (we all have that number on our refrigerators, don’t we?), but a spokesman for the FAA said they never received any such call. However, Denver’s KUSA-TV reported that an excited, but not particularly agitated, Richard called them to request a news helicopter track the balloon’s process. In that phone call, Richard said the balloon “emits a million volts on the outer skin.” If that were true, Falcon could not possibly survive, which made Richard’s demeanor all the more curious.