Balloon Boy

It was October 15, 2009 at 3 o’ clock. I had just gotten home from school and I was flipping through news channels to find some interesting stories for current events. But when I looked through all the channels it was all the same news story. “This just in – there is a 6-year old boy trapped in a giant balloon 2000 feet over Ft. Collins, Colorado.” I was like WHAT!?... I just had to listen to this story.

So on the news reporter went about how this little 6-year old boy climbed into this 20ft wide saucer shaped balloon and floated away in the balloon because the rope holding the balloon down came undone. I was thinking to myself, how could parents not notice the little kid climbing into this crazy balloon? So I had to continue watching this story to see how they were going to get this balloon down from so high up in the sky.

On they went about how getting too close to the balloon with a helicopter would be too risky and how a net would just make it plummet to the ground. So all they were going to do was to let the balloon slowly lose its helium and float gently to the ground. So for the next 45 minutes I watched and filled my dad in on what was happening too.

So after 45 minutes the balloon was falling to the ground near Denver very slowly and rescuers were underneath the balloon ready to catch it and rescue the boy. So when the balloon finally landed 15 minutes later they held down the ropes that came detached, poked holes in the balloon so it couldn’t fly away and were starting to pry open that compartment that the little boy was in.

So finally they opened the compartment, and believe it or not guess what they found in it, NOTHING. I was like huh? You mean I waited an hour and a half to watch a big balloon fly around in the sky. So I quickly changed the channel in disbelief.

Later that night on the Larry King Show, there was an interview with the family about the whole incident, they talked about being worried and how they found the little boy in their attic they happened not to look in. So I thought to myself, oh well I understand why they were so worried… until I heard what the little boy had to say when his father asked him why he was hiding from everyone and didn’t come out when they called him name the little boy responded, “Um…you guys said we did this for the show.”

So now I knew that this isn’t real, although they were on the show “Wife Swap” the little boy would not be talking about that in an interview. So that was pretty much my entire Thursday evening because this story took a while to fully unravel.