Okay, you’re just being nitpicky and totally missed my point. On 9/11/01, the nation was attacked, planes were grounded, iconic buildings destroyed, thousands died. Obviously, people in other parts of the country still had to function, but if there ever was a time when one could say the nation was at a standstill it was 9/11/01. Reporters now overuse the phrase for melodrama and phrases like that now loose all meaning.
The morons in this world never cease to amaze me.
BTW, well done Dolores.
Now, if he went to the Mariannas Trench in a balloon I would be impressed.
I don’t want to get too sidetracked but I agree. There has been nothing in modern American history that even closely matches the events of 9/11. People in large cities didn’t know if their buildings were going to be attacked. Every commercial airplane was grounded and office workers were huddled around TV’s, radio’s and computers. There was round the clock news coverage of the event. The WTC debris burned for 3 months. This is as close to the definition of grinding to a standstill that I can imagine.
There was also nothing on any channel but news coverage. Perhaps it was different in other parts of the country (I was in New Jersey), but every single TV channel had either a news feed or a text message on the screen saying basically “Put the news on”. I had to google “balloon boy” when I watched the night before’s Daily Show online. Was there anyone not living in a tent in the wilderness who found out about 9/11 on Wednesday?
And the 2009 Smartass of the Year award goes to…
From what I’ve seen, the balloon wasn’t big enough to have the lift to take the kid away and it was moving around in ways that would discount a heavy weight placed inside the gondola thingy.
Hoax, no doubt in my mind.
Actually, I don’t. I wasn’t in a habit of reading newspaper and I set my homepage to ‘blank’ so I didn’t get most news from the Internet. I found out on Wed itself when I was walking past by a computer shop, and I saw a live feed of CNN (or some other online news broadcast, or perhaps a computer connected to cable TV) and saw people jumping off.
It was freaky.
I saw an interview with the father where he said he checked the tape to confirm that Falcon had entered the balloon. I’m guessing he hung himself on that statement if, in fact, it’s not on tape.
news now has statement that sheriff says it was a hoax to promote themselves to future reality shows.
I just saw where the Larimer Sheriff is not just going to file the misdemeanor false report charges, but will also charge the parents with several more serious crimes (criminal conspiracy, fraud) that could potentially land them in prison for over 6 years…
What a dumbass that guy is. How the hell did he ever expect to get away with it?
He would have too if it wasn’t for those meddling kids!
God damn it, who’d have thought a six year old would be so bad at keeping a secret?! This has really opened my eyes. In my future publicity stunts, I’ll be relying on 10-year-olds and up - and they’ll have to pass a polygraph.
Ya got given em prostitutes and cocaine, or blows and hoes in slange terms, to keep em quite. Nothing else works.
And now “we did it for the show” will become the hot new catchphrase, and we’ll have to suffer though weeks of it being used by the un-clever. Wonderful.
Slithy Tove, I’mma let you finish, but “I’mma let you finish” is one of the best catchphrases of all time!
He was hoping the FAA would sail it to the public first, and who keeps the FAA number handy to call in a emergency? I bet they thought it was some crank call and hung up on him!
Falcon was plan b.
It would have made for better TV if it was first reported by an official agency, as a UFO, with the Heenes, in their TV absent household are blissfully unaware of the red alerts. next he launches the rockets…
:eek:
According to this AP story, the hoax went beyond the family:
Another issue – whether the balloon actually had enough lifting capacity for a small child, was addressed in the story. Daddy Heene alegedly gave false dimensions to the authorities, leading them to believe it could lift enough weight. When the balloon was recovered, the true dimensions were taken and it became clear that it wouldn’t have been able to lift the kid.
I can kinda see a new reality show out of this, “Mommy and Daddy Go To Prison”.
Hah. I thought the dims were wrong. I should have typed out loud.
Earlier on, people here and elsewhere were wondering how a kid that age could stay silent and in one place for so long, or how he even got into that crawl space. Guess this answers that: he wasn’t in the crawl space the whole time. All the parents had to do was say “He’s not in the house; we can’t find him!”