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Boy, 6, found alive after helium balloon drama
 
 
  
 
 AFP - Saturday, October 17
 
 
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 Six-year-old Falcon Henne, feared to have fallen to his death from a home-made helium balloon, has been found hiding in the garage of his family home ending a riveting televised drama that transfixed the nation.
 
 
 
 
 
 
FORT COLLINS, Colorado (AFP) - – A six-year-old Colorado boy feared to have fallen to his death from a home-made helium balloon was found hiding in his garage, ending a televised drama that transfixed the nation.
 
Falcon Heene was discovered on Thursday in the garage attic of his family's home in Fort Collins, outside Denver, roughly four hours after his brother told police he had climbed into the experimental craft and taken off.
 
The event set US aviation officials and the Colorado National Guard on alert, rerouted planes around Denver and captivated millions of viewers who followed the progress of the runaway balloon as it drifted thousands of feet into the sky before making a soft landing two hours later.
 
Authorities feared the worst when the silver flying saucer shaped craft -- followed closely by emergency services and tracked by television news choppers -- touched down in a field near Denver international airport.
 
But the sheriff's deputies who tethered it to the ground found no one inside.
 
Fears of a tragic ending evaporated after Larimer County Sheriff Jim Alderden received a call from an officer during a briefing with reporters -- Falcon had been found alive.
 
"The boy's been there all the time. He's been hiding in a cardboard box in the attic above the garage," afraid he was in trouble with his father after an earlier attempt to climb into the craft, a beaming Alderden told reporters.
 
His mother Mayumi later said Falcon simply climbed down from his hiding place and walked into the house, prompting screams of joy from the family.
 
Alderden said police had questioned Falcon's brother several times about what he had seen shortly before the balloon, which had been tethered in the family home's backyard, drifted away.
 
"What he said was that he saw his brother climb into that apparatus and he was very adamant, they interviewed him multiple times and that was his consistent story," Alderden said.
 
A sheepish Falcon later appeared before a scrum of journalists outside the family home alongside his father Richard, his mother, and two brothers, 10-year-old Brad and Ryo, eight.
 
"I was in the attic, and it scared me because he yelled at me," he said, referring to his father. "That's why I went in the attic." The boy also said he had fallen asleep up there.
 
Richard Heene, a keen amateur scientist who spends his spare time studying weather patterns and chasing storms with his family, said he had no plans to ground his son.
 
"We don't ground our children. But we are going to talk to them," he said, before bristling at suggestions that the drama had been a publicity stunt.
 
"That's horrible. After the crap we just went through, no, no, no," he said.
 
But the boy himself seemed to add to suspicions that the careening balloon, which caused mayhem on the ground and in the air with more than 100 Colorado police and rescue officials scrambling to track it over its 50-mile (80-kilometer) flight, may have been a stunt.
 
"You said that we did this for the show," Falcon said during a lengthy family interview on CNN, when his father asked him why he didn't come out sooner from his hiding place.
 
When asked to clarify his son's comment, Heene said he was "appalled" by the suggestion that this was anything but a tragedy averted.
 
Then he said Falcon's comment may have referred to earlier media appearances by the family.
 
Heene once appeared on ABC's reality show "Wife Swap," in which he was described as the patriarch of a "storm-chasing, science-obsessed family."
 
Heene told CNN he and his family often went hunting storms together.
 
Mayumi Heene told the Denver Post their children "get so much more that they can't get from any other entertainment."
 
Heene would not say whether he planned to give up his balloon experiments.
 
"I really have to sit down and talk to my family about it," he said, describing the craft as "like something out of 'The Jetsons'" television show.
 
 
 
 
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
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