Was a missing boy ever on board? Apparently not.
In a bizarre spectacle televised live, a homemade balloon lifted off from a Ft. Collins, Colo., home Thursday and sailed for two hours and more than 60 miles before softly landing in a field.
But contrary to initial reports that 6-year-old Falcon Heene – the son of a thrill-seeking reality show couple – had climbed into the helium-filled and released the rope holding it to the ground, it now seems he was at home all along – hiding in the attic of his family's garage.
"This couldn't have been a happier outcome," said Larimer County Sheriff Jim Alderden after the boy was found late in the afternoon.
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An emotional Heene family adamantly denied their son's brief disappearance coinciding with a weather balloon floating away from their backyard was a hoax.
Wife Mayumi (43) and storm scientist Richard (45) take their three kids, Bradford (8), Ryo (7) and Falcon (5), out of school to go on storm chasing missions to prove Richard's theories about magnetic fields and gravity. If conditions are right, Mayumi wakes her family by shouting "Storm Approaching, Storm Approaching!" into a bullhorn. The family sleep in their clothes so they can leap out of bed and into the storm-mobile. Richard calls Mayumi his 'ninja wife'; she maintains equipment, drives the storm-mobile, films tornadoes and waits with the kids while Richard jumps on his motorbike, heads into the eye of the storm and launches rockets to measure magnetic forces. At home the family are as chaotic as a twister: the kids have no table manners and throw themselves around the house, and while Richard devotes every moment to his research, he expects Mayumi to cook, clean and run the house without any help.
