Balloon boy hoax: A decade after falsely claiming their 6-year-old son was trapped in a helium balloon, couple still chasing fame
It's been a decade since the story of a six-year-old boy apparently trapped in a helium-filled gas balloon splashed across our television screens as his frantic parents begged for help.
Falcon, the son of Richard and Mayumi Heene of Fort Collins, Colorado, was said to have been inside the homemade balloon before it launched into the sky, 7,000 feet off the ground.
The incident was infamously dubbed the 'Balloon boy hoax' after it turned out that the parents had made the whole thing up and lied about the child being on the balloon.
Their reason seemed quite simple: they wanted to start a science-based reality show. They had imagined that the story of a child trapped in a balloon floating across the sky featuring his horrified parents who didn't know what was happening would have made good reality TV. Their idea, however, was turned down five times in five months and their hunger for fame was far from satiated.
In a recent interview with 5280, the mother, Mayumi, admitted that she had made up about 12 pages worth of notes that chronicled the days leading up to the event that she had then given to her lawyer in secret so she could "save herself."
"I made the whole story up," she told the magazine. Her husband asked her in apparent disbelief, "What do you mean you wrote this? What the f**k are you talking about? You said you didn’t know what this was. Why would you write this?"
"To save myself, because of our kids," Mayumi explained.
Titled 'Notes from Mayumi', the documents provide a step-by-step account of what happened between April 27, 2009—months before the incident occurred on October 15 the same year.
"What could we do to help them?” Mayumi wrote. “They wouldn’t put up money, but we can do our own project... Then they can make a ‘one-off’ out of it," she wrote. The entries started to get really suspicious in October.
"We started building a flying saucer and shooting the process inside of the house because it was snowing," she is said to have written in an entry marked October 3. Then on October 6, she noted "We have a video of Falcon saying, ‘I want to get inside of it.’"
She then mentions a story her husband Richard had told her about Lawnchair Larry, referring to the tale of Lawrence Richard Walters, who flew a lawn chair with the help of helium-filled balloons in 1982.
In the same entry, she wrote, "Then Richard mentioned what if Falcon hid for half an hour later... Falcon can hide in the closet in the basement."
On October 15, she wrote, “To my understanding, we’re never going to launch the flying saucer because the strong wind changed our mind. Because of the wind, it might crash on somebody, cars or anything... Richard said we would do the third test and quit. That’s why I thought he was acting so strange. After the flying saucer went off, he went so hysterical. Because he started so hysterical, I started taking it seriously. After it was launched, we did not know whether Falcon was in the flying saucer or in the house or anywhere.”
In the last entry made on October 18, she wrote, “I found out when we visited our attorney’s [sic] that Richard revealed he came down to the basement to look for Falcon, but he wasn’t there. Richard thought really Falcon would be in the flying saucer.”
Richard was sentenced to 90 days in jail and had to cough up $36,000 in restitution while Mayumi was sentenced to 20 days of weekend jail for staging the hoax. The family of five currently live in New York in a trailer and they even have a band.