Balloon boy dad's is a cardboard box for questions

Posted by Admin on Saturday 17 October 2009

Richard Heene promised a big announcement this morning, but when he emerged from his Fort Collins home to gathered media from around the world, it was an anticlimax.

Heene, father of a 6-year-old boy originally thought to be aboard a saucer-shaped balloon as it drifted across the Colorado sky Thursday, simply placed a cardboard box on his front porch.

He said he has been inundated with phone calls and emails with questions since the dramatic flight that gained global attention.

Heene placed the box on his front porch and invited people to leave written questions in it, which he said he would answer at 7:30 p.m. this evening.

There were about 50 reporters and cameramen present and one shouted at Heene to answer, once and for all, whether the balloon flight - which did not have his son aboard after all - was a hoax to gain publicity.

"Absolutely no hoax," he said, before ducking back into his house.

Besides media, the event attracted neighbors and other members of the public.

"C'mon, Richard, get this over with," said a 32-year-old neighbor who did not want to be identified. "Let the neighborhood get back to normal. We're sick of it."

Two brothers carried signs. One, a 25-year-old resident of the neighborhood, Paul Pocarnsky, said: "10-15-09, we will never forget."

"This is big," Pocarnsky said. "This is a memory for life.

"I think it is a hoax. It's a publicity stunt."

His 27-year-old brother
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Jarrod of Longmont held a sign that said, "Put balloon boy on TV: Americas's most wanted."

Another neighbor, 40-year-old Gene Fiechtl, was selling coffee for $1 a cup, having scratched out an earlier figure of $2.

"I don't believe they did that for publicity," said Fiechtl, a business development specialist for a food service distributor. "He's a great guy."

An unidentified woman added: "Its crazy how things get so frenetic. This media stuff is crazy."

On door of the Heene hom was a handwritten sign on a piece of paper: "Thank you for all of your support. We aren't taking any interview any more. We are tired. Thank you."

Richard and his wife, Mayumi Heene are used to living near the spotlight, if not always in it.

Part-time storm chasers and amateur inventors, the Heenes also have worked extensively in the television-production business and have, at times, pushed actively to get themselves on TV, a closer look at their background shows.

Friday, RDF Media — the company that produces the reality-television program "Wife Swap," on which the Heene family, from Fort Collins, was twice featured — confirmed it had been working with the family on a show of their own.

"At one point in time, we had a show in development with the Heenes," RDF Media spokeswoman Brooke Fisher wrote in an e-mail. "We are no longer in active development with the family."

Fisher did not respond to follow-up questions about how long ago the company had worked with the Heenes and why it stopped.

Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for the cable channel TLC — which is known for the reality show "Jon & Kate Plus 8" — said the Heenes pitched an idea for a reality program to the channel.

"They did approach us months ago to do a show, and we passed," TLC spokeswoman Laurie Goldberg said.

Friday, neighbors and officials took turns re-affirming their belief in the family and their tale of terror upon thinking Falcon, 6, had gone airborne Thursday in a homemade helium balloon.

Larimer County Sheriff Jim Alderden said it "seemed inconceivable" that Falcon — who spent hours running around his neighborhood and climbing on the family cars after emerging from hiding Thursday afternoon — could have been coached to sit still in his hiding space for so long.

"It seems much more likely that the boy was in fact frightened," Alderden said. "That seems like a credible story."

But Internet and television pundit speculation about the story only grew stronger Friday, and Alderden said investigators planned to re-interview the family to answer lingering questions and contradictions in the case.

He said the results of the Sheriff Office's investigation would be handed over to Larimer County's child-protection workers for a possible investigation of their own.

The Heenes, meanwhile, adamantly denied perpetrating a hoax during a string of televised media interviews Friday morning — including two in which a weary-looking Falcon vomited.

"This is not some kind of hoax,"

Richard Heene said on NBC's "Today" show.

"I'm repetitively getting asked this," he said. "What do I have to gain out of this? I'm not selling anything. I'm not advertising anything."

Richard Heene, who is variously described as a contractor or amateur storm chaser, is credited as a writer and producer on a series of children's videos called "Box Time," which teaches kids imaginative ways to use cardboard boxes. The Internet Movie Database page for "Box Time: Playhouse" lists Heene's two oldest sons, Bradford and Ryo, as actors on the video.

Before moving to Colorado, the Heenes owned a production company in Los Angeles, where they helped actors develop audition tapes, demo reels and websites, according to a pair of brief mentions in the book "Acting Is Everything" by Hollywood acting coach Judy Kerr.

The Heenes, Kerr wrote, were "dedicated to helping actors achieve their marketing goals."

Denver Post researcher Barbara Hudson contributed to this report.

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