What took you so long?
Netflix has long mined Colorado and Colorado-adjacent events for content, as demonstrated by docs about the 1996 slaying of JonBenét Ramsey, Chris Watts's 2018 murder of his pregnant wife and, most recently, the hunt for Forrest Fenn's hidden treasure, which may have cost as many as eight lives. Meanwhile, the Balloon Boy saga has been floating in plain sight, practically pleading for another moment in the spotlight.
Westword covered the entire zany escapade — and Netflix had no shortage of material from which to draw.
By the time our first post on the subject was published on October 15, 2009, the name that would become the label for the scandal had already become firmly affixed: "Balloon Boy: A Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes to You."
The piece opened with this: "When you woke up this morning, did you think you'd be riveted by the story of a Fort Collins kid who may or may not have floated away in a silvery balloon?"
The only people who might have answered "Yes" to this query were Richard and Mayumi Heene, who'd been operating on the fringes of the reality-TV industry; the couple had appeared on two episodes of the highly cerebral program Wife Swap, after which Richard had tried but failed to sell a show that drew upon his background as a meteorologist. And what better way to gin up interest on that subject than to report that a weather balloon had gotten loose and was sailing over northern Colorado with an unplanned passenger aboard — their six-year-old son Falcon, who had supposedly disappeared.
Decade-and-a-half-old spoiler: He hadn't. But it took a while for this fact to surface. The balloon stayed aloft for around ninety minutes and reached heights estimated at 7,000 feet before landing a dozen miles or so from Denver International Airport — a journey during which it was followed by National Guard helicopters and choppers from countless media outlets. And while authorities soon confirmed that Falcon wasn't inside the craft, a report that something had fallen out of the shiny inflatable prompted additional searches that didn't end until Falcon was found safely hiding in the attic of his family home in Fort Collins.
A young Falcon Heene by the balloon that supposedly carried him away.
OWN TV via YouTube
Within days, the media started pushing back about being played for suckers, with Patti Dennis, then-news director at 9News, the first television outlet Richard phoned, leading the pack. In a conversation with Westword published on October 19, Dennis recalled: "Shortly after 11 a.m., Jim Pedersen, our assignment manager, got a call from Mr. Heene. He was crying and sort of hysterical and said something to the effect that his son had drifted away in a saucer-like helium balloon. There was some exchange between the two of them — mostly Jim's incredible disbelief. I don't know how long that conversation went as Jim was trying to sort through whether this was someone who was kind of nuts or what was going on. But I know he asked why he hadn't called the police, and he said his wife was on the phone with the police at the same time.
"Jim took some notes down and got a phone number to return the call and then came in and interrupted me in a meeting," she continued. "After that, several of us went into the information center to sort out what he was talking about. Jim thought he sounded legitimately upset, but we wanted to confirm that he'd called the police. So one of our other managers called the Fort Collins Police Department — and at first, nobody knew what we were talking about. Then we put out a call to Eloise Campanella, the spokeswoman for the Larimer County Sheriff's Office; we weren't able to reach her at first, so we paged her to call us. Then I moved our people to the helicopter, thinking, Who knows about this, but let's get everyone in place just in case. And then I called him."
Heene "answered the phone," Dennis conintued, "and I identified myself and said, 'Could you please tell me what you called us about?' He said, 'My son is missing,' and told me the same story he told Jim. I said, 'I don't believe you' and asked for his son's name and the name of his school. And after he told me, I asked why his son wasn't in school, and he said because there were parent-teacher conferences this week. Then I said, 'Why haven't you called the police?,' and he said, 'I have. There's a detective right here.' I said, 'May I talk to him?,' and he put me on with Jake Bowser, an officer from Larimer County."
Bowser told Dennis the Heene boy actually was missing and thought to be on the balloon, but that wasn't enough for her. "I got his supervisor's name, so I could backtrack to make sure he wasn't a part of things," she noted. "And at the same time I was grilling the dad, one of our supervisors heard from Eloise, who said it looked like the real deal."
By then, it was about 11:45 a.m., and Dennis ordered the helicopter into the air. Around 45 minutes more passed before the crew on board caught sight of the balloon, and they maintained visual contact for the hour-plus before the craft touched down, with no Falcon in its perch.
When the balloon landed softly, "there was clapping in our control room," Dennis confirmed. "People were glad. But then we got a picture from a neighbor that made it look like something had fallen off the balloon, and we were afraid the boy might have panicked, jumped or fallen. Then the story changed into a search story, a search for a victim, and that's how it stayed until the news conference, when we were told he'd been found safe. And that's when the questions came up about how he could have been missed in a search of the house, how did he get hidden, did he have help or did he do it himself, and was this just a crazy series of events, or was it orchestrated."
The conductor, of course, was Richard, whose hair soon got a trendy makeover, in order to look better on camera. But no amount of styling could save him from lousy PR of the sort that flared after TMZ obtained old footage of him more or less offering an infant a cigar and a beer.
Richard soon lawyered up, and by October 20, his attorney, David Lane, acknowledged that the Heenes were likely to be criminally charged. Days later, the Larimer County Sheriff's Department released documents divulging that Mayumi had confessed that the whole runaway balloon schtick had been cooked up for publicity purposes two weeks before the balloon sailed away.
In the end, Richard and Mayumi pleaded guilty to multiple counts: conspiracy to commit a crime, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, filing a false report, and attempting to influence a public servant. Richard earned a ninety-day sentence, while Mayumi's was capped at twenty days. After doing their time, the Heenes moved from Fort Collins to Florida because, Richard said, the energy in Colorado "was kind of on the negative side." Shortly thereafter, Richard tried to make a name for himself as an inventor/entrepreneur of gadgets such as Bear Scratch, Your Shake Down and Truck TransFormers, none of which transformed him from infamous to famous.
Five years later, Oprah Winfrey's OWN network revisited the entire misadventure. Among the revelations: The family was being supported in part by the proceeds of the Heene Boyz, a heavy metal combo featuring Falcon and his two brothers. Here's the video:
In the years since this clip aired, Falcon has taken a different path and is currently behind a business that makes tiny houses. The bio on his Instagram account states, "I like to laugh and be active. You can find me actively laughing while being active." He adds, "I make tiny homes. Fuh them big ones."
The forthcoming Netflix documentary will presumably be good for Falcon's bottom line, and that's appropriate — since the Balloon Boy epic was all about cash.
That's show biz.
