In defense of Balloon Boy’s parents not looking too hard for him in the garage, can you imagine their eyes weren’t riveted like everyone’s on the television images of the soaring balloon? The spectacle was not a mere stray weather balloon, but a 6-year-old aeronaut aloft. Theirs.
If viewers have cause to suspect a hoax, it’s the corporate news and whatever their owners/sponsors would rather us not be pointing at.

Of course little Falcon Heene’s prime-time onscreen debriefing revealed he’d concealed himself, or wasn’t answering his parent’s calls, or thought his parents might have been play-acting, “for the show.” No doubt taping two episodes of reality TV for “Swapping Wives” had taught the Heene household about stage-managed reality. I can imagine there were lots of scenes where the kids had to learn to stay out of the shot until the cameras were ready for their closeup.

America, this is reality TV, the play at home game.

Perhaps we’ll learn later if network producers were in the house today making sure their footage, the entirety of it, from action to personal interest, would make good television. Little Falcon grinning from under a box in the garage would render the aerial footage about nothing but a runaway Chipotle float. A child’s escaped balloon is something you see everyday at the state fair, hardly TV Worth Watching. Not to mention the anti-climax for the rescue posse chasing on the ground for the big payoff reveal, the Mystery of Al Capone’s Vault on a barren Eastern Colorado field.

I find it hard to believe, actually, that Falcon’s father, couldn’t tell at a glance whether his helium borne backyard project was carrying the significant extra weight of a child. That was no UFO to the balloon’s engineer, who’d have to have noticed if ballast had been dropped at the takeoff point to compensate for a supposed passenger.

Similarly, police helicopters are equipped with infrared sensors which would have revealed immediately if a human body was aboard. The entire media distraction was a fabrication.