Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this article:
- The Balloon Boy Hoax captivated the nation in October 2009, when Richard and Mayumi Heene claimed their 6-year-old son, Falcon, was trapped in a homemade helium balloon shaped like a silver flying saucer.
- The incident is being revisited in a Netflix documentary, exploring the truth behind the hoax and its impact 16 years later.
- Falcon Heene, the “Balloon Boy,” is now an adult working in Florida, and his parents have been pardoned for their crimes.
On October 15, 2009, the American news media was glued to a story coming out of Fort Collins, Colorado.
A family there had been recording the first test flight of their amateur aircraft, a hot air balloon whose appearance was a mix between a UFO and a Jiffy Pop pan. Though the makeshift ship was supposed to be unmanned, the family realized only too late that one of their three sons, Falcon, was nowhere to be found. Believing him to be inside the now drifting dirigible, they contacted the authorities to help them get the vessel back down to the ground, and soon the story was all over the airwaves. And like something out of a Hollywood movie, the resolution was a whimsical relief: little Falcon was never in the balloon at all. He was hiding in the garage the whole time.
The saga of “Balloon Boy” unfolded at a time when the concept of a viral news story was a fairly new phenomenon, and it thrust the eccentric family at its center, the Heenes, into a national spotlight.
Just like it had been designed to do.
Revisited in the new Netflix documentary Trainwreck: Balloon Boy, the story of the Heene family lacks the peril and whimsy that first gave it its virality. The story now is about that very virality, and the things some are willing to do to pursue it.
The Balloon Boy story began to unravel when the Heenes were interviewed by Wolf Blitzer on an episode of Larry King Live. Six-year-old Falcon sat on his father Richard’s lap, while his two older brothers, Bradford and Ryo, sat on one side of them and their mother, Mayumi, on the other. While Richard, a handyman and storm chaser who had previously had aspirations of an acting career, handled most of the talking, Blitzer turned his attention to Falcon to ask what America had been wondering, namely why the boy hadn’t come out of the garage when his family called for him.
Falcon answered, “You guys said that, um, we did this for the show.”
From there, evidence began to pile up that the Heenes’ had intentionally staged the entire incident to create interest in a pilot for a reality television series they had been pitching around their family’s eccentricities. The press, and the authorities, pounced on this, and eventually Richard and Mayumi Heene were facing charges. The couple pleaded guilty—Richard to attempting to influence a public servant, a felony, and Mayumi to the misdemeanor of making a false report—and received a small amount of jail time and several years probation. They cited the threat of Mayumi, a Japanese citizen, being deported as the reason for their plea rather than an admission of guilt.
The Heene family’s belief that their antics could be reality TV gold weren’t entirely unfounded. The family had previously appeared on the controversial reality show Wife Swap, and Richard’s particular brand of played-up misogyny made such an impression on viewers that they were brought back on a later episode as a “fan favorite.” Richard had responded to this accolade at the time by calling it “like the best thing that’s ever happened in our life. Seriously.”
But while the fallout of the Balloon Boy hoax might, to some, act like an Icarus moment, where the fame-hungry flew too close to the son (pun intended), for the Heene family, including young Falcon, it wasn’t the final attempt to garner attention.
There are over 100 videos on a YouTube account called Heene Boyz, whose oldest upload stretches back 13 years. In a way, it functions as a chronicle of online trends, as the trio of brothers made famous by the Balloon Boy incident attempt to catch further lightning in a digital bottle. The earliest videos depict the siblings’ heavy metal band, Heene Boyz, performing original compositions and Metallica covers. Two years later, the young headbangers were making reaction videos, offering their preteen opinions on the trailers for movies like The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, and, of all things, future Best Picture–winner 12 Years a Slave.
Later came pranks and “random” would-be viral content under titles like “Human Penis Growing on a Frog” and footage of motorbike stunts, including their most popular upload, a 10-minute vlog titled “YZ 85 vs KTM 65 MOTO Vlog” which managed to crack 2.4 million views. Even that, though, is roughly 3 million views less than an Inside Edition video asking “Where Is the ‘Balloon Boy’ From 2009 Stunt Now?” No new attempt at virality has yet to surpass the public fascination, even more than a decade later, with the Balloon Boy saga.
It was that same retrospective fascination, however, that ultimately put the final nail in the coffin of Richard and Mayumi’s claims of total ignorance of their son’s true whereabouts during the balloon incident.
Journalist Robert Sanchez was working on a 5280 Magazine article in 2019, following up on what became of the Heene family ten years after the Balloon Boy incident. As part of his research, he interviewed the family and, as he would recount on an episode of the podcast Cheat!, had grown to become fond of them. It had begun to feel like the family had gotten a bit of a bum rap; after all, Richard had had to plead guilty to a felony, which prevented him from doing things like voting. Or, more pressingly to the Heene patriarch, “his felony disqualified Richard from the holy grail of reality television for inventors: Shark Tank.”
The Heenes hoped to secure a pardon, which could perhaps explain why they were so willing to participate in Sanchez’s article, even allowing him total access to the legal files pertaining to their case. And in the decade since the incident, it’s possible they forgot about a particular set of notes that were amidst the “at least 1,000 pages of investigative files, reports, and unreleased discovery” Sanchez was confronted with when he visited the office of the Heenes’ attorney in Fort Collins. Whatever the case, stumbling upon 12 pages of handwritten notes Mayumi made to the family’s attorney caused Sanchez to reassess just how true what the family had told him was.
These notes outlined a timeline, beginning on April 27, 2009, of how the Heenes conceived of a plan to generate network interest in their proposed reality show. Beat by beat, it explained how the Heenes made plans to build the “flying saucer” and how they documented every step of the construction process. It stated that on October 6, 2009, they purposefully filmed Falcon saying “I want to get in it” and how days later on October 14 “Richard mentioned what if Falcon hid for ½ hours later and landed, then mention in [news]paper, Fort Collins…. Falcon can hide in the closet with a safe in the basement.” The only part that didn’t go according to their plan was Falcon ultimately choosing a different hiding place.
As Sanchez noted in his story, “The notes explained everything. Here it was in black and white: For all the times Richard had claimed everyone had the story wrong, for all the tall tales he told me, Mayumi’s notes showed a motive and a plan.”
However, even with the hoax fully confirmed, Richard and Mayumi Heene were still able to secure their pardon. In December 2020, Colorado Governor Jared Polis pardoned the couple, stating that “Richard and Mayumi have paid the price in the eyes of the public, served their sentences, and it’s time for all of us to move on.” Richard Heene can now once again vote, and as NPR reported, can “pursue a general contractor’s license.” To date, he hasn’t yet appeared on Shark Tank.
Before Sanchez had discovered Mayumi’s notes, he had spoken to Richard about his hopes for the future, and Richard then claimed that all of his focus was on what he could do for his three sons. “I’m setting them up to be millionaires,” he told Sanchez. “I want them to be happy.”
As for Falcon, now 22, it’s not clear if he is a millionaire. But he does have a business of his own. As reported in the New York Post, he’s even amassed a following on Instagram showcasing his work, building tiny homes in Florida, which he sells for between $25,000 to $79,000.
Michale Natale is a News Editor for the Hearst Enthusiast Group. As a writer and researcher, he has produced written and audio-visual content for more than fifteen years, spanning historical periods from the dawn of early man to the Golden Age of Hollywood. His stories for the Enthusiast Group have involved coordinating with organizations like the National Parks Service and the Secret Service, and travelling to notable historical sites and archaeological digs, from excavations of America’ earliest colonies to the former homes of Edgar Allan Poe.
