‘MY family and I made an experimental flying saucer. It wasn’t supposed to fly and it took off. I think my six-year-old boy got inside. He’s in the air.’
This bizarre emergency call from frantic father Richard Heene, in 2009, sparked a nationwide rescue operation, watched in real time as millions of TV viewers held their breath and prayed for ‘Balloon boy’ Falcon.
Millions tuned in to watch the balloon – believed to have 6 year old Falcon inside – float away[/caption]
Over the next few hours, every news channel beamed images of the huge balloon – which measured 20ft across – as it sailed across Colorado.
But when it finally landed, little Falcon was nowhere to be seen – prompting a ground search over an area of 55 miles.
Now, 16 years later, the Heene family have spoken out for the first time about the infamous ‘hoax’ in the Netflix documentary Trainwreck: Balloon Boy which also features interviews with neighbours, reporters and police that reveal Richard’s hunger for fame.
And the family reveal how one innocent comment from Falcon, in the aftermath of the drama, turned the public against them and made them hate figures.
“Everything blew up,” says Richard. “It was like the biggest nightmare ever.”
Self-styled adventurer and inventor Richard, his Japanese-born wife Mayumi and their children Bradford, 10, Ryo, eight and Falcon, six – were a lively family, according to neighbours, Dean Askew and Tina Chavez, whose bedroom overlooked their backyard.
“Richard was this big energy, constantly pacing, talking 100 miles an hour,” recalls Tina.
“He was super smart,” adds Dean. “He could build anything. He could put electrical things together. One time I looked out the window and noticed he was working on something. It looked like a silver disc.”
When he wasn’t inventing things he liked to take the family in the car to chase hurricanes.
“We like to chase a thrill,” explains a grown-up Bradford in the documentary. “Dad was always making us look at science experiments on YouTube. We were super interested in UFOs.”
Inspired by the 1960s cartoon series the Jetsons, set in Orbit City where everyone flew around in personal space cars, Richard came up with a design for his own “flying saucer”.
“I just thought, ‘What if everybody could be flying around like The Jetsons?’ It would be wonderful,” he says. “Everybody could be pulling out of their garage in flying saucers, going to school and work and you wouldn’t have all this traffic.”
In 2009, he set about building his space age dream machine with his family in their backyard in Colorado.
“Dad would make me video pretty much every experiment but, at the same time, keep my brothers in check,” says Bradford.
“Falcon was pretty wild and chaotic. He was always touching stuff he wasn’t supposed to and loved to hide in the bottom of the flying saucer.”
The saucer was, in effect, a silver helium-filled balloon with a small compartment underneath.
“It was not designed to have people in it,” says Richard. “It was a place that had access to put the helium in.”
Swept away
Bradley’s footage of the creating of the saucer – 20 feet wide by six feet tall – is shown in the documentary. It took them just two weeks to assemble.
Richard says the plan was to keep it tethered so that it hovered at 20 feet and they could study its movements.
But on test day, 15 October, 2009, it broke free of its mooring and was swept into the air and carried off at speed. Video footage shows Richard shouting in anger and then in despair as Bradley tells him that he saw his brother crawl inside.
The balloon broke free from its tether and ended up crashing down in a field[/caption]
The family quickly found themselves under intense media scrutiny[/caption]
The flying saucer balloon was assembled in their backyard in just two weeks[/caption]
Falcon had a reputation for hiding but a search of the home and his usual places came to nothing and Richard made the memorable 911 emergency call, claiming his son had been swept away.
“I heard all the screaming and yelling and the chaos in their backyard,” remembers Dean. “My son, Brennan ran back and explained, ‘Dad, they said Falcon got in the balloon and it took off.’ I thought, ‘This cannot be happening.’”
With the balloon heading towards the airport, and possibly into the path of air traffic, panic set in.
Richard contacted a TV news channel asking them to follow it in their helicopter. This dramatic aerial footage then interrupted all the major news channels schedules across the country, keeping viewers riveted.
Bob Heffernan, an investigator at Larimer County Sheriff’s Office, visited the family and searched the property three times looking for Falcon before having to accept the awful inevitability that the young lad was up and away in a flying saucer.
Media vans and reporters swarmed outside the Heene house. After nearly two hours the saucer began to descend and made a surprisingly gentle landing. But there was no sign of Falcon. Had he fallen out?
At one point, a neighbour phoned Heffernan to say that she had taken a photograph of a small object falling from the flying saucer and police feared it could be Falcon.
“How do you deal with that?” Richard asks. “What if one of my stupid experiments killed my son?”
On that day I was trying to sneak into the flying sauce…I wanted to live in that little compartment
Falcon
As a ground search got underway, tracking the flight path over 55 miles, Bob Heffernan was standing in the family kitchen when, around 4pm he heard a great commotion. Falcon had turned up.
“On that day I was trying to sneak into the flying saucer,” he tells the documentary. “I wanted to live in that little compartment.
“After dad yelled at me a few times for being in there I was scared and thought, ‘You know what? I’m just not going to be here.’ So, I made my way up to my new hiding spot in the garage attic and just chilled there for a while and fell asleep.
“It wasn’t until I woke up later that I started hearing weird noises, people and cars. I walked down and there are a lot of people there. It’s crazy.”
Mum Mayumi says: “I couldn’t believe it when I saw him. We rushed up to him and hugged him. It was the greatest surprise I ever had.”
Tables turn
With news outlets desperate to talk to him, Richard went outside and thanked the police and news channel for the helicopter and then agreed to be interviewed live at home with his family for Larry King’s TV show. That was when things started to crash down around him.
The site of a black object falling from the balloon sparked fears that Falcon had fallen out[/caption]
Multiple searches of the family home failed to uncover Falcon’s hiding place[/caption]
News anchor, Wolf Blitzer, was sitting in for King and, with millions watching, the answer to his first question threw the family’s story up in the air.
Blitzer asks Falcon if he had heard his family calling his name when they were searching for him.
To his dad’s evident surprise, he replies, “Yes.” Richard then asks his son why he didn’t come out and Falcon looks at him and drops the bombshell – “You guys said that we did this for the show.”
A stunned Richard mutters, “Damn” and can’t look at the camera as Blitzer asks him what Falcon meant by that comment. He stammers, “I have no idea. I think he was talking about the media asking him a lot of questions.”
The interview turned the tide against Richard, making him the target of hostility from the public who now believed it was all just a hoax.
Reporters did some more digging into the family and discovered that a year earlier Richard and Mayumi took part in the TV reality show, Wife Swap in which husbands swap wives for two weeks, suggesting they were keen on media attention.
It would be helpful if they ended up in the news or got their name out their somewhere…I think that’s what their motivation was for this whole hoax
Heffernan
Two days after the launch of the spaceship, Bob Heffernan and Larimer County Sheriff information officer Jim Alderden, acting as press officer for the family, persuaded Richard to take a polygraph lie detector test.
But his behaviour, as shown in the documentary, was bizarre.
“It was obvious Mr Heene was employing countermeasures by tensing up, not answering questions directly and doing some mind exercises as well as almost comically pretending to fall asleep,” says Alderden. “These are published techniques of things that you can do to try to defeat a polygraph.”
The test was inconclusive but when Mayumi took one, she failed. Afterwards, questioned by Heffernan, her comments amounted to a confession that the entire thing was, indeed a hoax.
When directly asked if it was a hoax and that they lied to make themselves marketable, she nods. Heffernan then says, “Did you tell the boys what you were doing?” She quietly replies, “We told them. Yes.”
He pushes further – “Did you tell them to act like their brother had gone up in the balloon?” Mayumi answers, “Yeah. Something like that.”
In the documentary, however, the family now deny that it was all pretence and insist they were telling the truth throughout.
An interview Wolf Blitzer led to the nation turning against them[/caption]
Falcon now builds tiny homes for a living[/caption]
Richard Heene and Mayumi were eventually pardoned by the Governor of Colarado[/caption]
“Back then, my English was worse, and the word ‘hoax’ itself, I misunderstood,” says Mayumi. But Heffernan and Jim Alderden aren’t buying it.
“She had a degree in English from Japan, went to three more years of college in the United States. There was not a language barrier,” says Alderden.
“I learned that the Heene’s had been working very hard to try to get themselves a TV show,” says Heffernan. “It would be helpful if they ended up in the news or got their name out their somewhere. And I think that’s what their motivation was for this whole hoax.”
Criminal charges were brought for conspiracy, contributing to delinquency of a minor, false reporting to authorities and attempting to influence a public servant.
In court, Richard pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 days in jail while Mayumi received a 20-day sentence and had to sign in at the jail each day but then go out to perform community service.
They were also ordered to pay the $42,000 (£32,000) cost of the rescue operation.
Richard tells the programme that Mayumi was threatened with deportation to Japan if he did not plead guilty but Heffernan denies this.
Looking back on it, I was six years old and all these adults took whatever I said, and they’re able to just string together what they thought was something else and make it so big
Falcon
The family later moved to Florida to start a new life and, in a surprise move in 2020, the Governor of Colorado granted Richard and Mayumi a pardon, stating, “It’s time for all of us to move on.”
“I was surprised that the governor pardoned him without reaching out to us in law enforcement or anybody that had been involved,” says Alderden. “The thing that upset me is that he did it without having Richard make any sort of admission as to his guilt.”
“To get pardoned makes a statement that I’m a good person,” says Richard. “Everything that you said about me before was not true. That’s how I feel about it.”
As for Falcon, whose brief comment caused such a stir, he now says: “I think it’s crazy how I was able to just say a single sentence and affect the whole state of the country.
“I remember feeling bad that I did something wrong. But looking back on it, I was six years old and all these adults took whatever I said, and they’re able to just string together what they thought was something else and make it so big. It’s baffling.”
Meanwhile, Richard continues to work on his inventions.
“With the flying saucer coming to an end, it’s kind of a sad story because I loved it,” he says. “But that doesn’t hold me back. I’m working on something new. And it’s going to be really big.”
Trainwreck: Balloon Boy is available to watch on Netflix from Tuesday, 15 July
