A hoax, yes or no?
Writer-director Gillian Pachter’s 52-minute jaw-dropping documentary, ‘Train Wreck: Balloon Boy’, revisits a bizarre event that rocked Colorado 17 years ago.
Archival footage from October 2009 begins with a panicked Richard Heene and his Japanese wife Mayumi calling 911 for help to locate their six-year-old son, Falcon. The family suspects he may have accidentally entered their home-built flying saucer while they were launching it for an experimental test flight.
“It was meant to be a mere fun project for our three sons,” Mayumi claims. “I wanted our family to have a personal flying machine like ‘The Jetsons’,” says Richard, an avid storm chaser who often dabbled in science experiments with the kids.
It is when the Heenes are launching this personal UFO that Falcon, we are made to believe, crawls into the small balloon compartment. As the tethers snap under pressure and the helium-powered balloon rises into the air, the family realises that their youngest son may be up in the air. With the wind blowing in the direction of the airport, the balloon seems to be headed straight towards air traffic. One thought haunts Richard’s mind: “What if one of my stupid experiments killed my son?”
The search begins. Besides the Larimer County police, the Colorado National Guard is involved in what some describe as an “Apollo 13 kind of situation”. Richard contacts Sky9 News channel and requests them to launch their helicopter to locate his son. The experimental UFO is found to be flying at more than 10,000 feet now.
The gut-wrenching incident starts getting telecast live. Soon, the hyperlocal story of a six-year-old boy trapped inside a balloon starts airing on national channels, pulling at the heartstrings of an entire country. There are fears of the boy falling from the air or getting asphyxiated.
Archival videos from various channels show live coverage of the nail-biting event. When the balloon finally lands empty and the search begins for the body, everyone is prepared for the worst. But then, in a sudden twist, Falcon appears out of nowhere.
All this while, he’d been sleeping in the garage attic, he claims. Overnight, the Heenes become the media darlings. Their fame is short-lived, though. The nightmare begins after a brief sentence uttered by a confused Falcon on ‘Larry King Live’ creates suspicion and sparks outrage.
The entire episode is labelled an elaborate scam. Richard and Mayumi had taken part in a reality show, ‘Wife Swap’, sometime earlier. Rumours start floating that all this drama had been enacted just to enter another reality show. Investigations and court proceedings follow. Eventually, Richard pleads guilty, saying he feared that there was a possibility of his wife being deported to Japan.
Besides the Heenes revealing their side of story, the investigator, the County Sheriff, neighbours and even a ‘Wife Swap’ contestant share recollections.
Even as the couple serves a jail sentence and does community service, the viewers are left wondering: what if it wasn’t all a hoax, and too much had been read into a sentence uttered by a six-year-old? What if the backlash was for nothing?
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