On Oct. 15, 2009, Captivated viewers followed the drama of a 6-year-old who reportedly floated away in balloon. But when it landed, he wasn't there.
FORT COLLINS, Colo. – Like a sequence out of a comic book, a silver floating disc swept across Colorado's dusty plains on a clear October afternoon.
The Denver news station had a helicopter circling the balloon within an hour, broadcasting its journey live across three Colorado counties until the balloon eventually crashed into a desolate field of freshly planted winter wheat. When asked how he would describe the story of balloon boy 10 years later, USA TODAY reporter Trevor Hughes paused.
Hughes had been speaking to a lecture hall full of Colorado high school students during a journalism event early that afternoon when his phone started buzzing wildly. "It was one of those crazy situations where you had local reporters like us at the Coloradoan, but then you had all these reporters from international TV stations," Hughes said."I mean, CNN showed up. All the broadcast networks showed up."Almost 100 miles away in Central City, Alderden was monitoring the situation in between breaks during a state gaming commission meeting. He first heard about it when his lieutenant Andy Josey called.
Richard Heene asked his son: “He’s asking, Falcon, did you hear us calling out your name at any time?""You guys ... said that we did this for the show," Falcon responded.The burstEven before Falcon had been found safe, Hughes said he remembers a healthy bit of skepticism floating around the huddles of reporters outside the Heene house.
Richard Heene later told reporters his wife didn't understand what she was saying and that she had misinterpreted the word"hoax" because Japanese was her native language.More recently, in a series of interviews with Denver's 5280 magazine, he took aim at Alderden.
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