At first I thought this was an Onion story, but it’s not. A six-year-old boy is floating over Northern Colorado in a large helium-powered aircraft. It looks like a large tin-foil UFO, but it has a kid inside and is floating around 8000 feet. The kid’s parents were building the experimental aircraft, and the curious kid climbed inside and somehow got the tether loose, sending him skyward. The military, FAA, and all sorts of folks are trying to figure out how to safely get him down. The kid’s probably scared to death, the poor thing.
Live video is here or here if 9News.com feed doesn’t work (the MSNBC feed is more stable, and both show the same video). I’ve also embedded the live feed after the jump.
Update: The balloon landed safely just a few miles from Denver International airport (the airport owns a ton of land around there that’s completely barren, but has a lot of power lines, so they got lucky). It got low enough where somebody grabbed the tether lines. They did not find the child. There was nobody in the thing. The child was not at the home, either, so there’s a kid missing somewhere.
Update again later: The kid never left the house, was hiding up in the attic the entire time, probably freaking out that he’d get it trouble. Can’t say I blame him, but good to know he’s fine.
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Balloon Boy Sage Continues
So we all know at this point that the balloon boy was a hoax and charges will probably be filed, but now we know the guy that helped the dad…