Alert the Media

A song from my youth goes "Up, up and away...my beautiful, my beautiful...balloon..."

Today in Fort Collins, Colorado, a home made weather balloon got loose and took off from a homeowners backyard. It soared to heights of nearly 8,000 feet and sailed along unencumbered for more than 2 hours before finally coming down in a farmers field some 50 miles away. So?

Well, the story is this weather balloon was supposedly being piloted by a 6 year-old boy, who was unfortunately on board when it broke loose and took off into the wild blue yonder.

Alert the National Guard, they did. Reroute flights out of Denver International Airport, they did. Call every search and rescue volunteer in the state, they did. Alert all the hospitals and medical staff, boys, we got ourselves a broken arrow!

A 10 year-old boy told us so. He saw his brother on board when it broke loose and well, he's gone. Gasp! 4 hours of non-stop media coverage. Military helicopters with infrared scanners. Heck, I even went out back to check the greenbelt to see if it had a 6 year-old kid in it.

But wait, newsflash, the boy has been found. He is safe. He was hiding in his own home? A home that had been checked twice by authorities? The clever little guy had been hiding in a box up in the rafters of his attic. Seriously?

The media had gone into a feeding frenzy just hours before. Genuinely concerned citizens spent the afternoon searching for the poor little 6 year-old who was cast away on his dad's weather balloon. Will he be found, alive?

Let's get this straight. The only witness that "saw" the 6 year-old get kidnapped into the sky was his 10 year-old brother?

My wife said the kid is probably hiding. He was. In the post game news conference, the parents looked like they were holding a press conference discussing Al Gore's global warming. It was surreal. It looked like those stories we see of the press interviewing witnesses to the crime that in the end were the criminals themselves.

What was lost in all of this was the path that the weather balloon took today was the Windsor tornado of 2008 in reverse. The resemblance is uncanny. The damage almost as great. That tornado started approximately 50 miles to the southeast of Fort Collins and tracked in a northwesterly direction. This balloon took off in Fort Collins and traveled approximately 50 miles in a southeasterly direction before being harpooned by authorities in a farmers field.

In the end, the flying silver mushroom had been brought down by a guy with a shovel. We should have used that shovel to dig out from all the manure that was being spewed from the media. Eyewitnesses said they saw a dark spot on the bottom of the airborne balloon, presumably the small boy's body inside. Others saw something fall from the balloon into a field. And psychics were weighing in from all over the country on the boys exact gps coordinates.

Letting your imagination carry you away to create news and widespread panic is as responsible and reckless as a 6 year-old boy being swept up into the sky and ultimately found clinging to the rafters of his own attic.

I say give a Nobel Peace Prize to the 6 year-old boy for not being in that balloon. After all, the story was unfounded and the kid didn't really do anything. The media thought he did and folks that's what's real.