Balloon Fight

The Balloon Boy saga is getting completely strange now, as CNN is reporting charges will be filed against the boy's father...

Hours after Colorado authorities said they expect to file charges in the "balloon boy" case, sheriff's deputies and detectives were seen entering and leaving the house of Richard Heene early Sunday.

Heene is the storm-chasing father whose giant Mylar balloon ascended into the sky late last week, sparking fears that his 6-year-old son Falcon was aboard.

A dispatcher with the Larimer County Sheriff's Department declined to release any information about the search, but said the office will hold a news conference at 1 p.m. ET Sunday. Calls to the department's spokeswoman were not immediately returned.

"We anticipate criminal charges will be filed sometime in the near future," Sheriff Jim Alderden told CNN late Saturday.

...and that Gawker's story on Heene's research assistant Robert Thomas is a pretty crazy story about Heene's crusade to get back on TV again that must be read a couple times to be believed.

When my friends called me about the whole balloon episode I was working. I had just moved to a new place and didn't have my television set up. I probably would never even have heard about this, except that a good friend of mine remembered me telling him about Richard several months ago. He told me, "Rob, you need to turn on the tv immediately! That Richard guy you worked with just pulled a massive publicity stunt!"

Richard's story doesn't add up. He is saying he thought Falcon was in the balloon, and that Falcon ran and hid as a result of Richard yelling at him. I've spent a lot of time with them, and Falcon is, first of all, not afraid of his father. I've never once seen Richard's children afraid of him — and I've definitely never seen Falcon go hide. He was one of the most social of the three children.

Secondly, Falcon supposedly hid in that attic in the garage. I've spent a lot of time in his garage, which has a drill press and various welding tools. It's unorganized and chaotic. There's really not so much an attic as some support beams connected with plywood. Being an adult of average height, I couldn't get up into the attic if I'd wanted to, so I don't know how a six-year-old child could have gotten up there. There's not an easy way to access that overhang. Maybe if I'd lifted that child up into the attic, he might have been able to rest up there, but not comfortably.

My doubts and concerns about that story were verified when Falcon's parents asked him on CNN, "why didn't you come out?" And Falcon said, "you guys said we did this for the show." Lights went off in my head. Bells were ringing; whistles were whistling. I said, "Wow, Richard is using his children as pawns to facilitate a global media hoax that's going to give him enough publicity to temporarily attract A-list celebrity status and hopefully attract a network."

Truth is not only stranger than fiction at times, it's just stranger than the truth as well. Hard to say what annoys me more if all this is to be believed, that Heene would use his son for a publicity stunt, or that his end game is making a TV show that's the Bizarro World version of Mythbusters.