Fairy-tale finish for boy who kept nation up in air

One minute, President Obama was on the television, speaking about the rebirth of New Orleans, the usual array of citizenry behind him. In the next, he had been shoved aside by a live breaking Grimm's fairy tale. A rambunctious 6-year-old boy had climbed into a homemade, flying-saucerlike helium balloon that escaped its tether, and he was floating thousands of feet above Colorado, at the mercy of the winds.

Or so it seemed.

For 2 ½ hours Thursday, a mesmerized America watched the televised images of the shiny, silvery disc spinning slowly against a brilliant blue sky with puffy white clouds. Emergency vehicles began trailing the balloon over two counties. The Air Force was contacted. The Federal Aviation Administration grounded some planes. And the nation wondered: Was the boy in the balloon? Was he alive? Had he fallen out?

At last, the balloon floated down — a safe landing! — 50 miles from the Fort Collins home where it had been tethered.

There was no boy. And then, two hours later, he emerged from the attic, where he had been hiding in fear.

The boy's father, Richard Heene, said the family was tinkering with the balloon Thursday and he scolded Falcon — the perfect fairy-tale name — for getting inside a compartment on the craft. The boy, at home because local schools were closed, had fled after the scolding and was never in the balloon during its more than two-hour, 50-mile journey.

"I yelled at him. I'm really sorry I yelled at him," Heene, 48, said as he hugged the youngest of his three sons during a news conference Thursday night.

"I was in the attic, and he scared me because he yelled at me," Falcon said. "That's why I went in the attic."

"Quite frankly, I couldn't stand," Richard Heene, said of the moment Falcon suddenly reappeared inside the family's home. "I just hit the floor with my knees," Heene said, as Falcon, chomping pizza and occasionally grinning, stood among reporters in the family's front yard. "He scared the heck out of us."

By nightfall, questions were emerging about the public costs of the saga, which briefly interrupted departures from Denver International Airport, and about how Falcon had managed to stay hidden in the attic of the garage even as authorities twice searched the home.

Falcon's parents, Richard and Mayumi, are storm chasers who appeared twice in "Wife Swap," the ABC reality show where two mothers switch households for several days and never fail to come away aghast at how other people live.

Their most recent appearance was in March. The show promoted the Heene family as storm chasers who also "devote their time to scientific experiments that include looking for extraterrestrials and building a research-gathering flying saucer to send into the eye of the storm."

Richard Heene said the family had been working on a low-altitude vehicle that people could take out of their garages and use to hover over traffic. But it wasn't supposed to go higher than 20 feet or so, he said.

He adamantly denied the notion that the whole thing was a publicity stunt. "That's horrible after the crap we just went through. No."

During a live interview with CNN, Falcon said he had heard his family calling his name.

"You did?" his mother, Mayumi Heene, said.

"Why didn't you come out?" Richard Heene said.

Falcon answered, "You had said that we did this for a show."

Later, Richard Heene bristled when the family was asked to clarify and said he didn't know what his son meant. He didn't ask his son what he meant by "a show."

Heene is an amateur scientist fascinated with the mysteries of the natural world, he says on his MySpace page. In 2005, he "flew into Hurricane Wilma to take magnetic field measurements," just an ordinary family vacation for the Heenes, from the looks of it in a Denver television-station report also uploaded to YouTube, and "this year I rode a motorcycle into a mesocyclone." He also said he'd like to meet "real aliens from outer space and conduct a full interview with them."

His former business partner told ABC on Thursday that Heene "loved those boys dearly" but often put them in danger.

The three had been playing out back with the balloon, when one of the boys saw Falcon climb into a box, attached with pegs, on the bottom of the balloon, said Kathy Messick, a spokeswoman for the Larimer County sheriff.

Neighbor Bob Licko heard a commotion when he was leaving his house and saw two boys on the roof with a camera. "One of the boys yelled to me that his brother was way up in the air."

Their mother seemed distraught, he said, and their father was running around the house.

The balloon tipped precariously at times before gliding to the ground in a field 12 miles northeast of Denver International Airport. Sheriff's deputies secured it to keep it in place, tossing shovels full of dirt on one edge and poking holes to let the helium out.

With Falcon nowhere in sight, investigators searched the balloon's path. Several people reported seeing something fall from the craft while it was in the air, and yellow crime-scene tape was placed around the home.

Licko said he didn't believe any hoax was involved.

"Based on what I witnessed in the backyard in the morning with the parents, I don't think that's the case," Licko said. "They're better actors than I thought they were if that's the case."

Larimer County Sheriff Jim Alderden, asked about the possibility the event was a hoax, said: "From our investigators on the scene, by all accounts, the angst and anguish this family was experiencing was genuine and the relief they experienced when he reappeared was genuine. I can't imagine he would have been instructed to hide by his parents."

The sheriff said he would meet with investigators today to see if the case warranted further investigation.

Material from The Associated Press and The Denver Post is included in this report.