Greetings From Scott Turner: Balloon Boy Hoaxters

Greetings Pub Quiz Balloon Boy Hoaxters...

Holy crow!

It's not that the Heene family failed so miserably in the parents' shot at fame.  Truth be told, they won that battle.  Maybe it's Andy Warhol's consummate "fifteen minutes of fame."  Or maybe it's just that our little club called "society" can never, ever get enough of this stuff.

Look at me!  I'm writing about it.

Look at you!  You're reading my writing about it.

Face it -- seeing this thing flying through the northern Colorado sky last week was just plain weird.  And kinda awesome, to boot.


Bruce Ratner solves everything -- an arena designed by the firm of Gehry, Ellerbe Beckett & SHoP floating over Brooklyn, making eminent domain unneces-- what?  This isn't the new arena?  Durn it!

I saw it on live t.v. and thought "good grief, the aliens have arrived, and they're driving an intergalactic Pinto."  Then, the breathless newspeople said there was a young boy aboard this thing, and it got ookie and creepy.

Finally, after two hours of helicopter coverage and interviews with the Heenes' neighbor, the balloon landed, and wasn't that a sight -- a uniformed officer (whose uniform, sadly, was a polo shirt -- I'll be sure to respect that when the grid goes down) lunging for the guide wires we were told had given way and put the poor boy in danger.  The ground beneath them looked like the American farmland melded with a Japanese garden.


a new Olympic demonstration sport, slated for the London Games of 2012

Then, the huh?-ness of rescuers not feverishly ripping the hatch off the balloon to save the boy.  Just standing around and by-golly not doing much of anything.

"THE BOY'S NOT ON BOARD!"  As though a contraption like this could have a board to be on.  Because newscasters will tell you -- probably at the next panel discussion at the Museum of Television and Radio -- that they just had to bring it up ("it was germane," Anderson Cooper will probably say).  Bring what up?

"HAS THE BOY FALL TO HIS DEATH SOMEWHERE ABOVE NORTHERN COLORADO?!!"  This followed theories that the balloon COULD COLLIDE WITH JETS OVER DENVER INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT or that the balloon was HEADED STRAIGHT FOR DOWNTOWN DENVER!

Except for the part where it wasn't.  "THERE ARE BUILDINGS IN DENVER THAT ARE VERY TALL!  WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF THIS AIRCRAFT STRUCK ONE OF THOSE BUILDINGS IN THE MIDDLE OF A WORKDAY?!!"

You mean, this aircraft?


and to think, the feds forgot to raise the Alert Level to...uh, what, silver?!

I dunno...it'd probably make us all forget 9/11 ever happened.

The rest of the story you know.  Boy not aboard.  Boy not fallen to his death.  Boy "hiding in the attic."  Boy claiming to be scared of letting daddy's balloon get away.  Boy spilling beans to Wolf Blitzer that it was "for the show."  Father acting indignant at suggestions that this could be a hoax.  Mother alternating 'tween teary and wacky.  Media irretrievably stuck to the story like an accident at the Elmer's Glue factory.

Now, it's Hoaxville for sure, and boy, are do the authorities have the Heenes in their sights.

I don't much care that it was a hoax.  Sure, the parents, and the father in particular, are strung-out hi-test Grade A fame junkies.  They also have the disturbing habit of plopping their kids in the backseat when they go driving straight at tornadoes.  If I were Falcon Heene, the boy with the perfect-for-television name, I'd be counting the days 'til I was old enough to kick Dad square in the weather balloons.


Falcon Heene: "Boy, do I know something you wanna know..."

Hoax or not, American t.v. media sure does love jumping up and down, clapping its hands in over-excited glee, and unleashing an oddly blended concoction of well-worn and heavily rehearsed clichés, stuttering lack of comprehension, and queries for people in the field who haven't any clue what's transpiring than the well-coiffed behind the studio desks.

One network brought on an "expert" -- someone who pilots hot-air balloons.  Since the Balloon Boy balloon was a pilotless contraption filled with helium, the expert was reduced to answering most questions with well, I fly hot-air balloons, and this isn't one of those, so I can't say.  But if I had to guess...

After a while, there was no story left in the story. That didn't stop the news networks from bleeding what they could out of Balloon Boy.

There have been other hoaxes.  Clifford Irving's Howard Hughes autobiography.  The Piltdown Man.  Affordable housing and jobs at the Atlantic Yards project.  But not the Loch Ness Monster.  Nessie is real, man!


Which of these things is real?  Hint -- it's not the one in the color picture.

As a rule, we like hoaxes.  The best part is that they often make us believe harder.  We're all Fox Mulder -- we all want to believe.  Because we're ready to believe a hoax, even root for it, it means we're more than ready for when it's the real thing.

There's no surprise in any of this.  There's certainly no surprise in me getting all huffy about it, either.  It'd just be nice, just once, for the sky to really, truly be falling when folks on live breaking-news t.v. tell us it is.

Next thing you know, they'll be going on and on that some basketball arena is getting built in the middle of Brooklyn.

Yeah, right...

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Thanks to everyone who turned out for the big Spunk Lads gig at Freddy's this past Friday.  It was, as per usual and par excellence, a real 'loo wrecker.  Bigger thanks to everyone who supported Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn's annual Walkathon this past Saturday.  Your donations and emotional support are appreciated beyond words.

Thank you.