Whatever The 'Balloon Boy' Lesson Is, We've Apparently Already Forgotten It

by Linda Holmes

UPDATE: Now the sheriff's department is apparently saying "publicity stunt," so they've presumably uncovered some actual evidence, given a couple of days to check up on it.

Like a whole lot of other people, I watched for a while yesterday as the helium balloon in which a 6-year-old was supposedly flying made its way through the sky, landed softly on the ground, and turned out to have nobody in it. And, like a whole lot of other people, I was relieved when it turned out that he was in the attic of his own house the entire time.

(My favorite part of the news coverage: a CNN commentator using a fancy touch-screen gizmo to zero in on a satellite photo of THE KID'S HOUSE in order to dramatically demonstrate the outcome.)

And finally, like a whole lot of other people, I hoped that perhaps something might be learned from the entire sequence, and that it might be remembered for ... I don't know, perhaps a few hours. The point being: If you don't know what's going on, don't say you know what's going on. Yes, this was fed by 24-hour news channels, and it was fed by Twitter (which, at least for me, performed with a certain uneven twitchiness the entire time this was unfolding).

But it was also fed by the fact that we who live with so much information are no longer used to admitting that we don't really know what's going on. Surely someone knows what's going on; how can it be otherwise? I don't have to be driven crazy anymore about song lyrics, or who played the best friend in a movie from 15 years ago, or what my old neighborhood looks like these days. Thanks, Internet!

So, rather than coverage that says, "We don't know what's going on," you get a series of evolving theories — as one of the CNN anchors actually admitted yesterday. They move from one "working theory" to another; I saw four distinct prevailing theories in a space of a couple of hours yesterday. (1) He's in the balloon. (2) No, wait — he's not in the balloon because he was never in it. (3) No, wait — he's not in the balloon because he was in a "box" that fell off the bottom of it. (4) No, wait — he's in the attic. Better to state what you believe is going on and have to take it back later than to say, "We don't know."

And then came the appearance on CNN last night, during which 6-year-old Falcon said to his father, "You had said that we did this for a show."

The guessing begins again, after the jump.

Wolf Blitzer didn't press for details at the time, but you can now find people all over the Internet declaring that they now know, for sure, that it was a hoax and the parents set the whole thing up and should be prosecuted and fined and tarred and feathered and so forth. (Don't believe me? Search for "balloonboy" on Twitter.)

All this because a 6-year-old — one who had, in fact, been on television by that time off and on for hours — used the words "We did this for a show." His father later claimed that he was referring to the reporters who accompanied him to the attic to see where he was. I mean, we all understand that there was a show, right? And we all understand that Falcon did several things for that show, whether it was a hoax or not — he talked to the press, he perhaps showed the reporters the attic, he went on CNN accompanied by the headline "Balloon Boy Lives!" As for his comment: What's "this"? Which show? Said when? He's six.

Note that the kid had no context for the conversation at all, because until this part of the discussion came to him, his dad was chatting it up with Blitzer. His father turned to him and relayed the question, saying, "Did you hear us calling your name at any time?" Note — "at any time." And he says he did, and when his father asked why, then, he didn't answer, Falcon said, "You had said that ... we did this for a show."

Now, in my experience, 6-year-olds can be very literal. I don't know how he interpreted "at any time," but the idea that he was referring to a point where he was told that he was showing the attic to a bunch of reporters, and he heard his parents calling but didn't answer them, doesn't seem entirely implausible to me. In fact, a 6-year-old could be changing the subject entirely, and "did this" could mean talking to Wolf Blitzer. A 6-year-old can have an entire conversation with himself that takes place between your question and his answer.

It also doesn't seem entirely implausible to me, on the other hand, that it's some kind of bizarre put-on, or some combination of the two — a bizarre put-on that went horribly awry and wound up completely different from whatever bizarre outcome it was meant to have. Yes, the family has submitted videos to CNN and to YouTube, and they've been on Wife Swap, and they're certainly not shy about the spotlight. Maybe they got busted by their own kid.

I honestly have no idea. The dad's affect is a bit odd — I actually saw their episode of Wife Swap at one point, and they're definitely unusual people who make decisions about their kids that I wouldn't. But if in fact Dad wants to promote his weather research and his experimental aircraft and whatnot, it's hard for me to understand, publicity-stunt-wise, what this would do for him. If the kid had actually gone up in the balloon and landed safely, I'd get it.

But how does a miserable failure — a vehicle you can't control, which everybody agrees would be totally unsafe for flying, operating in a manner that accomplishes, proves, and demonstrates nothing — serve as a publicity stunt? How does pretending that your experiment has endangered your child's life — and making it appear plausible that it could have endangered your child's life — make people more likely to take your theories seriously? How does it promote your research to make people think you don't know whether somebody is inside the balloon or not, and that you have no way of getting him down safely if he is? Yes, the dad made it to CNN, but not as a visionary in the field of aeronautics.

I have no idea. Will I be shocked if it's a hoax of some sort? Not really. Will I be shocked if it's not? Not really. I wasn't shocked when the kid wasn't in the balloon, either. There's no shame in having no idea what's going on. No matter how surrounded we are by the Internet Movie Database and Google Maps, there's no deciphering a 6-year-old without more information.

It's just a bit disheartening to see, less than 24 hours after the last time so many people labored under a misunderstanding of the circumstances of this same situation, that there's so little reluctance to jump to a conclusion about what's going on now. Surrounded by coverage and surrounded by guessing, it's gotten very hard to shrug your shoulders.

It's easy to feel like you know a lot: Yesterday, we knew the altitude of the balloon, the name of the family, the size and shape of the alleged "compartment," what the neighbors thought, and what the family's reality-television resume looked like.

But for hours, we didn't even know we were watching an empty foil bag float through the sky. It's not always easy to know what you're looking at, even when you're staring at it with your own eyes.