The mother of Falcon Heene, the six-year-old American boy who sparked a major rescue operation after he was wrongly believed to have been carried away inside a helium weather balloon, has admitted the incident was a hoax, reports say.
Mayumi Heene told a sheriff’s investigator that she and her husband, Richard, ”knew all along” that their son was hiding at their Colorado home, according to court documents.
The papers, which were made public in the United States, also suggest the parents had told their three children to lie to the authorities and the media.
According to the affidavit, Heene said the plan was to make the family, who have appeared on the US reality TV show Wife Swap, more marketable to the media.
The couple called police and TV stations last week to say Falcon was in a homemade balloon that had accidentally launched from their backyard in Fort Collins.
TV news channels in the US and much of the world carried live footage of the silver, saucer-shaped balloon drifting thousands of feet in the air above rural Colorado, pursued by rescue helicopters, after authorities were told Falcon was seen climbing into the base of the craft shortly before it took off on October 15.
But when the balloon eventually came down about 50 miles from Fort Collins it was empty. Searches of the Heene’s home uncovered nothing, prompting fears the boy had fallen out mid-flight. But Falcon then climbed down from the rafters of the garage attic where he had been hiding.
An apparently straightforward good news story took a curious twist when, during a live CNN interview with the Heene parents and their three sons, Falcon was asked by his father why he had not responded to shouts from his worried family. ”Um … You had said that we did this for a show,” Falcon replied.
The court document said the parents devised the hoax about two weeks earlier.
”She and her husband had instructed their three children to lie to authorities as well as the media regarding this hoax,” it stated.
But Richard Heene has continued to deny that the incident was faked.
His lawyer and his wife’s lawyer had not seen the document before it was made available to the public through the Larimer county courthouse, the Coloradoan newspaper reported.
The Larimer county sheriff, Jim Alderden, has said he would recommend charges including conspiracy, contributing to the delinquency of a minor and making a false report to authorities.
Some of the most serious charges each carry a maximum sentence of six years in prison and a $500 000 fine. — guardian.co.uk