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The voices on the 911 tapes sound distressed, and sincere. First a man, then a woman, in near hysteria telling a dispatcher about their 6-year-old son, who has taken flight on a homemade helium balloon shaped like a flying saucer.
The tapes, released by the Larimer County (Colo.) Sheriff’s Office, show that the boy’s parents, Richard and Mayumi Heene, repeatedly mentioned the age of their son, Falcon, and are heavily larded with emotional and dramatic pauses and repetitions.
If it sounds like an act, law enforcement officials say that should come as no surprise. They believe the whole incident was a staged publicity stunt.
Sheriff Jim Alderden is pursuing charges against the couple at the center of the balloon saga —conspiracy, attempting to influence a public servant, contributing to the delinquency of a minor and false reporting to authorities.
The adventure that captivated the nation last Thursday began with a call to 911.
“I think my 6-year-old boy ... He got inside, and it took off,” Richard Heene tells the dispatcher.
“Ok, where is he at?” the dispatcher asks calmly.
“He’s in the air,” Heene replies. “He’s only 6,” he says, in a voice larded with stress. “He’s only 6.”
Heene’s wife, Mayumi, also spoke to a 911 dispatcher.
“It’s supposed to be tied down so it’s just floating, and it’s 20 feet up ... But I don’t know what happened to the tie. But it got loose or something. So it’s flying,” she says.
Attempting to sort out what’s actually happening, the dispatcher says, “All right, you think he’s flying around in the air somewhere?”
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“Yes,” Mayumi Heene replies. “We can’t find 6-year-old Falcon. And, um, my other son said Falcon was at the bottom of the flying saucer. He said he was in there. But anyway, I tried to find him ... I tried to find him everywhere.”
At that point, the woman caller becomes incoherent, babbling and sobbing on the phone.
“OK, we’re going to get you ... help,” the dispatcher says. “Just stay on the phone with me.”
Video: 'Balloon boy' family under microscope For the next two hours, the Air Force and local television stations chased the large silver balloon across 50 miles and two counties. When it finally landed after leaking helium, no one was inside.
That touched off a search for Falcon, who had been presumed to be riding in a small compartment attached to the balloon like a stem on a mushroom. After three hours of retracing the balloon’s route and searching the area around the Heene home, Falcon showed up in the attic of the garage. He said his dad had yelled at him, and he got scared and hid in the attic.
Suspicions that all was not as it appeared surfaced that night, when the family — the Heenes have two other sons — was on CNN and Falcon said, “We did it for the show.”
The next morning, the family appeared on TODAY, but Falcon threw up on camera and didn’t talk — a performance he later repeated on another morning show. Richard Heene said that when his son talked about the show, he was referring to a reenactment of his hiding in the attic he performed for news crews.
Video: Heene attorney: ‘Presumption of innocence’ Heene’s story rapidly started to unravel. One former associate said that Heene, who was featured twice with his wife and kids on the reality TV show “Wife Swap,” was obsessed with getting on television and was concocting ideas for reality shows.
He had once lived in Hollywood, where a former associate, actor-comedian Perry Caravello, said he took a fling at stand-up comedy but bombed. Then he started thinking about reality shows, proposing such stunts as riding a motorcycle into the middle of a tornado.
“He’s got talent, but he abuses it by going after these crazy things,” Caravello told NBC News. “He wanted to go into comedy. But that was overtaken by the desire to be a reality TV star.”
Heene’s neighbors are not leaping to his defense. One neighbor got into a fight this week with a television employee when the neighbor thought his way was being blocked.
Another neighbor, Kim Hicks, is upset because of the distress her children, who go to school with the Heenes, went through.
“My daughter had told me earlier, when school had started, that Falcon said he had a spaceship. I was so worried that I was going to have to explain to my kids that something horrible happened to their friend, and that’s not fair,” Hicks told NBC News.
“He was always looking for this kind of a thing. He was always wanting a big moment,” Heene’s friend, Jonathan Thymus, told NBC News. “Any stardom to him is good stardom. Whether it’s good or bad, it’s still good stardom.”
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