Six-year-old "balloon boy" Falcon Heene was feared to be flying high over Colorado in a weather balloon yesterday -- by accident presumably: the balloon was part of a family science experiment. But after a few hours of media hysteria and public tracking via internet, they brought the balloon down and found that Falcon wasn't inside. Meantime, he finally climbed out of the box in the garage of his home where he'd been hiding from punishment for some earlier wrongdoing or other.

Weird enough story, but what's weirder is that, during an interview after the incident, he and his father had an exchange that seemed to indicate that the family had planned the whole thing as a stunt.

It's easy enough to believe. The Heene family is the "storm chaser" family that appeared twice on "Wife Swap," the reality show where the mothers are switched out and try to get their new families to play by their rules. (They were brought back for the 100th episode by viewer voting ... presumably for entertainment value.) Father Richard Heene turned out to be an obnoxious, borderline physically abusive asshole (he threw food and then drink on the visiting mom), who appears to have ADHD, and definitely has crazy ideas about UFOs. The family's hobbies including building hovercraft, following tornadoes, yelling rather than talking, teaching their very young children to burp and fart at the dinner table, and letting them use words like "fuck," "dumbass," (to their visiting "mother"), "pussy" and "pussified."

(The entire return episode is on YouTube in five parts, starting with the one below. Trigger warning: his treatment of woo-woo psychic visiting mom is genuinely verbally abusive. I couldn't watch for very long.)