Anyway, I don’t know if there was a publicity-grabbing hoax plotted, or if an opportunity was seized on the fly, or if it all innocently happened the way Balloon Dad says it did. But whatever happened yesterday, I have a sneaking suspicion the flying Jiffy Pop balloon was not originally conceived, built and being tested as an innovative commuting vehicle.

It’s not for nothing Shepard Smith and everyone else was comparing that thing to a UFO yesterday. Maybe, like the Richard Dreyfuss character in ”Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” Richard Heene was just strangely compelled to make his experimental 3DLAV commuting device look like a traditional Roswell-inspired flying saucer hoax.

But there is nothing about the 3DLAV … seating, controls … to suggest it is designed for low-altitude manned flight, or atmospheric research for that matter, and there’s a lot about it that looks more like an off-the-shelf extraterrestial photo prop. At this point I don’t want to leap to a UFO hoax genesis to this thing, which after all clearly ended up following a different, very human-oriented storyline. Published reports in any case indicate Heene firmly believes humans are descended from aliens. Which doesn’t suggest “hoax” as much as “totally wacked.”

I just thought he was a Ron Paul voter

Jules Crittenden goes into the aerodynamics of the Balloon Boy’s dirigible. All that’s missing is the pie plate from “Plan 9 from Outer Space.”

Don Surber Blog

http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/1806