Offbeat: Balloon Boy’s dad, in retrospect: “He was a crackpot”
- I can’t help but feel I was responsible for stirring the thirst for fame inside of him that led to last year’s hoax. It’s something I have to live with, and sometimes it makes me feel like I want to climb into a box and hide.
- AOL News contributor David Moye • Explaining how his dealings with Richard Heene may have contributed to the “Balloon Boy” incident a year ago this week. See, Moye worked as senior editor for a service called FlashNews, which provided odd, offbeat news to radio stations and newspaper columnists. And Heene, see, is a crackpot. So Moye covered him more than once. The first time, he referred to Heene as the “Bob Vila of Cardboard Boxes,” after Heene made a video for kids featuring a cardboard puppet named “Boxter.” Dude loves his boxes. Moye also did stories with Heene playing wacky storm-chaser in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. “After all,” he writes, “he was a crackpot and my audience — wacky morning disc jockeys — would eat this stuff up.” All of this, by the way, was before he got pseudo-famous on “Wife Swap.” Great work, David. source