The Balloon Boy
On 15 October 2009 a homemade balloon shaped like a silver flying saucer rose from a garden in Fort Collins. The father, Richard Heene, said his six-year-old son Falcon was inside. The National Guard put helicopters up, Denver airport held flights, and the country watched two hours of live coverage. The balloon landed empty, the boy was found at home in the attic, and that evening in a CNN studio he told his father: you said we did this for the show. Heene, who had appeared in a reality programme about hunting UFOs, pleaded guilty in a Colorado court, served ninety days and paid $36,000 in restitution to the emergency services.
The Coso Artifact
On 13 February 1961 three rock dealers from Olancha, collecting geodes in the Coso Mountains, cut open a concretion and found a ceramic cylinder inside with a metal shaft down the middle and a copper sheath. Geologists they consulted put the rock at half a million years, and the find entered the literature as an extraterrestrial spark plug. In 1999 Pierre Stromberg and Paul Heinrich showed X-rays of it to the Spark Plug Collectors of America: the members identified a Champion plug of the 1920s, with its characteristic thread and ceramic insulator. Concretions of clay and rust grow around iron in decades, not epochs.
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