Balloons, Hoaxes, and Wife Swapping

I know we were thinking some pretty harsh things about Richard and Mayumi Heene.  If the names don’t ring a bell, they’re the family who put together the balloon boy hoax this month.  They claimed their six-year-old son Falcon was trapped in the basket of a giant homemade balloon that went sailing, pilot-less over Colorado.  Authorities discovered after the fact that little Falcon had been hiding in the attic, and upon being found declared to the world in an interview with Wolf Blitzer, “You guys [his parents] said we did it for a show.”

This, of course, left us all feeling somewhat less than sympathetic for this family.  But now, I have come across news this morning that will soften your heart towards the Heene family.

It seems that they had been chosen for an episode of “Wife Swap,” a lovely little show on Lifetime Channel where wives swap homes with one another in a reality TV test-tube experiment.  The experiment?  To see what happens when you take a person out of their usual family environment and drop them into another’s.  Test-tube science meets daytime soap opera.

The episode the Heenes filmed has been canceled due to poor publicity.  Seems they just didn’t have enough credibility to be on the show anymore.  I know you’re just dying to read the whole story, so here. Good news for all you sorely disappointed folks–they’re going to post the episode on YouTube.