Balloon boy's father 'planned weather balloon UFO stunt'
Richard Heene was so obsessed with kick-starting his reality television career that he devised an alien hoax that would be "bigger than Roswell", according to a confidant.
Robert Thomas, a fellow science enthusiast and former business associate of Mr Heene, sold his story to the gossip website Gawker as police prepare to charge members of the Heene family over the runaway balloon flight that gripped the US on Thursday.
Mr Thomas described Mr Heene as "driven by ego and fame", saying that their shared ambition of creating a television series based around madcap science experiments went awry as the father-of-three's ideas became "extreme and paranoid"....