With the recent publicity about boys in hot air balloons, the word has spread and inspired the imaginations of many an artist and aspiring aviator. So it seems fitting to place the context in perspective after two hot air balloon pumpkin boys were featured at the 18th Halloween Pumpkin Contest. Reality to one may be fantacy to another. So let the story that follows inspire your imagination rather than pop the fantastic balloon.

The original balloon boy
Sarah Barmak
Special to the Star
Published On Sat Oct 24 2009

Meet the real-life Balloon Boy.
Today, Dan Nowell owns a contracting business in Corte Madera, Calif. But in 1964,
he was known around the world as the original Balloon Boy, an 11-year-old who got
accidentally carried away by a hot air balloon.
Last week, the saga of Falcon Heene, the 6-year-old boy apparently imprisoned in
a weather balloon high in the sky, seemed incredible. It was. The story turned out
to be a tall tale allegedly perpetrated by the boy’s parents in a bid to get media
attention.
By contrast, Nowell’s trip into the sky 45 years ago was no hoax – it was terrifyingly
real.
On that day, Nowell remembers being one of a group of kids asked to hold some ropes attached to a hot air balloon at its launch in Mill Valley. But when the order came to let go, he couldn’t hear it over the roar of the hot air burner.
With the rope cinched around his hand, the balloon jerked him up into the sky.
“Just like that – ffffffttttt – he took off,” said Ron Beigel, who had been standing
beside Nowell, in an interview this week with the Marin Independent Journal. “Holy cow, I almost wet my pants. We didn’t know what was going to happen. To see
him keep going and going and going, and then to see people crying and praying …
it still shakes me up now.”
Unaware that the rope was tightly wound around Nowell’s hand, many on the ground
feared the boy was simply holding on and that his grip would fail.
Nowell yelled for help to the balloon’s pilot, but the sound of the burner drowned
him out. Friends and relatives watched in terror as he floated nearly a kilometre
into the air, carried by a contraption out of
The Wizard of Oz.
“I felt like I was in a movie theatre, looking down at the landscape of Tam Valley,”
he said. “I was keenly aware of where I was, but at the same time I felt kind of
detached from the experience.”
After what must have seemed like hours, the balloonist, William Berry, turned off
the gas. According to media accounts of the time, he then heard a voice below him
say, “Sir, could you please help me?”
There was “almost a surreal quiet” around the balloon, Nowell said.
Berry brought the balloon down in a backyard. Amazingly, Nowell was unharmed aside
from his fingers, which were blue. He had been in the air for 10 minutes.
Nowell remembers the strangeness of the ensuing media circus, as he was interviewed for countless newspapers and featured on a game show; fittingly, the show was To Tell the Truth.
“People still refer to me as the Balloon Boy,” Nowell said in a separate interview with The San Francisco Chronicle. The kid was made of hardy stuff. He was so unfazed by his flight that he later went up in another balloon with Berry.
After the flurry of attention this week over Heene, Nowell says his phone began to ring.
“I said, `Somebody is trying to steal my thunder,’” he told the Chronicle.
They tried, but they couldn’t match the real deal. For now, Nowell remains the only lighter-than-air kid on record.