Richard and Mayumi Heene, parents to Falcon Heene, known from here to eternity as “Balloon Boy,” are set to plead guilty to charges brought against them for perpetrating the most retarded hoax to ever captivate America. |NPR|

Seriously, can someone from Child Protective Services in Colorado get their asses to the Heene home stat and investigate what the hell is going on over there? Both videos embedded below are just heartbreaking. MAKE. IT. STOP.

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While the search and rescue operation for Falcon Heene continues, more and more is being learned about the kooky family he hails from, and you can bet that more and more information about the Heenes will revealed over the next 24-48 hours. Regardless of whether or not this turns out to be a horrifying tragedy or one of the biggest hoaxes in American history, the Heenes are here to stay, so get used to them. The parents are batshit crazy and the kids are obviously precocious…hello reality show!!! America, you’ve just been introduced to the new Gosselins.

What’s sort of additionally weird about what happened this afternoon is that today was, by most standards, a slow news day. In fact, earlier today I found myself bitching internally about the lack of anything interesting to blog about. And then, BOOM…Balloon Boy emerged, and none of us will ever forget it. Regardless of Falcon Heene’s fate, regardless if this turns out to be more “War of the Worlds” than Amelia Earhart, this is one bound to be one of those “Do you remember where you were when…” days. For a few hours millions of us sat riveted to our televisions, radios, and computers, we tried to put ourselves in the kid’s shoes, tried to remember back to when we were six years-old to get some sort of idea of what would be going through our minds if we were up there in that balloon. We tried to empathize with what his parents must have been feeling while the balloon was in the air, regardless of how irresponsible they may have seemed to be on the surface. We were utterly captivated by it all.

As I write this, the day is fading into night as the sun sets on the East Coast and the fate of Falcon Heene is yet to be determined. I hope he’s okay and is just hiding in a basement or under a car in another part of his neighborhood or something, scared shitless that he accidentally did something to release his Daddy’s precious giant helium balloon into the sky. I hope. We all hope.

But regardless, there are phone calls, emails and text messages flying all over the place in Hollywood right now. There are publishing and reality show deals being discussed and life rights contracts already being drawn up. So yeah, the Heenes are here to stay.

The giant helium balloon chase that has riveted the nation for the last hour or so has come to end…the balloon has hit the ground after a soft landing, but there was no child inside. Either Falcon Heene fell out at some point or this is all an elaborate hoax. A side note…Falcon’s parents are storm chasers who’ve appeared on ABC’s Wife Swap…twice. Again, a live video feed of this madness is available from MSNBC here.