October 19, 2029—The story that a little boy had been hurled 140 million years into the past aboard a time machine was a hoax concocted to land a reality Web TV deal, authorities said this morning, and the boy’s father will likely face felony charges.
The stunt last week was a ploy by Conrad Mann, a self-proclaimed inventor who lives in Boise, Idaho, to convince the public that his four-year-old son, Ostrich, crawled into a first-of-its-kind time-traveling apparatus and accidentially activated it, according to the Ada County Sheriff Chase U. Downe. Mann is suspected of concocting the entire incident to launch a self-produced reality series titled “Time Swap,” in which families from different centuries switch places and try to adapt to their new surroundings, Downe said.
Downe said he expected to recommend that Mann be charged with making a false report to authorities and attempting to influence a public servant be brought against Mann. Federal charges are also possible.
The drama involving Ostrich played out over live streaming video over a 24-hour period on Oct. 14, after Mann made a desperate call to the sheriff’s office asking for help in rescuing his son. Mann said that recording data on the machine indicated Ostrich had been transported to the early Cretaceous period. Mann’s statements had prompted the authorities to gather leading physicists and technologists from around the world to gather in Boise to rescue the boy.
The experts eventually programmed the device to return Ostrich to the present, but when they opened the machine to pull him out, all they found was a Protoceratops egg. Officials thought the boy had possibly been eaten or trampled by a dinosaur, but Ostrich was subsequently found in the family’s hologram room, playing with a 3D image of Elmo from Sesame Street.
In fact, the machine — which was nothing more than a souped-up clothes dryer — would not have the power to launch the the 27-pound-boy back in time, Idaho State University physics professor Molly Cule said, adding that the scientists involved in the rescue should have realized the story was a hoax since Mann, who has a high-school education, was not likely to have invented time travel.
The Mann case bears a striking resemblance to the “balloon boy” case that gripped the nation 20 years ago. In that incident, a Colorado man named Patrick and Mayumi Heene were accused of fraudently convincing authorities that their six-year-old son Falcon was aboard a runaway balloon when the boy was in fact hiding in the attic of the family’s home. Charges against Mayumi Heene were eventually dropped, and Patrick Heene was acquitted by reason of insanity in a 2010 jury trial.
Asked by FU to comment on the similarities between the balloon incident and the time-machine stunt, Falcon Heene, now 26 and living in Utah, promptly threw up.
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Posted by Skip Dekades 
Posted by Skip Dekades 
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Posted by Skip Dekades 
