Viewers of the ABC Wife Swap show will be familiar with the six year old boy Falcon Heene who is involved in today’s highly publicized balloon incident in Fort Collins Colorado.

The family was featured in the October 3, 2008 episode of the series plus a special 100th episode of the show which aired March 13 of this year.

The promotional material for the show described the Heenes as follows:

When the Heene family aren’t chasing storms, they devote their time to scientific experiments that include looking for extraterrestrials and building a research-gathering flying saucer to send into the eye of the storm. In this ultimate swap, the Heenes swap lives with a psychic mom who speaks to the dead and can control the weather, her husband and her children — who believe they are destined to be stars.

Falcon Heene (referred to as “Balloon boy” by the media was suspected to be adrift in a home-made helium balloon above the Denver, Colorado area on October 15, 2009. The boy was reportedly not in the aircraft when it landed in Prospect Springs, Colorado. A search is currently being conducted for the child whose current condition is not known.

Officials have expressed concerned that he may have fallen out during flight. Margie Martinez of the Weld County Sheriff’s Office says that the door was unlocked in the balloon. There is also speculation that he may never have been in the balloon at all, and that he may be hiding somewhere in his neighborhood or that he had fallen out as the door of the balloon was unlocked and a small structure attached to the balloons undercarriage was made from thin material. Larimer County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Eloise Campanella said, “At this point, we are thinking that he did not fall out of the balloon and is somewhere on the ground. The basket itself was not breached. It does not look like he fell out of it, but again, this is all conjecture.”

Barbara Slusser, who formerly worked with Heene, says that Heen “put his kids in the line of fire a bit too much.”

Search crews in Colorado continued searching for the boy most of the afternoon.

Falcon was then found alive and well as it turned out he had spent the afternoon hiding in a box in the attic above the garage. Despite his brothers, 7 & 9 reporting that he had been in the basket on the balloon, Falcon was in fact never in the balloon.