Star Trek Captain Picard explains why we love balloon boy

Cluster ballooning

Part of balloon boy’s mesmerizing power is our desire to be him—not so much the offspring of nutty parents or the object of a media feast, but the kid who flies away by helium balloon. We hear the story again and again in new iterations and are charmed each time by its whimsy, adventure, and seeming impossibility.

There are the stories about literal helium balloon flight. In the short film “The Red Balloon,” produced in 1956, the stray helium balloons of Paris band together and take little Pascal up and away. The short’s popularity inspired “The Flight of the Red Balloons,” a feature-length film based on the tale released in 2008. And in last year’s Disney-Pixar film “Up,” grumpy Carl Fredricksen unmoors his house from terra firma by hitching it to thousands of balloons. The list goes on, but it’s fair to say that aside from the burdened few who suffer from globophobia (a fear of balloons), most of us melt a little at the sweet notion of flight by balloons.

And then some of us go so far as to turn the fantasy into reality. Over decades a handful of people have taken to the sky via bunches of helium balloons, an activity (rather dully) referred to as cluster ballooning. These balloon boys (all men, based on my search) do it to satisfy a childhood dream, to push the outer limit of possibility, and to go where no person has gone before.

Their long lineage popularly, though inaccurately, begins with Larry Walters. In 1982 the young Vietnam veteran lashed dozens of weather balloons to his lawn chair and soared over Los Angeles, equipped with a BB gun to get down. For those who doubt the veracity of that high-flying tale, take a look at the news footage of his flight. When asked why he did it, Walters described a lifelong longing for the flight and famously said, “A man can’t just sit around.”

In demonstrating that one really can just tie themselves to a bunch of balloons and take off, Walters inspired many to develop the technique and science of cluster ballooning, some more successfully than others. Last year Brazilian Catholic priest, Father Adelir de Carli, tried a 1,000-balloon flight to raise funds for charity, but sadly died in his attempt. In 2007, Jonathan Trappe affixed his office chair to a bouquet of 55 colorful balloons and successfully sailed over North Carolina for four hours in an expedition he dubbed “Chairway to Heaven.” That same year Kent Couch fulfilled his childhood dream by mimicking Walter’s lawn chair approach and sailed over Oregon and into Idaho. Reaching 21,400 feet, John Ninomiya claims to have set the world’s record in 1998 for the highest cluster balloon flight.

But the true balloon boy pioneer, a man who embodied our quest for space travel and exploring the limits of science, was chemist and professor Jean Piccard. He first tested the concept of cluster ballooning in 1937 using between 80 and 100 latex balloons for a flight over Iowa (here’s an early Time magazine article about it). While using a .22 caliber pistol among other weapons to descend, Piccard barely escaped with his life as the helium balloons caught fire. Ahhh, early science.

We breathlessly watched that floppy silver mushroom potentially carrying Falcon Heene waft over Colorado in part I think because it brushed against our fantastical love affair with scientific progress and the new worlds to which it transports us. How cool then to learn today that it is Jean Piccard, along with his twin brother physicist Auguste Piccard, after who Star Trek: The Next Generation character Captain Picard was named. Maybe that explains the multitude of Jean-Luc Picard fans…he is the ultimate and archetypal balloon boy.

By Victoria Schlesinger

Photo credit: Omnibus