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A six-year-old boy feared to have floated away in a home-made helium balloon in Colorado on Thursday has been found alive, police said.
Larimer County Sheriff Jim Alderden told reporters that tiny Falcon Heene had been discovered hiding in a garage attic at his family home in Fort Collins, Colorado.
"The boy's been there all the time. He's been hiding in a cardboard box in the attic above the garage," Alderden told reporters after being notified of the dramatic discovery during a news conference.
"I don't want to make a conjecture, but this is not the first time when we have been involved in searching for some child and once the child realizes people are looking for them, they hide because they're afraid they're going to get in trouble," he added.
Dozens of police and rescue workers had been engaged in a search for Heene after the flying-saucer shaped balloon broke its tethers and drifted thousands of feet into the air before making a soft-landing roughly 50 miles away.
Police had earlier said one of the boy's brothers had reported seeing his sibling clamber into a compartment at the bottom of the futuristic aircraft before it took off.
Alderden said police had questioned the brother several times about what he had seen.
"What he said was that he saw his brother climb into that apparatus and he was very adamant, they interviewed him multiple times and that was his consistent story," Alderden said.
