By Greg Bartlett
The nation was riveted on October 15th as images of a flying saucer hovering over Colorado filled news channels everywhere. The oblong, silver monstrosity held no aliens, but as state police and even National Guard units scrambled to follow it, what they hoped to find inside was actually a small, 6-year-old boy. The story was even carried internationally by all major networks, and nearly everyone near a TV set or on a news site followed the drama.
News & GPS Tracking
Thankfully, to everyone’s relief, the boy was merely hiding in his attic and discovered by an investigator staying with the family. The incident was actually just the latest in a long string of mishaps for a rather unique family, whose prior television appearances included a stint on Wife Swap, a semi-popular reality show with a habit of exposing familial issues.
As national attention was called to the incident, one cannot help but wonder how a simple GPS tracker could have alleviated the problem. Forget putting a GPS tracker on the balloon. After all, people could see the shiny object for miles. But if the rambunctious first grader had been given a GPS-enabled wristwatch or perhaps a regular GPS tracker to wear with the other gadgets on his belt, parents and investigators would have been relieved to see that the boy was indeed home the whole time, and the world would’ve been spared the opportunity of witnessing the first saucer attack since Roswell.
The incident ended well and will hopefully draw attention to the plight of lost children in the U.S. Hopefully parents—even eccentric ones with gigantic UFOs in their back yards—will make good use of earthling technology like GPS trackers to protect their kids. Gadgets don’t solve every problem, but a good dose of know-how combined with a strict sense of responsibility can keep the kids happy and safe at home.
Update: Turns out the entire incident was a hoax by the parents to garner publicity for their pursuits on reality television. We guess we’ve found something even GPS trackers can’t do: keep a parent from intentionally sucking their own kid into a cheap scam. And sure, all the technological savvy in the world won’t keep an innocent child from blurting out the scheme on Larry King Live.
Besides wasting the time of cops and guardsmen all over Colorado, the true crime by the parents was diminishing the plight of truly lost children. We hope that parents and officials everywhere still take these issues seriously.
