A 6 year old boy finds himself helplessly floating away on an experimental balloon made of foil over Northern Colorado. Authorities have been notified of the incident and are currently tracking the home-built balloon which if not addressed can reportedly rise to as much as 10,000 feet.

The balloon, in the shape of a flying saucer is covered in foil and filled with helium. It has a compartment for a passenger underneath. It lifted the boy into the air near Fort Collins Thursday morning after the balloon became untethered at the boy’s home.

Airtracker 7 located the craft at 12:35 p.m. at about 8,000 feet in Weld County. It appeared to be slightly tilted. You can watch the video here.

(Source) CNN

This news story isn’t exactly new, but I still found it very interesting.  It’s about a dad, Isaac Daniel, who had a bad scare a couple of years ago–he received a call while at a conference that his son had gone missing.  Every parent’s worst nightmare.  He left his conference, jumped on a plane, and flew back home, only to find that his son was safe, and that his “missingness” was only due to a miscommunication.

But just because the danger is past doesn’t mean the fear has really gone away. So Daniel began working on a product, a GPS tracking chip that can be embedded into shoes.  The way I understand it, the chip remains dormant unless the parent calls into the monitoring company to activate satellite tracking.  Then the chip is activated and the shoe-wearer can be quickly located. 

These are pretty pricey–adult shoes go for $300-$325, and then there’s the $19.95 a month for the monitoring company.  And you can’t just use them to check whether your teens lied about where they would be, because activating the chip automatically involves notifying authorities. 

And I’m not sure that tracking kids every minute of every day is necessarily a good thing…at least I say that while I know exactly where my kids are (home sick with an ear infection, Girl Scout meeting, bus home from middle school).  But if one of my kids went missing, I’d be on that plane as fast as Isaac Daniel was.   If I had the resources of a large business on my side, I’d use them to keep kids safe in a heartbeat. 

So, the thought of all of us having tracking chips in our shoes is pretty creepy, but the thought of our kids being safe…that’s pretty appealing.