Balloon Man

The Butterfly Effect

If a butterfly flaps its wings in China, will it cause a hurricane in Texas? Probably not. Nevertheless, sometimes even our most innocuous actions produce consequences we could scarcely have dreamt of.

Take Tongmuan Pochailoet, for example. When he found a discarded helium-filled rubber doll trapped in the branches of a tree in August 2005, his only thought was that it might make a good scarecrow for his garden. So he took it home and tethered it outside his house in Doi Kam Village, Thailand.

The orange doll stood a metre tall and boasted an oversized head and tiny arms and legs. It kept stray ducks and chickens from invading Pochailoet's vegetable patch, and even frightened the local children away when its head nodded eerily in the breeze. Then on August 29, a storm swept through the village and blew the lurid scarecrow away.

Days later, Pochailoet heard that a diminutive orange alien had been seen romping through the rice fields of nearby Huay Nam Rak Village. And something about the little humanoid with the big bald head and tiny limbs sounded strangely familiar...

Stranger in the Field

Sawaeng Bunratchasak was the first to see the alien. As he drove through Huay Nam Rak at 8am on September 1st, he slowed down to stare at a "moving scarecrow". The scarecrow stared straight back at him and nodded its head "as if it was asking for help".

A witness's sketch of the entity

Later that morning, Sawaeng Boonyalak heard that an alien had landed in a rice field on the outskirts of the village. Naturally, he rushed to see it for himself.

"The alien is about 70 cm high and has yellow skin and a flat chest," he told reporters. "Its mouth is very tiny. It has a bald big head with big eyes and big ears."

Boonyalak described how the alien wandered around the field then drifted up into a tree. "After more villagers came to see it, it floated into the sky into the bright light," he stated.

Buakaew Intaweng said that she first thought the weird orange figure was a doll. Similarly, Somkit Kriangkraimoon thought it was a scarecrow - until it began wobbling unsteadily through the field. Buapan Lawicha said the red-eyed alien stumbled around as though it had "very little energy", while Kamma Pinsaimoon remembered it flying away "like a soaring rocket".

The news spread fast. Soon the village was overrun by pressmen, TV crews and sightseers (although Buapan Lawicha claimed that people were afraid to walk past the field after dark in case they were "kidnapped by the alien like in a movie").

The district chief, Wisit Sittisombat, arrived to investigate the rumours in person. He sceptically concluded that "there was no evidence to consider the entity seen by the villagers as an alien". Police Chief Kittisin Kongtaweepan reached the same conclusion, but nevertheless stationed extra officers in the village to control the flood of visitors.

Inflated Opinions

At the height of the media frenzy, Tongmuan Pochailoet finally came clean about his missing scarecrow. He had not spoken sooner, he claimed, for fear of offending the Huay Nam Rak villagers. He made a sketch of his inflatable doll for reporters, who in turn showed it to the witnesses.

Although many witnesses had said that they first thought the strange figure was a doll or scarecrow, by now they had convinced themselves they had seen an extraterrestrial - and it was going to take more than Pochailoet's drawing to change their minds.

The doll had arms and legs, but the alien only had legs, they protested. The doll had a mouth but no ears, whereas the alien had ears but no mouth. And after all, hadn't a brilliant shooting star passed over the village only the night before the sightings?

A rumour even spread that the alien had been captured, and the local municipal office was overwhelmed by visitors clamouring to see the unearthly prisoner.

In desperation, the Mayor asked the village chief to set up a camera in the rice field in case the entity or balloon or whatever-it-was returned. (It didn't.) He also had to send workmen to repair the road running past the field, which had been churned to mud by the sudden influx of visitors.

Still, as district chief Wisit Sittisombat remarked, "Looking on the bright side, the villagers could be making money from selling food and drinks".

Well - it worked for Roswell, didn't it?

Related External Links:

Doll Mistaken For Alien
A case of mistaken identity from Brazil.

Sources

Ufo Evidence case file
Archived collection of news reports.