Balloon boy's dad studied storms with ex-WRGB weatherman

The father of the Colorado boy thought to have flown away in a homemade helium aircraft Thursday afternoon studies extreme weather and is intensely interested in extraterrestrials, according to media reports. He also happens to be one-half of a weather-investigative team with a former on-air weather personality at CBS 6.

Richard Heene, 48, has twice been featured with his family on the ABC reality television show "Wife Swap," and was selected especially for their weather-chasing obsession. 

"ABC said they devote their lives to scientific research, including 'building a research-gathering flying saucer to send into the eye of the storm," according to an Associated Press article reporting Heene's stint on the show.

That obsession with extreme weather bred a science investigative team called "The Psycience Detectives," which is trying to prove that rotating storms create magnetic fields, the New York Daily News reported Friday. 

His partner, according to the Daily News and several online searches? Former WRGB/CBS 6 TV weatherman Scott Stevens, who was famously dismissed from the station in 1995 after it was discovered he had fabricated his meteorology credentials. 

Stevens and Heene formed The Science Detectives after the two met during a radio show Heene was hosting, according to a 2007 Denver Post profile of the team. They bonded over their theory, which, Stevens told Post, would "rewrite meteorology."

The profile goes on to describe the duo's wild-weather chasing ventures.

Stevens had gone on to work for a television station in Idaho after his termination at WRGB, according to his online bio (which now appears outdated). His bio briefly references his stint here, saying, "I spent a little more than a year in the Capital District of New York as the chief for WRGB. What beautiful country!  And they know how to clear the roads after a big snowstorm!"

Heene maintains a YouTube channel under the "Psycience Detectives" name.