Of course, it would have also proven whether or not your wife was using the golf club on your face before the incident. The point is that, unlike most vehicle accident cameras, the Car Cam Dually offers a more complete picture of how an accident went down, making it easier to prove who was at fault and what kind of injuries were sustained. To that end, the device also keeps track of your GPS location and the g-force of the impact. [Spy Gadgets via TRFJ via DVICE]

Authorities are trying to rescue the balloon but there's no much they can do about it, as the UFO is flying without control over northeastern Colorado, pushed by 15 to 20mph southwest wind. According to Eloise Campanella, Larimer County Sheriff's Officer spokeswoman, "the device could rise to 10,000 feet." At that altitude, temperature is very low and there's little air to breathe.

The balloon was made with helium balloons and tinfoil by his father, Richard Heene (who is quite a weird character, as you can see in the video of him trying to prove life in Mars). Hopefully things won't end dramatically this time, and we will see a happy ending so the people at Pixar can make a follow up to Up!.

Update 1: The flying saucer is down. The boy is OK, but it's not clear yet if he was in the balloon or not. MSNBC is saying now that the kid wasn't on the balloon after they said he was, but CBS just said he was.

Update 2: Boy is not in the balloon. County sheriff is saying that the Colorado emergency office and various sheriff offices are organizing a search and rescue operation.

Update 3: They are evaluating areas for the search.

Update 4: The Heene family is one weird bunch. Once upon a time, they participated in ABC's WifeSwap:

The Heene family from Colorado live life on the edge. Wife Mayumi (43) and storm scientist Richard (45) take their three kids, Bradford (8), Ryo (7) and Falcon (5), out of school to go on storm chasing missions to prove Richard's theories about magnetic fields and gravity. If conditions are right, Mayumi wakes her family by shouting "Storm Approaching, Storm Approaching!" into a bullhorn. The family sleep in their clothes so they can leap out of bed and into the storm-mobile. Richard calls Mayumi his 'ninja wife'; she maintains equipment, drives the storm-mobile, films tornadoes and waits with the kids while Richard jumps on his motorbike, heads into the eye of the storm and launches rockets to measure magnetic forces. At home the family are as chaotic as a twister: the kids have no table manners and throw themselves around the house, and while Richard devotes every moment to his research, he expects Mayumi to cook, clean and run the house without any help.

Meanwhile on a quiet street in Connecticut, the Martel family — wife Karen (43), husband Jay (50) and their two kids, Max (11) and Dean (10) — live a life of calm and safety. Dad is so committed to safety that he runs a child-proofing business devoted to identifying dangers and risks and making sure kids stay out of harm's way. With all the precautions taken to keep them safe, Max and Dean seem to be afraid of everything..."you can fall down the stairs, get cancer from the microwave, get tapeworms from sushi, and the lava lamp could explode..." The Martels conduct safety fire drills, make sure the kids wear protective gear on their bikes and pogo-sticks and never let the boys out of their sight. The atmosphere in the house is calm and serene, and Karen and Jay are equal partners.

Now, enjoy this "rap video" with the three kids.

Update 5: I'm not surprised the father picked an UFO theme for the helium balloon. Check him proving life on Mars on iReport:

Update 6: One of the siblings says he saw Falcon getting into the UFO. Police are looking now for an object—presumably a box—that was seen dropping from the balloon.

Update 7: The boy was actually at home.

According to the USAF, the driver lost control of the truck because a "large insect" landed on the driver's back. The truck was hauling Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile parts from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. Fortunately—and unlike other recent incidents that originated at the Minot Air Force base—the crash didn't involve any nuclear warheads. Or an attack by Mothra, for that matter. [Danger Room]

Dirk had an accident. Below is the X-ray showing his totally crushed finger tip. It took 1 1/2 hours of surgery to remove the shattered bones and repair the damage. Medically speaking, he crushed his right index finger distal phalange. The magnets had a 50 cm (20 inch) separation when they decided to fly together.

Neodymium magnets are rare-earth magnets and are the among the strongest made today. Their strength is graded on a scale that ranges from N24 to N55—this particular magnet clocked in at N45. Sufficed to say, these magnets are dangerous. To be honest, this guy is probably lucky he didn't lose his whole hand.

Dirk posted several shots of his mangled finger online in an effort to warn people about the risks of purchasing these magnets—but I spared you the goriest of them. For those of you who are not squeamish (and not sitting at work) hit the following link to witness the horror in its entirety. [Magnetnerd via Geekologie]

[Break via Jalopnik]

[ABC News via Crunchgear]

Luckily, fellow astronaut Stephen Bowen was nearby to help afterwards, sharing his tools with Stefanyshyn-Piper. Flight controllers are currently trying to track its location in orbit and determine its impact on the next three spacewalks. "Oh, great"? Really? Since E.T. is back home now, I suppose he can call the space station to find out what's up, track down the bag, and personally hand-deliver it to Stefanyshyn-Piper. Only she'll be like, "Holy mother *bleep* what the *bleep* *bleep* Reeses' *bleep* *bleep* Pieces *bleep*!!" [Associated Press]

FOR WANT OF A TRANSPORTER

My father loved engineering. Anything he could do to visit NASA, an aircraft carrier, a submarine, he'd do it. There was no end to the enjoyment he received when people would come up to him and say, "I'm an engineer because of you." So when a company in Texas offered to launch his remains into orbit, we could only accept.

It's been just over 3 years since my dad, James Doohan, passed on. In that time, there have been many memorials, the most recent of which to commemorate Linlithgow, Scotland, as the future birthplace of Scotty. But his launch into space was the most publicized, and it was to be the most significant.

There have been many attempts to send my father on his way. On Saturday, the latest launch attempt by SpaceX, with a portion of my father's remains aboard, failed to achieve orbit. While there are many complicated reasons why this is a disappointment, mine is simple: I'd like to finish saying goodbye.

Every launch attempt is like reliving his funeral. There’s a lot of pomp and ceremony, and a retelling of his deeds in life. But at the end of these funerals, something goes awry, the body doesn't get buried, and you know you're going to have to come back to do it over again.

I'm not laying blame on anyone for the delays. It's difficult, living on the cusp of technology. Where most of us lament the premature obsolescence of our cell phones, there are those few of us who've pinned the memories of our family members on a rocket, hoping it will touch the sky.

My dad believed in human ingenuity, and he believed in mankind's destiny beyond the exosphere. That it would take several attempts in these early stages to successfully achieve orbit would not have phased him. I can accept this, because of who he was, and because he knew it was all a part of progress.

For those reasons, I know that his spirit will persevere, and others will keep those launch attempts coming. The act of sending a loved one's remains into space will someday be commonplace, even if we have to book a space flight ourselves to make it happen. That's the kind of progress my father believed in.

But I'm not sure I can hang on until then. Grieving can't wait for the pace of progress, and I have to say goodbye now. So when news of the next launch rolls around, please don't ask me about it; I won't be paying attention.

If my father has anything to do with it, though, I'm sure that ship will get where it's going.

— Ehrich Blackhound

I know several scientists and engineers who use Scotty's infamous "I tell the Captain it'll take me a day to fix it, when I know it'll take 6 hours" theory in real life. SpaceX will undoubtedly achieve a 100% successful launch some time soon. And with space journeys for non-astronauts almost upon us, I'm pretty sure James Doohan will make it into space properly. It'll be a good final farewell for his family. [BoingBoing]

The first flight took him from the Brazilian town of Ampére to San Antonio, in Argentina, complete with tin foil pants and a DIY seat. He landed without any incident, getting rid of the balloons to lose altitude until he reached the ground.

The second flight isn't finished yet. Or at least, not officially. This time he had with him a GPS unit, which he planned to use to relay his coordinates to the ground.

There was only one problem: he didn't know how to use it correctly. Padre Adelir de Carli took off after a special mass last Sunday, at 1PM. The weather was bad, but he didn't care. He wanted to fly again, this time to beat the record of flight distance with party balloons. And besides, he was sure his new GPS was going to provide him with some safety, a way to ask for help with his precise location in the case anything went wrong.

The plan didn't work out. The strong winds took him 31 miles into the sea, and a little bit later, frustrated, he requested help from people on the ground:

I need to contact someone who can teach me how to operate this GPS, so I can give the latitude and longitude coordinates, which is the only way that people on the ground can know where I am.

Sadly, nobody was able to explain to him how to do it correctly and, around 9PM—the time of his last contact—he disappeared. After a two-day search using military police helicopters, and the cooperation of local fishing boats, it seems Father de Carli's flying dreams are not going to have a happy ending. The last thing that people found were fragments of balloons, next to the beaches of Santa Catarina.

I'm sure some people will call him an idiot for not learning how to use the GPS first, but what is more interesting in this story is asking how technology could still be so difficult to use. Is it really necessary to read an instruction manual or get directions to operate a gadget? The answer is simple: It doesn't have to be.

I'm supposed to be a "technology expert," dealing all day long with gadgets, but I still find plenty of devices that are a complete user interface nightmare. Things that require instruction manuals when there are no excuses anymore to design clear, straightforward interfaces that can be accessed by people with zero experience in technology.

I see this sad event, which has ended in the tragedy of a missing person—obviously he's a bit crazy and this is all his fault—as an example of all that is wrong with the design of machines today. Not because technology itself was the cause of him getting lost—it wasn't. It was more bad luck and bad planning than anything else. After all, his first flight was a success without GPS, and men have been wandering through Earth without any help for thousands of years.

The problem here is that I can imagine his frustration, trying to make sense of an infernal device so he could tell people his exact location, all the while knowing that he was going to get lost forever in the immensity of the sea.

And while we don't put ourselves in these crazy life or death situations every day, it wouldn't be bad if manufacturers actually invested some money and intelligence in making technology truly accessible. Not just a bunch of circuits and software tied together with extremely badly-designed UIs that merely alienate the user, but devices that can actually help people and make their experiences enjoyable.

Until then, I'm afraid we will have to live with thousands of useless gadgets that not men, and neither God will ever truly understand. [G1 and G1]

According to the shepherd's sister, he's taking Roskosmos to court for compensation for the stress he's suffered. After all, the metal casing nearly crushed his outhouse. Roskosmos agrees that if it is a genuine case he will be paid "No question about it. We live in a civilized, law-abiding country." Hmmm.

If it is an unwanted, "normal" piece of rocket, sounds like Boris will be rich. The Roskosmos spokesman does hedge his bets a bit, though, noting that sometimes "somebody gets greedy, and it turns out the parts did not fall on his land, but that they were dragged there. Those moments are not good."

If bits of rocket do actually fall off regularly and make it to the ground, then remind me never to go live near Kazakhstan. [Reuters]

It sounds fairly dubious, but it seems that shortly after take-off, one 22-pound BDU-33 dummy bomb from a group of six just "fell off" one of the F16s that was heading for a practice bombing run in Kansas. The first indication that something was amiss was apparently at the bombing range itself, where only five impacts were recorded from that aircraft.

There I was thinking that flyers were heroic, intelligent keen-eyed guys. I mean, you'd think you'd notice bombing Tulsa wouldn't you? Mind you, I've never been there. [Danger room]

Joeseph McPhatter of Baltimore, MD, recently was cruising along when he was abruptly cut off and wrecked his motorcycle. Upon crashing, McPhatter was launched over 100 feet at a rate of 140MPH and instantly became the Impact Jacket's first "real world" motorcycle crash test. Medics claim that if McPhatter hadn't been wearing the Impact Jacket, his injuries, which amounted to a few sore ribs, would have been severely worse—if not fatal. Thanks, Impact Jacket! [Baltimore Sun via Core77]