After fearing for the life of a 6-year-old who wasn’t in a saucer-like helium balloon, some people are now accusing the family of staging a hoax. Others want them to pay or somehow be punished.  Welcome to age of instant judgment based on emotion, asumption and few facts.

Should we hate balloon boy because his family is a little bonkers?  Or because they toyed with our emotions?

The father, Richard Heene, didn’t come off very well this morning on NBC’s “Today” show. Bu then, he’s not the most articulate person to begin with and the whole family is, well, eccentric.

Heene was upset that anyone would think he staged a stunt involving his own son. He called the drama that played out on television Thursday a “horrible moment.”

“I really don’t want to re-live that again. It was a really horrible, horrible moment for me and my wife as well,” Heene told Meredith Vieira today from his Fort Collins, Colo., home.

The nation watched the balloon soar and glide for hours, fearing the worst and wondering how television would cover the ending (which could have been horrible if the boy were really in that balloon).

Heene, a contractor, amateur storm-chaser and alien investigator, seemed to be on the verge of tears, and his son, Falcon, vomited during the interview, causing Vieira to take a break. “The first thing I was thinking was perhaps he had fallen out,” Heene said. “What would have I have to gain?” he said when asked if it was a hoax.

The home-made balloon went adrift, and Falcon’s older brother told his father that Falcon was in a a compartment below the mushroom-shaped balloon. That resulted in massive TV coverage most of Thursday afternoon and a three-hour hunt for Falcon during which searchers retraced the route the silvery craft had taken. The drama, which had been watched by millions on cable TV, finally ended when the boy came down from the attic of the family’s garage — where he had been hiding the entire time.

During an interview Thursday night on CNN, Falcon touched off a controversy when he said, “We did this for a show.” The comment raised questions about whether the entire drama had been a stunt designed to bring attention to the Heene family, who twice appeared on the ABC reality show “Wife Swap.”

“First of all, let’s clarify: He’s 6,” Heene pointed out. “I don’t know that he really understood the question he was being asked.”

Heene then said Falcon may have been referring to an incident Thursday evening when photographers asked him to retrace his actions and climb into the garage attic again. “One of the guys told him it was for some TV show. That’s what he was referring to when he made that statement,” Heene said.

“I’m starting to get a little ticked off,” Heene told Vieira regarding allegations of a staged stunt. “I’m repetitively getting asked this. What do I have to gain out of this? I’m not selling anything. I’m not advertising anything. My family and I, we do this all the time.”

According to local and national reports, the members of the Heene family, which includes three sons, sleep in their clothes so they can leap out of bed to chase storms. They are said to be active experimenters who chase storms and investigate reports of aliens.

“We’re always doing some kind of scientific research,” Heene said. “We’re always building something together. I teach my kids how to shoot cameras. It’s highly educational for my boys ... This is not some kind of hoax.”

It’s easy to see why some people are calling for an investigation because the Heene family has been on television before as part of the ABC series “Wife Swap,” which features non-traditional families swapping children and spouses in a social/cultural experiment.

Heene and his wife apparently believe in extraterrestrials and, according to their conduct on “Wife Swap,” they have few rules for their children.