Pay up.

Okay. He's alive. Thank God. For a couple of minutes I thought of the worst. But just from the body language alone, you can see it is going to be a rough couple of months for thsi family. The mother has her arms around her two older sons, the father does not have his hands around anyone and their smallest kid is standing by himself with a Jenny Slate face.

“We don’t charge lost people and we certainly aren’t contemplating passing on any of the financial aspects to the family,” he said. If the family has a hunter’s license or a fisher’s license, he added, then the authorities could recover some of the costs “through an emergency type fund that they give grants out of.”
As for the question of criminal charges, Sheriff Alderden said this was simply a case of a boy hiding because he was afraid of being scolded, and that everyone involved was just relieved that he was found.
“I was under the strong belief that the boy had fallen out of this craft by the time it had landed,” he said. “I was expecting the worst scenario and to have one come out so positive like this it’s overwhelming.”

No. This family needs to pay for the cost of this whole wild goose chase. First of all this could have easily been avoided if the parents had taken the proper precautions to secure the balloon. I mean for f**k's sake, a 6 year old kid was able to release the balloon, I can think of multiple ways of preventing this from happening and I know absolutely nothing about ballooning.

I recall incident when I was in junior high school when during a an after school rehearsal of the school musical somebody pulled the fire alarm.

The next day, our music teacher spoke to us and I still remember her words to this day.

"It could have been your house."

She explained to all of us that if a real emergency had actually occurred when the alarm was pulled, the consequences would have been disastrous.

What if a real emergency had actually occurred while this whole fiasco was transpiring? What if a life or lives were really in danger and desperately needed aid? There would be blood on the hands of these parents.

Compensating everyone is the least they can do.

When you are young, you do stupid things. Everyone can relate to that. That is why we have parents to ensure that we do not royally screw up.

UPDATE! Apparently it looks like this whole thing might have been a hoax.

If that is the case, I think some jail time would also be reasonable.