...in which I refuse to believe it.
This can't possibly be for real, can it?
Colton Harris-Moore is the kind of person you find it difficult to believe exists: He’s a legendary folk bandit archetype-part Robin Hood, part Tom Sawyer and part John Dillinger. He’s a criminal that hasn’t just charmed the hearts of swooning young girls but-considering the random accidental escapes, fateful strokes of luck and quite frankly idiotic stunts that miraculously work out just fine in the end-has apparently gotten the universe itself wet.
He lives entirely in the forests outside Seattle like a feral child. He’s thought to be responsible for several dozen burglaries. He’s stolen cars, speedboats and even several planes which he taught himself to fly by playing video games. And that is balls right there; figuring you can fly a plane because you’ve played Crimson Skies for an afternoon. He actually got in an aircraft and took it up into the sky because he’d played a game about it before. To put that into perspective, that’s like starting a war because you beat the first level of Halo.
It gets even crazier: He uses stolen thermal vision goggles to hunt at night, and he mostly just steals things he can use like blankets, food and medical supplies. He once made off by driving a car into a gas storage tank and using the explosion as a distraction to escape, another time by crash-landing a plane into a forest clearing and another time by slipping through the dragnet of the largest manhunt in a decade. The FBI and police coordinated their efforts and cordoned off an entire island just to catch him. The result? Two policemen say they “think they saw him once” but that he “disappeared right in front of their eyes.”
Basically, he’s a feral hillbilly criminal Batman.
That’s the take Cracked.com has on the story, but the real story is no less crazy. I’ve decided not to believe it until Rachel does a piece on the kid.