Like most folks, I suspect, I didn’t figure there was much if anything more that could or should be said about the “Great Balloon Boy Hoax of ’09.” So there wasn’t much interest in this latest Netflix “Trainwreck” doc about pop culture events gone sideways.

But I glimpsed a few excerpts from reviews from respectable publications that suggest that filmmaker/interviewer Gillian Pachter planted the seeds of doubt as to whether or not this “hoax” was a hoax after all.

Watching “Trainwreck: Balloon Boy,” I’m not sure she did. That doesn’t mean she didn’t score points against the prosecutors in this tale — the Colorado Sheriff and sheriff’s department that charged them, the media that embraced this story and turned on the Heene family in a flash and the public’s lemming-like rush to judgement in such situations.

Yes, a lot of that public opinion was formed by the way a six year-old child, interviewed on live TV, described what had been going on as “for a show.” Maybe young Falcon Heene, the “boy” his family thought had flown away in that UFO balloon, was talking about whatever his family was planning on doing with this wacky inflatable flying saucer experiment that they were filming. And that isn’t necessarily damning, if you buy into their TV pilot pitch that “went wrong” claim. Or maybe Falcon was talking about the “show” that all this attention — local and national TV news, etc. — brought his family.

Yes, the police tactics — a mixture of lies, cajolery, threats and leading questions posed to Richard Heene and in a separate interview, his Japanese-American wife Mayumi Heene — were suspect. Some of that is on display in damning police interrogation tapes, including a “manipulated” –Sheriff Jim Alderden claims — lie detector test Richard took,  most are the hallmarks of a fine bit of Colorado railroading.

Yes, the kid Falcon, interviewed 15 years later, comes off as credible and innocent today. We’re allowed to wonder, just based on him, if maybe this wasn’t a hoax after all.

But if their plea-dealing lawyer, David Lane, has a point about “They had no case, nothing” about the prosecution, then why did anybody involved pitch or accept that “deal” that put Richard Heene in jail for a month and landed his not-yet-a-citizen wife on probation?

It’s a real can-of-worms film, in which the sheriff comes off like most sheriffs — blustery, spinning and law-unto-himself bully — the father comes off as a manic on-the-spectrum flake with the neighbors who knew this family perhaps being be the most credible witnesses of all.

And if that’s true, maybe it was a hoax, or maybe it wasn’t, as those neighbors themselves wonder as they admit going back and forth about this.

The most damning thing about this entire “stunt” is the family’s behavior, captured on their own video, of the moment they think their littlest boy was hiding in the gondola of their “flying saucer” that slipped its balloon tethers . They give what look like “performances.” And they damned well make sure to keep those performances in the frame of their locked-down/tripod-fixed camera.

The second most damning thing is our reminder that TV news has never shaken its collective mania for an inconsequential but telegenic and “dramatic” story, this one about a child in peril. Joseph Pulitzer, over 150 years ago, summed up an ethos that has never left our profession, even after we started calling ourselves “journalists.”

“News,” the famous newspaper baron said, “is anything that makes somebody go ‘Gee whiz.'”

Even when this started to look like a hoax, few people in law enforcement or in the media asked the right follow-up questions.

Did Mayumi, whose broken English all these years later comes off as fishy, misunderstand what she was “confessing” to, under pressure? Sheriff Alderden trots out her “English major” college grad from Japan and some college in the U.S. bonafides.

But if she’s that bright, how did she end up marrying and raising a family with this flakey, breathless savant, which is a generous way of describing the “attention whore” with no visible (in the film) means of support, Richard Heene?

“Balloon Boy” leaves us with more questions than credible answers, which can’t have been Pachter’s goal all along. She doesn’t quite make the maybe-not-a-hoax sale, despite her best efforts.

One thing that should surprise no one is where the Heenes landed when they fled infamy and Colorado.

Florida? Sure. Bradenton? That’s just too on-the-nose. I used to live there and work at the newspaper. That corner of the state was and is a cheap living magnet for musicians — some of the more infamous Allmann Brothers bandmates, this Brit band’s drummer, that famous bass player.

And it’s tucked tightly between the “sideshow freak” settlement of Ruskin, and the old circus town Mr. Ringling built up, Sarasota.

So when Heene promises “something new” and “something big” he’s a put to unveil at the end of “Trainwreck,” he’s in the right place to humbug that. “Hokum” is all around him. He must feel right at home.

Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Richard Heene, Mayumi Heene, Bob Heffernan, Dean Askew, Jim Alderden, Jimmy Negri, Tina Chavez, Bradford Heene, David Lane and Falcon Heene

Credits: Scripted and directed by Gillian Pachter. A Netflix release.

Running time: :52