As the country watched a helium balloon believed to be carrying a 6-year-old boy fly out of control over Colorado Thursday, a Twin Cities man recalled a similar incident in Minnesota decades earlier that made international headlines.

In December 1969, then 11-year-old Rick Snyder, found himself on a runaway hot air balloon by himself.

"It was a Vikings game. The Vikings were playing San Francisco at home," recalls Snyder.

He stepped into a hot air balloon during halftime at the old Met Stadium for a part of a Winter Carnival promotion.

"The plan was to put the balloon up on a tether about a hundred feet, and I go up and wave at the crowd," said Snyder.

Snyder did what he was supposed to, but the balloon did not.

"It kept going up and up and up, and I thought something's wrong," he said. Somehow, the rope snapped.

"I was scared when I got up high enough where I was suddenly in the clouds and I couldn't see the ground anymore," he remembers.

Snyder had been in a balloon before, but it was always attached to the ground.

He said he turned off the burner first, but it just kept climbing. Finally, he opened a flap on the balloon and it began descending. It eventually landed in the Minnesota River a few miles away.

"I was thrown off the balloon, into the river on impact, and when my weight was gone from the balloon, the balloon then took off again," he said.

Layered in winter clothing, he made it to shore. He said his parents saw the balloon back in the air and followed it by car, until it crashed miles away in a field.

"They had to wade through waste deep snow to get to the balloon, and they got there and I wasn't in it, and then my parents freaked out," Snyder said.

They were eventually reunited. Rick escaped uninjured.

"I was lucky. It was a very happy ending," he said.