Demise of Giant Pig Balloon Links Obama to Pork

By Anastacia Mott Austin

The fate of the puffed-up porker flown overhead by Roger Waters this week at the Coachella music festival has been discovered.

The enormous inflated pig was two stories tall and the width of two school buses, and had the word "Obama" painted on its underside, in support of the candidate by former Pink Floyd band member Roger Waters. And, one would think, not easy to misplace. But there it went, floating off into the night sky, never to be seen in one piece again. Concert organizers immediately put out word of the missing pig (perhaps flyers were distributed with "lost: giant pig" on them), and a $10,000 reward was offered for its return.

Sadly, the gigantic pig-shaped balloon was found several days later, in two separate pieces, by residents of a nearby neighborhood. Cynical minds might suspect a sneaky GOP plot…..or perhaps that invisible sniper fire that keeps Hillary Clinton ducking.

Regardless of the cause of its demise, hopes for recovering the enormous, expensive balloon have of course been deflated.

The giant pig balloon has become a staple of Waters’ concerts, and it floats overhead while the band sings the 1977 Pink Floyd hit "Pigs." This is not the first time the helium-filled hog has escaped.

During a 1976 Pink Floyd photo shoot for their "Animals" album, the giant pig balloon used for the shoot escaped its ties to a London power plant and floated for miles, rising as high as 40,000 feet and cancelling airline flights from Heathrow before it came to rest at a farm in Kent.

In 2006, the buoyant boar broke free during a Roger Waters’ concert at the Hollywood Bowl before being captured.

At this week’s Coachella concert, the pig was decorated with a menacing version of Uncle Sam holding two meat cleavers, with the words "Don’t be led to the slaughter" spray-painted alongside. The underside of the pig had the word "Obama" painted on it, with a giant check-box made to look like a ballot.

When the pig first was spotted drifting in the air space around Indio, California, where the Coachella festival is held, folks reporting it to local police got a skeptical response. Ben Guitron, from the Indio police department, said that initially dispatchers thought right, pigs are flying, sure. But then they saw it for themselves. "Then someone said, ‘Look up, there's a giant pig flying over Indio,’" said Guitron to reporters. "Then it vanished into the moonlight."

The two neighbors who discovered the remains of the porcine balloon will split the reward funds, and keep the lifetime Coachella tickets also offered with the reward.

Said La Quinta resident Susan Stolz, who found half of the pig’s vinyl remains on her driveway, "My sons who are in their 20s will think I'm pretty cool." Stolz’s neighbor Judy Rimmer found the other half, and both families are thrilled to have what amounts to $5,000 each of pork fall out of the sky onto their driveways.

Of course, this doesn’t look good for Barack Obama. What with the endorsement from Pink Floyd on the pig. You know that means he is in cahoots with that unsavory rock band.

And now he’ll be linked to pork handouts to the neighborhoods around Indio, just to get people’s votes.

Nope, not a good week for Obama.