There is no other story more awesome, more insane and more incredible than the story of Lawnchair Larry. This story might seem too far-fetched to be true, but rest assured everything you're about to read actually fucking happened.
The date was July 2, 1982, and a man by the name of Larry Walters, who had always dreamed of being an Air Force pilot but couldn't due to his poor eyesight, got the brilliant idea to make a flying machine of his own.
After finding a bunch of industrial grade weather balloons at a local Army surplus store in his hometown of San Pedro, California, Larry bought them without hesitation, forging paperwork in the process and saying they were for a television commercial.
Larry then took the balloons, tied them to a lawn chair (hence the nickname Lawnchair Larry) and filled them all full of helium. Equipped with his pellet gun, a CB radio, sandwiches, cold beer, and a camera, Larry sat in the chair and severed the rope anchoring his lawn chair to the ground.
Instead of slowly rising to a comfortable height of roughly forty feet like Larry had planned, the helium filled balloons quickly shot into the sky with Larry in tow. Larry and his lawn chair rose to a staggering height of over 16,000 feet in a matter of minutes.
Scared shitless, Larry didn't dare shoot any of the balloons like he'd planned. Instead, the poor bastard clinged on for dear life. Eventually, after 14 hours of being freezing cold and utterly terrified, Larry found himself slowly drifting over Long Beach and crossed the primary landing corridor of Los Angeles International Airport.
The bewildered pilot of an approaching TWA flight contacted ground control describing how he'd just flew passed a man in a lawn chair carrying a gun at 16,000 feet.
After trying to describe to ground control what he'd done via his CB radio, Larry decided to take a risk and shoot several of the balloons. He then accidentally dropped his pellet gun overboard, but luckily for him his makeshift craft, dubbed Inspiration I, began to slowly descend. While nearing the ground the balloons' dangling cables got caught in a power line, causing a blackout in Long Beach for over an hour.
Dangling from the power lines, Larry was able to jump out and safely land on the ground without harm. He was immediately arrested by waiting members of the Long Beach Police Department and fined $4,500 for his antics. The fine was later reduced to $1,500. When asked by a reporter why he had done it, Larry replied, "A man can't just sit around."
As a result of his insane adventure, Larry received instant fame, and was invited to Johnny Carson's Tonight Show and Late Night with David Letterman. The Smithsonian Institute even asked Larry to donate his craft to their museum, but he declined and gave it to a young admirer named Jerry instead (who still has it to this day.)
To date, Larry is the only person in history to have ever been awarded a Darwin award and lived through his ordeal to talk about it, since the Darwin Awards are generally awarded posthumously and reserved for those who "do a service to humanity by removing themselves from the gene pool" either by death or sterilization in an idiotic fashion.
Larry's antics were one of the many inspirations for the Pixar film Up and even inspired the crew of Mythbusters to test (and ultimately prove) the crazy physics behind Larry's lawn chair adventure. True stories don't get much more awesome than this.
For more information on Lawnchair Larry and his crazy adventure, click here.
