Truth is Stranger than Fiction

In this tele-serial named Gotham (it’s about Gotham City while Batman was still the kid), there’s one episode where a vigilante nicknamed the Balloon Man, approaches known bad guys who are too rich and too powerful to ever be prosecuted. The Balloon Man would approach such people, suddenly snap on a handcuff, and set off the inflation of a weather balloon attached to the other end of the handcuff. Upon which the balloon would go up, taking the handcuffed man along with it… until the balloon broke and the man plunged to his death.

 

Fiction, right? Until I read of street magician, David Blaine, who “grabbed onto a bunch of big helium balloons and floated into the sky”:

“Over the next 50 minutes, he rose to an altitude of almost 25,000 feet before letting go and skydiving/parachuting safely to the ground.”

If you’re interested, check out the 2-hour video of the whole event on YouTube.

 

Which in turn reminded me of Austrian daredevil, Felix Baumgartner, who back in 2012, became “the first man to break the speed of sound in freefall”. Yes, that’s right: he broke the sound barrier while in freefall! He went up in a weather balloon right up to the stratosphere (that’s almost 39 km up, or about 3½ to 4 times the height at which a plane flies). It took all of 4:20 minutes. And yes, that’s on YouTube as well.



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