And what's more, his friends and family were all evidently on board with his plan, since they pitched in to help him out. According to the Telegraph , Basnayake was attempting to break the world record for "longest time buried alive," and he wasn't actually a stranger to being covered with dirt for hours at a time — his previous stunts had lasted between two and a half and six hours.
This time he was going for six and a half hours, but evidently that was around a half hour too long. When he was dug up at the end of the stunt he was unconscious, and he was dead by the time he arrived at the hospital. Of all the stupid stunts people do, speed stunts are probably the most impressive and the most dangerous.
Before the advent of cars, people tried to beat each other on foot, and then on horseback, and then while doing weird things like underwater archery or typing with your nose. So really it's more accurate to say that some speed stunts are dangerous and impressive, but definitely not all of them, unless the person who is typing on your keyboard with his nose has bird flu or something.
Anyway, according to Michigan Aviation Archaeology , year-old Lowell Bayles set the official air speed record of So Bayles tried again, but this time the attempt ended tragically. The plane took off and picked up speed, but before the official run began it "pitched violently," rolled three times and crashed in a spectacular fireball.
No one is completely sure what happened, but the most popular theory is that Bayles got hit on the head with his own gas cap, which came loose during flight and incapacitated him. The theory seems to be supported by video footage of the craft, and by the fact that the gas cap was found loose some distance from the crash site, along with Bayles' bloody goggles. It's kind of starting to seem like maybe Niagara Falls needs to answer for its crimes.
Because it's killed like 5, people, while Mt. Everest , in contrast, has only claimed around Granted, Everest does keep all its victims lying around like gruesome trophies, which is way more sociopathic than what Niagara does, but still, Niagara has some special powers — it can kill from a distance, sort of like Darth Vader only without all the one-sided banter during strangulation. So how does Niagara do this? Well, surviving the descent over Horseshoe Falls is kind of miraculous, and people who experience miracles sometimes think they're untouchable.
According to the LA Times , in year-old Canadian daredevil Karel Soucek went over Horseshoe Falls in a barrel, which must have given him some confidence because less than a year later he did the same basic stunt again, only this time from the top of the Astrodome into a foot wide water tank.
Overconfidence got him there, but the accident itself can be blamed on both the barrel's instability and the awesome power an audience who kind of wants you to just hurry up already because it only has the babysitter until 9 p.
Human beings dreamed of flight for centuries before the Wright brothers figured out how to do it. In fact it's probably safe to say that it's one of the core human ambitions, right behind becoming wealthy and eating as much chocolate cake as you want without having to worry about calories. So there really is a very long and distinguished list of people who have tried to conquer the skies in the stupidest ways possible.
A thousand years ago, though, you couldn't really blame people for thinking that all you need to achieve flight is a pair of wings somewhat similar to bird wings. So for most of human history you have accounts here and there of people who built wings, jumped off high places, and plummeted to their deaths.
According to How Stuff Works , one of the earliest records of this comes from A. So there you have it, it isn't just modern people who die in stupid, hopeful, arrogant ways. It appears to be built into our DNA. A lot of people tried to improve on human flight, but most of the time the only real flying that occurred was when the bits and pieces of those carefully crafted wooden or feathered wings flew into the air upon impact.
For some reason, it never occurred to most of these earlier aviators that they should maybe test their inventions on like a mannequin or a bear or something before actually strapping it to their bodies and jumping from the edge of a cliff. According to the Vintage News , Franz Reichelt was an Austrian tailor who evidently felt that his profession specially qualified him to design aerodynamic clothing, since everyone knows pant legs and coattails must perform within certain specifications on a gusty day.
Anyway it was , and Reichelt had just invented the parachute suit, which was basically a flight suit with a parachute built into it. Instead of testing the weird-looking thing on a dummy, though, he decided to test it on himself — this despite the fact he'd already broken a leg during an earlier, much lower altitude test.
That earlier failure, he felt, was entirely due to not being tested from even greater heights, and he was so sure of this fact that he went up to the first stage of the Eiffel Tower and then jumped feet to his death. As it turns out, a lot of people gave their lives during the early pursuit of flight, and it wasn't just in planes, gliders, and parachute suits.
Early hot air balloons were also pretty temperamental, like "I'm going to catch fire and fall out of the sky now" temperamental, which you might not know is like one of the worst kinds of temperamental there is, right behind "I'm going to explode now" and "I'm going to eat your liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.
According to National Geographic , the world's first deadly balloon crash happened in , when a balloon operated by French balloonists Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier and Pierre Romain caught fire and sent its occupants plummeting to Earth. The cause of the accident was most likely a stray spark, although it might not have happened at all if de Rozier hadn't put hydrogen in his balloon, which does tend to get rather explode-y when you combine it with fire.
The accident was the first balloon-related fatality in the history of manned flight, so at least the two men are remembered, though probably not for the reasons they'd hoped. Speed records on land or in the air are cool and all, but it takes a special kind of crazy to tackle a speed record on the water. Because water may look all pleasant and summery and like it's inviting you in for a swim but what it really wants is to kill you.
According to the Guardian , in Donald Campbell was trying to beat the water speed record of The weird thing about this story is that Campbell seemed to have known what would happen if he pushed his boat too far — he'd once said that Bluebird could withstand less than 3 degrees of nose lift before it would flip, and he was certainly smart enough to know that excessive speed could make that happen.
And here's the other half of the tragedy: Campbell died as the water speed world record holder, not because his fatal run had broken the existing record but because the existing record already belonged to him.
That's right, he died trying to best himself. Evel Knievel was the Elvis of daredevils, with his bright white, star-studded jumpsuit complete with cape and curly chest hairs. But even Evel Knievel knew his own limitations — after he nearly killed himself while attempting to jump 13 buses with a motorcycle , he went on to complete a single record-breaking jump of 14 buses and then called it quits. Well, there was that one stupid jump over a tank full of sharks that he did after that, but that was too lame to really talk about.
Anyway, lots of people since then have tried to duplicate Evel Knievel's stunts, but 13 or 14 buses is just so According to the LA Times , in a year-old Iranian daredevil named Javad Palizbanian decided to jump not 15 or 16 buses but 22, which would have really shown Evel Knievel who was still alive at the time who the true king of bus-jumping was, except that the stunt killed him.
Ironically, he came down on the 13th bus, so not only had he misjudged his abilities by a full nine buses, but he also unwittingly duplicated Knievel's 13 bus accident at Wembley Stadium in Wu Yongning called himself "China's First Rooftopper. Only the first 44 floors of the building are open to the public — Wu's girlfriend said he'd probably taken the elevator as far as it would go and then climbed the rest of the way.
Wu was an experienced stuntman who had completed similar feats hundreds of times and had made the equivalent of thousands of dollars from the videos he shot of himself performing. Wu's family believed that Sina News , one of China's major news outlets, had put up the money. His step-uncle said that Wu needed the cash for his mother's medical expenses and for his wedding. He had planned to propose to his girlfriend the day after his death.
Wu's death prompted debate in China over "close-to-death" reality videos, where people are encouraged to record themselves doing dangerous things in exchange for money and internet fame. Shortly after his death, Wu's stunt videos were removed from the two popular video services that had previously promoted them.
Sorry pilots, skydivers, and people who like to bounce really, really high on trampolines: Humans aren't meant to fly. Sure, we do it, and most of the time, we get away with it. But every now and then, we're reminded that we're really vulnerable up there, and when things go wrong, we can't just flap our wings and catch the next updraft to safety.
Because we don't have wings. They weren't in the helicopter, though — they were below it, hanging from a rope beside a huge Colombian flag. According to the Australian Associated Press , the pair were waving at the crowd when they suddenly fell to their deaths. The commander of the Colombian Air Force later said that the rope they were clinging to didn't detach — it snapped. He also said that investigators had eliminated the possibility that the rope was worn or that safety procedures weren't followed, which sounds kind of like a roundabout way of saying, "It's not our fault.
Reality TV has taught us one thing: Human beings will go to great lengths to achieve fame. Sometimes, people will even risk death for a shot at becoming a household name.
That sounds like an awful, awful suicide attempt, but that's not what it was — he was actually recording an audition video for a program called "India's Got Talent. Unfortunately, the fire raged out of control before Jalaluddin had a chance to remove his shirt, and his videographers were a bunch of neighborhood kids who ran away when things went south, leaving no one to help put out the blaze.
Jalaluddin suffered burns over 60 percent of his body. He died three days later in a hospital. The problem with becoming known for shooting amazing images from dizzying heights is that you always have to top yourself.
If you got a great shot from 15 stories high, then you need to get an even better shot from 30 stories high, and then you need to improve on that shot by climbing up the scaffolding on a construction site or dangling your feet off a ledge as the city buzzes along far, far below. Christopher Serrano shared the photos he shot from atop tall buildings and bridges in New York City with his , Instagram followers. According to the New York Post , Serrano was attempting a photo from the roof of a moving subway car when he was knocked off the train by an unknown object.
He died on the tracks while his girlfriend watched helplessly nearby. Serrano's last known image, captioned "It's lonely up here," was a shot of his feet dangling over Times Square from the top of a skyscraper.
Well, that's not what Norjani did with the According to MSN , Norjani kept the snake in his hut for about a week before he brought it out to show to his neighbors, but not in a "let me lure it out with this flute" sort of way. Instead, he spun it around until it was good and angry and even laughed when it hissed and lunged at him.
Unsurprisingly, the snake bit Norjani twice, once on his arm and once on his face. He resisted onlookers' efforts to help after the first bite and continued performing until after the snake delivered the second bite. Even then, he did not immediately seek medical attention. Two hours after his weird impromptu performance, Norjani was taken to a hospital and given antivenom, but he'd waited too long to seek help. He died that evening. After his death, his family cut the snake's head off, which is kind of a tragic epilogue, really, given that the snake wasn't exactly the instigator in the whole horrible affair.
In yet another installment of things you should never do for YouTube fame, a Spanish YouTuber named Ruben Carbonell broke into a cement factory late one night and then filmed his own death. The stunt didn't go the way Carbonell had planned it, unfortunately.
According to Extra. Carbonell went first, but his parachute failed to open. He fell to his death. Carbonell's YouTube channel featured parachuting and paragliding videos and similar jumps from tall structures like bridges. He had just subscribers, so he was either trying to create some wild content to draw in more fans or he was okay with risking his life for a handful of likes.
Either way, his death was an avoidable tragedy. Remember the Ice Bucket Challenge? That was like a couple of centuries ago in YouTube time, but for a while, it was a big thing. Except, one could get tired of watching random people pouring ice water on their heads and then gasping in miserable shock because, for some reason, it never seems to occur to anyone that ice is cold. Anyway, year-old Cameron Lancaster must have realized that being the bazilionth ice bucket challenger would just make people yawn, so he decided to up the game.
He completed the Ice Bucket Challenge and then followed it up with an foot leap into an abandoned quarry. In his defense, there was water in the quarry, and evidently, kids would jump into it all the time. But something went wrong this time, and Lancaster landed in shallow water.
His body was recovered four hours later. Lancaster wasn't the first person to suffer the fatal consequences of a not-boring Ice Bucket Challenge — according to The Telegraph, just a few days before Lancaster's stunt, a woman attempted the challenge on the back of a horse and died after the animal threw her, because horses don't like having buckets of icy water dumped on them any more than humans do.
There's a reason why today's Red Bull commercials are cartoons — cartoon characters can't accidentally die during filming. Well, that's probably not the entire reason, but we'd like to think that Red Bull has thought long and hard about including extreme sports athletes in their promotional materials after what happened to Shane McConkey.
Probably not, but we'd like to think so. The year before his death, he jumped nearly 1, feet above Whistler Valley during a grand opening performance for a ski gondola. Red Bull planned to feature him in a promotional movie, but something went wrong during the shoot.
McConkey was supposed to release his skis after performing a double backflip off a cliff, but only one of them disengaged, and it became tangled up with the one that was still on his foot. McConkey managed to release the ski manually, but it was too late to deploy the parachute. He died on impact. One of the great tragedies of dangerous stunts is that other people sometimes die trying to come to the rescue of doomed daredevils.
After Megan Scraper fell from the top of a treacherous waterfall, her companions tried to save her — and they died, too. Scraper and her friends were members of High on Life, which promotes dangerous stunts in exotic places, doesn't discourage trespassing, and probably also doesn't encourage anyone to mind the posted "danger" signs.
High on Life members usually document their crazy stunts with video or still photography, and it often ends up on social media. According to the Washington Post , Scraper, Ryker Gamble, and Alexey Lyakh were walking along the ledge at the top of Shannon Falls pictured when Scraper slipped and got caught up in fast-moving rapids.
Gamble and Lyakh jumped in after her, but the current was too strong and all three of them plummeted about feet. No one survived. High on Life likes to promote the idea of "living life to the fullest," but members have been criticized for doing stuff that isn't just dangerous but also obnoxious, and the apparent goal seems to be more about grabbing a photo than "living life to the fullest. Most people don't die from knitting.
Most of us don't need to build a rocket in order to know that the Earth isn't flat because the world has cameras and, you know, science. Still, there are some people who are convinced that it's all a big conspiracy, literally every scientist in the world is in on it, and the reason why they're all lying is because stuff.
And things. It seemed Mike Hughes was one of that handful of people who was convinced that the Earth is flat, but he wanted the rest of the world to be convinced, too. So he built a rocket, which he launched from the California desert. That's one way to find out whether or not the Earth is flat. Those remote cameras should tell you everything you need to know.
Unfortunately, his rocket crashed shortly after launch, and he was killed before he could reach the hoped-for altitude of 5, feet. Hughes wasn't an amateur daredevil. According to the BBC , he'd successfully completed a lower-altitude launch the year before his fatal attempt, and he set a Guinness World Record in for the longest limousine jump.
So his fatal accident wasn't necessarily because he was an inexperienced daredevil, and there was definitely an element of very, very bad luck. Base jumping carries a one-in-2, risk of death. Sounds pretty safe, right? That's per jump, though, so if you jump 25 times a year for ten years, well, you'll probably like those odds a lot less. Let's just say your chances of dying are about 43 times greater than they would be if you just jumped out of a plane.
Base jumping websites even admit it's dangerous. Heck, danger is part of the appeal. But it's also why we really shouldn't be surprised that there are so many deceased base jumpers.
Uli Emanuele was famous for a wing-suit jump through an 6. But even the best base jumpers are vulnerable when they're flying around the mountaintops at speeds exceeding mph , and Emanuele's luck ran out while he was shooting video for GoPro in the Dolomites. According to The Inertia , Emanuele lost control during a jump and crashed into the rocks before he could deploy his parachute. He was Here's a piece of advice: If you're going to break a world record , you should choose something like "heaviest weight lifted by a human beard," or if you lack the ability to grow a beard, maybe "most spoons stuck to a human body.
Jessi Combs set the land speed record for a four-wheeled vehicle in October Her jet-powered vehicle hit miles per hour, but Combs wasn't satisfied. She made a few attempts to bust her own speed record and clocked more than mph in those attempts, but the runs couldn't be recorded as records because of mechanical issues.
Undaunted, Combs decided she was going to aim for mph, which is a weirdly specific number, but okay. Ultimately, she wanted to beat Kitty O'Neil's land speed record of mph, which had been set in a three-wheeled vehicle in Combs was in her jet-powered car on a dry lake bed in Oregon's Alvord Desert when USA Today says the front wheel suffered a mechanical failure, causing the entire wheel assembly to collapse. Combs had accelerated to nearly mph at the time of the failure.
Joining student groups and other clubs is a pretty normal part of the college experience. You can join the French club or the theater club, or you can join the Oxford Stunt Factory if you really don't care if you ever graduate. What's the Oxford Stunt Factory? It's a self-described "dangerous and extreme sports club" for students of Oxford University. Kostydin Yankov was a member, though the club denied any part in the fatal event he traveled to in According to Cherwell , the Oxford University student newspaper, the event featured a medieval-style catapult designed to fling humans instead of rocks or cows or whatever they used to fling with catapults in the actual Middle Ages.
The first four participants made it to the net, but only just, and for some reason, that wasn't enough to convince event organizers that they might need to recalibrate the machine or, you know, move it closer to the net. Yankov missed the net completely, breaking his legs and spine. He died in the hospital later that day. To be fair, organizers were weighing participants and testing the machine with equally weighted objects, but that wasn't enough to save Yankov.
Three years later, a coroner concluded that the accident could have been avoided had there been additional safety tests. The accident could have also been avoided if event organizers weren't flinging live humans from catapults, but let's not spend too much time on the details, or anything. Human beings love competitive sports.
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