Other winners used different technologies to terminate themselves. While your correspondent has heard a similar story in a non-PC joke, a dim-witted Texan teenager really did decide to play “Russian roulette” with a self-loading semi-automatic pistol, increasing his odds of a self-inflicted fatal shot from one in six to one in one. Rockets have, of course, played a part in the achievements of past winners of the Darwin awards. While the one about a US Air Force sergeant fitting a JATO rocket engine to his Chevy Impala automobile to then blast himself into the side of a cliff is just an urban legend, there are a few true ones involving rockets. One of these award winners was a chap who in 1995 tried to parachute off the Niagara Falls on a rocket-boosted jet ski. Neither the rocket nor the parachute worked, due to water getting into the mechanism, and he plunged fatally into the drink. That is, if the authorities let him do it in the first place. Let us hope that “Mad” Mike has a safe flight for his sake, and does not win a “Darwin” himself.

The limousine chauffeur and self-taught rocket engineer, “Mad” Mike Hughes (pictured), has built a rocket out of scrap to blast himself high enough to prove the theory one way or the other. Well, either this, or it is his bid to join the winners of the Darwin Awards.įor the uninitiated, the Darwin Awards are named in honour of Charles Darwin, the father of evolution theory with its “survival of the fittest” premise, and are handed out to those who improve the human gene pool by removing themselves from it in a stupid way. Thus, the awards are normally given out posthumously.

Flat earther blasts off