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A UFO? |
(UPI) LONG BEACH, Calif. -- Look, up in the sky. Is it a bird, a plane, the space shuttle? No, it's Larry Walters at 16,000 feet in his lawn chair.
Walters, 33, a truck driver, spent nearly two hours in the air on Friday in an aluminum lawn chair suspended from a 50-foot cable attached to 45 helium-filled balloons.
Among other things, he threw a scare into a couple of airline pilots who happened across the path of his weird flying contraption.
"I know it sounds strange but it's true," said a Long Beach police officer. "The guy just filled up some balloons with helium, strapped on a parachute, grabbed a BB gun and took off."
But everything didn't go as planned and Walters had a few dicey moments
as he started getting numb in the cold atmosphere at 16,000 feet and decided to descend -- which he accomplished by popping some of the balloons with the BB gun. As he neared the ground he saw power lines.
"That's when I got scared," he said. "Those things can fry you."
He didn't get fried, the balloons draped themselves across the wires, leaving Walters dangling in his chair a few feet from the ground and he dropped to earth. The landing knocked out power in the neighborhood for 20 minutes.
"I have fulfilled my 20-year dream," said Walters, a truck driver for a company that makes TV commercials. "I'm staying on the ground. I've proved to myself that the thing works."
In addition to the BB gun and the parachute, Walter carried several one-gallon water jugs for ballast, a life vest and a CB radio.
"But the best piece of equipment was the lawn chair," Walters said. "It was a Sears. It was extremely comfortable."
Walters told authorities that he was trying to drift to the Mojave Desert, site of Sunday's scheduled space shuttle Columbia landing, but the winds didn't cooperate.
"I wasn't trying to upstage the space shuttle," Walters said. "I would have landed well away from there. I just wanted to lay back and enjoy it all, but I had to do something when my toes started getting numb."
Police said they probably would not file charges against Walters. But the Federal Aviation Administration was investigating, mainly because of the scare Walters gave the airline pilots who came across him at 16,000 feet in his flying lawn chair.
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