Swiss inventor Yves Rossy took Elton John's Rocket Man just a little to seriously

Remember those cool jet packs you saw in the movies as a kid? Well, they’re for real, folks, as we saw this week, when Swiss inventor/daredevil/rocket man Yves Rossy jumped out of a perfectly good helicopter and treated onlookers in Rio De Janeiro and the Christ the Redeemer statue to a little jet-powered ingenuity before landing on Copocabana Beach.

At present, Rossy is the only man ever to have had the pleasure to live out his wildest Jetsons wet dreams, as his jet pack, which he invented himself, is the only one in existence (darn!), though this wasn’t his debut flight. Rossy became the first man every to fly with a jet pack back in 2009 when he did a fly by over the Swiss Alps.

And I thought the Swiss just made clocks and chocolate…

Anyway, a little video of Rossy’s adventures high over Rio de Janeiro in his jet pack. Let’s see how long before he auctions it off on Ebay…

The picture says it all.  Daredevil Austrian BASE Jumper Felix Baumgartner scaled one of the largest and certainly most famous statues on Earth way back in January 1999.  What made this jump so spectacular was that this was the lowest BASE jump on record at the time.  At 95 feet, Baumgartner had just seconds after jumping to pull his chute.  The high jumps like Burj Khalifa might be sexier, but it’s low jumps like this that are riskier because there’s precious little time for the parachute to open before the jumper becomes road pizza.  This jump went down in history as one of the most dangerous, and most spectacular ever caught on film, and enough to make Environmental Graffiti’s The 5 Most Mindblowing BASE Jumps in History, and my own personal thumbs up.