Mr Boria said he “somersaulted out the chair” and parachuted down to safety after the balloons took him too high.
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Boria’s idea was to parachute into the Calgary Stampede, a rodeo and accompanying festival, to advertise his startup cleaning product business All Clean Natural.
I seriously hope this isn’t another one of those Steve Fausset types who gets it in his head that his main role in life is to be an “adventurer” heading on these wild excursions just because he can (and because it gets him attention).
Speaking about his flight, Mr Boria, 26, said: “The winds were pretty fierce up there, no doubt.. the winds were so strong, it pushed me back”.
“It was eerie because it didn’t feel the same way you thought it would”, Boria said.
Boria landed a few miles south of his intended destination, and the chair itself finally came down in a farmer’s field miles outside of town.
Joe Barbera’s troubles started early after several of the weather balloons attached to his chair popped and he had to ditch most of his equipment, including his shoes, to generate lift, KGW reported. In 1982, Lawrence Walters, also known as Lawn Chair Larry, pulled a similar stunt in San Pedro, California.
“It was the most surreal experience you can ever imagine”, he said.
The daredevil aeronaut got arrested upon the landing on Sunday evening, but was released the next morning, charged with “one count of mischief causing danger to life”.
After being up in the air for 30 minutes, he failed to parachute into the chuckwagon races and crash landed “a mile or two” away from the stampede.
MISCHIEF! Ah, bless Canada and their lack of more serious crimes.
“He’s flying over a city of 1.2 million, heading towards the Stampede grounds, hundreds of thousands of people, the last thing we want to see is anybody injured, whether it’s himself the pilot or a member of the public”. 51-year-old John Freis took a similar trip on a chair using 170 helium balloons. “I’ve never done anything wrong before and this was with good intentions“, he said.
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His stunt did not go unnoticed, as people snapped photos of Boria’s lawn chair and shared them on social media.
