David Blaine has been a magician from the time of our parents. His motto is to test how far he can take the limits of the human body and mind while entertaining and astonishing the world. He has had a lot of success in the magic world, but, it has been proven that all of the stunts that he has pulled off have been real and there have been no tricks or magic involved.
This year, he has a stunt that he has wanted to pull off since he was really young. He said that when he was young, his parents took him to see a film where a man hung from some balloons and left floating into the sky. He has been investigating and training and he has announced that he will do the stunt. He calls it Ascension.
In order to pull off this stunt, David had to train not only in simple skydiving training but also had to learn to traverse the sky and land in a safe location, which is a technique that experts use. Because of all the laws that exist nowadays, he also had to get a hot air balloon pilot license and a gas balloon pilot license too since the balloons that were going to take him up would be full of helium.
David and the experts behind this whole experiment chose to use Helium over any other gas such as hydrogen because when exposed to fire, hydrogen is flammable while helium is not. If there were to be any accidents in the air while using hydrogen balloons, there could be serious injuries.
The premise of this stunt was to attach some helium balloons to his jacket and fly up to a height of around 25,000 ft. The only problem with this was: hypoxia. It is a serious problem where oxygen doesn’t properly enter the brain which can lead to your mind going crazy, not thinking right, or just passing out. This is something that can kill you and it wasn’t a joke. David would also have to put on a parachute while going up, detach from the balloons, open the parachute, and find a safe landing spot.
David finally was able to pull this stunt off and there is a video of it on his YouTube channel. While being interviewed, he stated that the stunt he had just pulled off was one of his most dangerous ones and that it was the first time in all of his stunts that he wasn’t harmed or taken out by his crew due to any failures.
This magician has gone from simple card tricks to pushing the boundaries of what is thought as impossible for humans to do.
I will leave a link to his channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/davidblaine
