The 20 Most Extreme Daredevil Stunts In Human History
As the great escape artist Harry Houdini once said, “The easiest way to attract a crowd is to let it be known that at a given time and a given place, someone is going to attempt something that in the event of failure will mean sudden death.” The man knew a thing or two about drawing a crowd, enthralling people with his seemingly death-defying stunts. But the truth is that he really was dicing with death — and one time he very nearly succumbed to it. He wasn’t the only one, either, as we’ll see from this list of insane stunts performed by fearless — or crazy — daredevils. But be warned: not all of these guys managed to make it out of their performances alive.
1. Philippe Petit
From the tender age of 18, Philippe Petit had been nursing a downright crazy idea inside his head. The young man had a craving for danger, and he knew how he wanted to satisfy it: a high-wire stunt between two insanely tall buildings without a net to catch him should he fall.
Petit took his scheme very seriously, and he spent years preparing for it. And finally, on the morning of August 7, 1974, he was ready to begin. At a height of 1,350 feet above New York City, he stood on the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
Walking a tightrope between the Twin Towers
Linking the South Tower where Petit stood to the North Tower 131 feet away was a thin wire. There was no net beneath this wire. Petit wore no safety harness. Should he fall, nothing would stop him descending to the streets below. Yet with a calm few people on Earth can claim to possess, off he went over the wire.
Call it crazy, but his wild act captured the attention of a lot of people. It’s been referred to as the “artist crime of the century.” Maybe you’ve seen the documentary about it, Man on Wire, or The Walk, the dramatized version of the story?
2. Harry Houdini
One of Houdini’s most famous feats was his Overboard Box Trick, where he would be placed inside a crate, his limbs bound, and tossed into some water. Spectators loved to see him try and get out of that seemingly impossible situation! When the crate was retrieved from the water after a minute and then opened, people would find only the bindingss that Houdini had discarded.
It was a great trick, but it was a genuinely dangerous one. In fact, there was one time when he was performing it in New York, and things went badly wrong. The attempted escape almost cost him his life, as he recounted in an article he wrote in 1919.
The Overboard Box Escape
Houdini recounted, “Whatever happened I don’t know until this day. It may have been that a passing boat disturbed the water, for as the box was sinking it seemed to be thrown about roughly. What I had to do to make my escape from the box had to be done in seconds, and even as I write of it now there comes to me a feeling of suffocation.
Having discovered the ropes restraining him had become tangled by the buffeting, he continued, “It became necessary for me to work faster than I had ever worked in my life before and my mental apparatus proved equal to the task. However, I did it. I am not quite sure how, but my time hadn’t come and the thousands of people who watched cheered loudly as I came to the surface free of the manacles and handcuffs.”
3. Evel Knievel
Perhaps the most famous daredevil in American history, Evel Knievel performed an abundance of wild stunts during his time. And while he’s remembered for some great successes, there were an awful lot of failures, too. A testament to that is the fact he still holds the world record for most broken bones in a single lifetime: the magic number is 433.
One of Knievel’s most high-profile failures occurred when he attempted to cross the Snake River Canyon on his very own steam-powered rocket cycle. The gorge had a 500-feet drop and was a quarter of a mile wide. This was truly a crazy idea.
The Snake River Jump
In preparation for the big day, Knievel conducted some test jumps: they weren’t successful. Yet on he went with his insane plan, with the main event taking place on September 8, 1974. Thousands of people showed up, while millions were glued to the TV broadcast to see how things went down.
What actually happened was that, while he was in the air, Knievel’s parachute suddenly malfunctioned and deployed — which threw him off course. The wind helped him to avoid the gorge drop, though, and he somehow made it to the other side with little more than a broken nose.
4. Alain Robert
Alain Robert loves to climb. But while the same could be said for lots of people, Robert is a little different. He doesn’t just go bouldering or rock-climbing. No, he scales buildings. And we don’t just mean any old buildings: we’re talking about some of the tallest structures on Earth here.
During his time he’s climbed the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, and Taipei 101, which was, at that point, the tallest building on Earth. Oh, and he doesn’t really like ropes or support of any kind. He just needs some chalk and climbing shoes, and he’s happy.
Scaling the Petronas Towers
In 2009 Robert took on another unthinkably lofty structure: the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The climber had attempted this feat twice before, but on both occasions he had come up short. Unperturbed, though, he tried again. For whatever reason, he needed to make it to the top. And this time he succeeded.
At 88 stories and 1,483 feet, it’s just an insane thought that a person is capable of climbing this building. But it’s not for nothing that people call Robert the French Spiderman! The police weren’t quite so impressed with him, though, and he was arrested for his daring ascent.
5. Kitty O’Neil
Kitty O’Neil had a difficult start to life. Having picked up some nasty infections during her early years, she was left without hearing and had to learn how to read lips instead. But nothing held her back, and she eventually developed a taste for danger. She started playing the part of the daredevil, usually performing stunts in the water.
As O’Neil got older, she started to make a career as a stunt performer with a wide-ranging set of skills. An especially adept driver, she ended up doing stunts for many famous movies and TV shows, such as The Blues Brothers, The Bionic Woman, and Wonderwoman. Mattel even produced an action figure in her image.
Becoming the fastest woman alive
O’Neil broke a series of world records throughout her career, including falling from the greatest height. She broke that one twice, incidentally! But when it came to her feats in a vehicle, her most notable achievement was taking the title of the “fastest woman alive.”
She did it inside the cockpit of a three-wheeler vehicle known as the SMI Motivator, which was powered by hydrogen peroxide. Zooming through Oregon’s Alvord Desert, O’Neil averaged a speed of 512.7mph. But her peak speed was 621mph!
6. Ormer Locklear
Born in 1891 the Texan Ormer Locklear grew up to become a pilot in the United States Army Air Service. When in 1919 he retired from that, though, he decided to use his skills elsewhere, becoming an aerial stuntman.
This new career path quickly took him to Hollywood, where he was given the opportunity to perform his stunts in a film. This was The Great Air Robbery, which was very much the right sort of movie for him.
Shooting a movie goes wrong
But things quickly went very wrong for Locklear. While he was working on his second movie, The Skywayman, in 1920 a disaster occurred. He and a co-pilot named Milton Elliot were flying at night for a sequence, but something went awry.
The two men and their plane smashed into the ground beneath them; both Elliot and Locklear were killed. The latter’s remains were brought back to his native Texas, where he was laid to rest. At least he’d died doing what he loved.
7. Lawnchair Larry
The date was July 2, 1982, and a humble Californian truck driver named Larry Walters was about to do something crazy. He’d tethered his lawn chair with about 40 balloons filled with helium. Ready to float about 100 feet into the air, Walters was ready for a thrill. But he’d badly miscalculated.
Walters rose quite a bit higher than 100 feet: he instead ascended to an altitude of about 16,000 feet above his Los Angeles property. Pilots in nearby planes actually spotted him up there: they must have thought they were losing their minds!
Flying in a balloon chair
In order to get back down again, Walters had brought a pellet gun with him. He started shooting out a few of the balloons, so that he would descend. But having done that, he realized his descent was now too fast! He desperately needed to think of a way to slow down.
The only thing for it was to shed weight, so he got rid of some water he’d brought. That helped, but then when he actually got close to the ground he got tangled up in power lines. The LAPD had to help him down. But after all that, he’d survived and become immortalized as Lawnchair Larry.
8. Felix Baumgartner
“I’m standing there on top of the world outside of a capsule in space... I looked around; the sky above me was completely black,” Felix Baumgartner said to CNN in 2022, remembering what he had done on October 14, 2012. “I was really trying to inhale that moment.”
Baumgartner was enjoying a view of Earth few people ever get to experience first-hand on the lip of a pod floating in the stratosphere. And he was about to jump. “Sometimes,” he’d said right before stepping over the edge, “you have to go up really high to understand how small you are.”
Falling to Earth from space
At 24 miles above the surface of the Earth, Baumgartner was about to make the highest freefall in history. With nerves of absolute steel, he stepped out and hurtled towards the planet’s surface at an unthinkable speed. He literally broke the speed of sound during his descent.
Aside from being a record-breaking feat of bravery, Baumgartner’s jump was also useful for scientists. It provided them with information about how human beings could handle the experience of such lofty altitude: useful knowledge that today is helping to enhance the safety of astronauts.
9. Nik Wallenda
Perhaps Nik Wallenda had always been destined to walk the tightrope: he’d been doing it since before he was even born! “My mom was six months pregnant with me and still walking the wire,” he explained to CTV News Toronto in May 2023, “so I’ve been walking the wire longer than I’ve been walking on terra firma, if you will.”
The Wallenda clan had been performing circus tricks since the early 20th century, so Nik was simply carrying on the family tradition. And since he was a young kid, he’d always yearned to do that in one way in particular: he wanted to cross Niagara Falls on a high wire.
Tightrope-walking across Horseshoe Falls
Wallenda wouldn’t be the first person to walk a tightrope across parts of the three cataracts that make up the Niagara Falls, but nobody had ever managed to cross the biggest of them: the Horseshoe Falls. It was difficult to obtain permission from the authorities to do the stunt, but eventually his persistence paid off. It was June 15, 2012, when Wallenda finally stepped out on his 1,500-foot wire over Horseshoe Falls, starting on the American side and making his way towards the Canadian side.
“I remember there was so much heavy mist in the air that it was almost hard to see the Canadian side from the U.S.,” Wallenda said of his 25-minute walk. “It was surreal, it was a dream. I was like a kid who always wanted to go to Disney World their entire life and finally, at 16, their parents bring them: it was a dream come true.”
10. Rossa Matilda Richter
The human cannonball is a well-known circus stunt, one that has its origins as far back as the 19th century. It was thought up by William Leonard Hunt, a daredevil who came from Canada. By 1871 Hunt had actually obtained a patent for the device he’d use to achieve this crazy feat.
But while Hunt was the brains behind the human cannon, he wasn’t actually the first person to be shot out of one. No, he left that dangerous act to someone else. The honor went to one Rossa Matilda Richter.
Zazel, the first human cannonball
Billed under the name Zazel, the first human cannonball, Richter’s debut for being shot out of a cannon occurred on April 2, 1877, in London. It was an insanely dangerous act: she’d be placed into a cannon equipped with rubber springs that would fling her over a great distance.
When it came to it, Zazel traveled something like 70 feet in the air before hitting a safety net that had been set up to catch her. With that, she’d completed the act with her health intact.
11. Annie Edson Taylor
It seems the sheer might of Niagara Falls just calls daredevils to it, but the stretch of water has claimed some of their lives. One of the survivors, though, was Annie Edson Taylor, a woman who, in her 60s, did something especially crazy. As she later wrote in her memoir, “The idea came to me like a flash of light: go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.”
This was in the era of Harry Houdini, but Taylor had nowhere near as much experience as performers of his caliber. Perhaps that’s what attracted so much attention to her stunt in the fall of 1901.
Barreling down Niagara Falls
Taylor cascaded 160 feet down the falls, landing in a plunge pool dotted with sharp and deadly rocks. Her barrel sank below the surface for a moment, with water leaking inside. Luckily, as she was flung from rock to rock, spectators managed to pull her to land. When they opened up the barrel, they found her alive, albeit disorientated, beaten, and bruised.
Somehow, she had survived and she soon became known as the first, the oldest, the only lone woman to have achieved such a feat. Taylor became famous for her stunt, taking on the moniker of the “Goddess of Water.” A pretty lofty title, to be sure, but one that was well deserved.
12. Bessie Coleman
Arriving in 1892 into a world of extreme racial prejudice, Texas-born African-American woman Bessie Coleman had big aspirations. She wanted to fly, which was much easier said than done for any woman in those days, never mind a Black woman with Native American heritage.
But Coleman’s will was strong, and she decided to undergo pilot training abroad, traveling to France. And she excelled, obtaining a license after only seven months of flying. In fact, she was the first African-American woman to ever be issued with a flying license.
A tragic fall to the ground
Having earned her license, Coleman decided to keep up her training in order to become an aerial performer. She managed that, too, and soon she was doing stunts in her plane for crowds across America. It’s worth noting that her principles forbade her from ever performing for segregated crowds: she believed everyone should be welcome to see her perform her insanely dangerous tricks in the sky.
Sadly, her incredible flying career was cut short in 1926. Coleman went up in a plane alongside a guy named William D. Wills, who was in control of the craft that day. While they were in the air, the plane suddenly lost control and began to spin. Coleman, who hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt, was thrown from the plane and killed upon impact. Wills, meanwhile, couldn’t recover control and also died when the craft hit the ground.
13. Clem Sohn
Clem Sohn was a real-life Batman who made a name for himself in the early 20th century, jumping out of aircraft at tremendous heights and gliding towards the ground. As he neared the surface, he’d pull a parachute and land gracefully. At least, that was the idea.
He’d created his own wingsuit to help him achieve these landings safely, designed specially so his arms weren’t literally ripped from his body when he spread them. Combined with his eyewear, the suit really did make him look like a sort of man-bird hybrid.
The Batman falls
Sohn’s jumps didn’t always go down without a hitch. There was one in London, for instance, when his parachute got caught up in his wings. He survived that, but he picked up some nasty injuries. Unperturbed, he continued with his jumps — until his final one in 1937.
“I feel as safe as you would in your grandmother’s kitchen,” he remarked in the build-up to this stunt in France. But having jumped, when the moment came to deploy his parachute, both the main canopy and his back-up failed. In front of 100,000 spectators, he plummeted to the ground and died on impact.
14. Colonel Joseph W. Kittinger, Jr.
Colonel Joseph W. Kittinger, Jr. received many honors as a result of his military career, including the Distinguished Flying Cross and two Silver Star medals. But he’s perhaps most famous for his insane freefalling record, which was unparalleled until Felix Baumgartner beat it in 2012. Colonel Kittinger wasn’t bitter about that, though: he actually helped Baumgartner along the way.
Colonel Kittinger was a key part of Project Excelsior across 1959 and ’60, which involved several freefall jumps from insanely high research balloons. The idea was to examine what happened to a human body when it was subjected to such insane stresses while falling from a great altitude.
A nearly lethal fall from the sky
Colonel Kittinger jumped in three Excelsior missions, with the third one starting at around 20 miles in the sky. The first jump had been lower, but it was almost fatal all the same. A line got caught and sent him into a spin, causing him to pass out. A back-up chute that deployed automatically was all that saved him from certain death.
Even the third, record-breaking jump wasn’t without incident. His right glove hadn’t been pressurized properly, which caused the hand to swell to roughly twice its normal size. And if that hadn’t been bad enough, he almost suffocated when his air hose shifted out of place: he was lucky to survive.
15. Bud Ekins
Bud Ekins was one of the great movie stuntmen. He was perhaps most famous for his work on the Steve McQueen flicks The Great Escape and Bullitt, both of which contributed greatly to his legacy.
Bullitt came out in 1968 and it featured maybe the greatest car chase in movie history. There are certainly people out there who’d argue that, and Ekins was the man behind it.
The greatest movie motorcycle stunt ever
But perhaps Ekins’ greatest moment came in the first film he ever did with McQueen: The Great Escape. He performed a 60-foot motorcycle jump over a barbed fence, which, again, many would argue was the greatest stunt of its kind. Unfortunately for Ekins, audiences often thought it was McQueen himself who had performed it.
According to the book McQueen’s Machines, The Cars and Bikes of a Hollywood Icon, McQueen never wanted to take credit for the stunt. “A lot of people thought it was me making that jump,” he said, “but I’ve never tried to hide the truth about it.” It had been all Ekins.
16. Valery Rozov
In 2013 the BASE jumper Valery Rosov did something astounding: he leapt off the edge of Mount Everest! At the time, it was a world record for the highest BASE jump to ever take place: he was something like 4 miles from the ground.
Rosov obviously didn’t attempt this jump without a great deal of preparation first. For about three weeks, he hung around a camp there so his body could adjust to the high-altitude conditions. After that, he hiked for four days in order to reach the jumping-off point.
Leaping off Mount Everest
Rosov’s jump was a big success, and he was unfazed by the experience at the time. As he later recalled to Red Bull, “Only when I got back home did I see how hard it was for me both physically and psychologically.” But sadly, not all his jumps would go so well.
Rosov later returned to the Himalayas, where he planned to BASE jump from another peak. This time, things went badly wrong. He was killed, once again demonstrating just how dangerous BASE jumping really is.
17. “Mad” Mike Hughes
“Mad” Mike Hughes was an eccentric sort. Convinced that the world was flat, he set out to prove it the only way he could: by building a rocket and launching himself up to the sky to gaze down at the planet below. That might seem pretty crazy, but you have to admire the fact that he was deadly serious. He literally built himself a rocket.
In 2018 Hughes even managed to successfully launch himself skyward, returning basically alive and well. That’s quite the feat, and he felt good about it. “Relieved,” he commented after the launch, as he was being assessed by medics. “I’m tired of people saying I chickened out and didn’t build a rocket. I’m tired of that stuff. I manned up and did it.”
Homemade Rocket Man
But another launch in 2020 proved to be Mad Mike’s undoing. This time, things went badly wrong. During the launch, the rocket smashed against a ladder and set a disaster in motion. A journalist named Justin Chapman was on the scene, describing what happened to NPR. “It ripped off a parachute can,” he explained, “which deployed the parachute, which got caught in the thrust of the rocket and kind of took the rocket off course a little bit.”
The rocket still shot into the air, but its course wasn’t steady and it ended with a terrible crash. Chapman said, “He went way up in the sky. I’m not sure how high, but his goal was 5,000 feet. Then it did an arc and then came straight down and nose-dived into the desert floor about half a mile away from the launchpad.”
18. Paul Steiner
Paul Steiner of the Red Bull Skydive Team did something frankly insane in 2010. Giving a whole new meaning to the phrase “connecting flight,” he moved from one airplane to another — while they were both in the air!
Steiner climbed out of the cockpit of the first plane and edged onto the wing. He then rolled off the wing and hung there, which was presumably incredibly difficult given the intense winds he must have been experiencing.
Catching another flight
But Steiner wasn’t done with a little roll off the wing. No, now it was time to get on the other plane. That second flying machine flew close, just underneath the stuntman. When the positioning was right, he dropped off the first plane and onto the wing of the second. Insane.
“This was an incredible stunt that has not been done ever before,” Steiner commented, when it was all said and done. “We rehearsed it for a whole year, minimized sources of errors and practiced every single step again and again. In the end it was all worth it.”
19. Gary Connery
By 2016 and at the age of 42, Gary Connery had gained plenty of experience leaping and falling from great heights. He’d done it literally hundreds of times, whether while BASE jumping or skydiving. But while that was all well and good, Connery dreamed of still-greater thrills.
This adrenaline-seeking habit ultimately led him to jump out of a helicopter 2,400 feet up in the sky — without a parachute! In doing so, he broke the record for greatest jump by a person not equipped with a chute.
Falling without a chute
You might be wondering, though, how could a person possibly survive such a lofty fall? Well, for one thing, he was wearing a special wingsuit to slow him down. And he didn’t just smash into the ground, either. No, some 18,600 cardboard boxes had been laid out to break his fall.
It was still an insanely dangerous thing to do, but he survived it. Speaking to the press afterwards, he said, “I feel absolutely wonderful, I am overwhelmed. I am in a strange zone at the moment. It is an amazing feeling. I feel incredible, just completely elated.”
20. Yves Rossy
Yves Rossy had twice tried and failed to fulfill one the craziest of ideas ever: to cross the channel between England and France via jet-powered wings. Both of his attempts had been thwarted by bad weather, but he didn’t give up. The third time, it turned out, was the charm.
On September 26, 2008, Rossy — known as the Jet Man — took to the skies and remained in the air for just under ten minutes. The wind was blowing with him, which reduced his journey time over the sea by roughly a fifth.
Jet Man crosses the English Channel
As he reached the other side, Rossy released his parachute and started to descend gracefully back down to the surface. He was, understandably, thrilled by what he’d just done, as his excitable, waving legs made quite clear to those below him.
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Speaking after his stunt, Rossy said, “With that crossing I showed it is possible to fly a little bit like a bird. I am full of hope there will be many in the near future.”