The Human Bird-Man: I have the answer!

Update: It turns out that this really is the work of an animator, working at the very top of his game. See my post here. Nevertheless, I'm leaving this piece advocating the "balloon theory" in place, for an obvious reason: The idea tickled me when I was young, and before I die, I'd like to see someone try the experiment. For real. No CG.

Many of you have seen this video of a man named Jarno Smeets, allegedly flying like a bird -- just like a bird -- using wings he concocted himself. Here's his website. There's a lot of footage on the internet of the team building the wings. Everyone is asking: Fact or fake?

I think I know how he did it. This video both is and is not deceptive.

Smeets, I believe, has put into practice an idea I had back in the 1980s -- an idea which may have made my fortune, if ever I had done anything practical to get it off the ground (so to speak). Which I never did.

Stop snickering and let me explain.

No, I'm not claiming that Jarno got the idea from me; we've never met. The same idea can pop into separate noggins. (How many people invented the steam engine...?)

Your first big clue as to what's really going on here may be found on his website: "Building a semi human powered flying device."

Semi?

Yes. There's a big, big secret located just outside the frame in the above video. That same "secret" was whispered into my noggin by none other than Jack Palance.

Many of you will recall the original 1980s-era incarnation of the show Ripley's Believe It Or Not, in which Palance -- doing his usual borderline-insane shtick -- traveled the world investigating strange and eccentric things.

In one episode, there was a very brief squib that electrified my imagination. It was one of those things they flashed before your eyeballs just before going to commercial. The gist was this: Early in the 20th century (claimed Palance), a British newspaper had printed a story about a man who had affixed a lighter-than-air balloon to his back.

The balloon canceled much, but not all, of his body weight, allowing him to take massive man-on-the-moon leaps.

I loved this idea. Dangerous? No doubt. But who wouldn't want to give it a try? I wanted to market an updated version of this concept under the label Personal Ballooning.

Naturally, my thoughts turned to coming up with a way to control the thing. Propeller beanies? Rocketeer-like jet packs? The problem with the jet pack seen in Thunderball is that that device carried just enough fuel to keep James Bond in the air for only about half a minute. You would need much, much less fuel if nearly all of the pilot's weight were countered by a balloon. Problem: You would be placing a flame near the gas holding the balloon aloft.

Finally, an idea hit me: Why not do it the way birds do it? If you could reduce a man's weight to (say) five or ten pounds, would it not be possible for that man to fly by flapping artificial wings?

I talked about all this with a friend who worked at a major bank. (Yes, I was middle class -- once.) His eyes lit up. He thought we could get seed money for this project -- enough cash to have a prototype built -- if we could verify that the original story was true. For all we could prove, the producers of the show had made it up. We needed proof of concept. We needed that old newspaper clipping.

So I spent a lot of time in the libraries at CSUN and UCLA, looking for some mention of the article referenced by the Believe It Or Not crew. Nothing.

Letters to the production company went unanswered. Jack Palance would not even humor me with a footnote.

Eventually, my banker friend and I went on to other distractions.

But in the back of my cranium, I've always felt that Personal Ballooning was an idea that could work. Jarno has proved the point.

So, is the above video a fake? It depends on how you classify the word "fake." In my estimation, this isn't After Effects at work. (It would be best, though, to ask the opinion of someone like Andrew Kramer. If anyone could fake it in AE, he could.) If any AE was involved in this production, it was used to erase the tether lines.

No, I think that the "trick" in this video is quite simple: The cameraman does not show the balloon located above the flier, attached by a thin line to his body-brace. The balloon counters most, though not all, of his weight.

In a sense, he really is flying, exactly as a bird flies. In another sense, it's a hoax. Everything depends on your perspective.

Birds do it. Bees do it. Even Jarno Smeets does it.

Perhaps you can too, in the near future.