Basejumper.com - archive

About the Family Tree. I hope everyone knows that Carl Boenish and the US BASE Association never pretended to be the start of BASE jumping. Carl was filming BASE in the late 70's and in Norway in 1980 and the Fins and Norges were some of the first doing tall cliffs. Carl was the world's most respected freefall photographer for over 10 years when he fell in love with BASE. He invented the word and the concept of starting a sport where people felt the experience of doing 4 different kinds of objects. Nowadays, there are other objects, but Carl is the man that got El Cap legal, Bridge Day legal and Canyon de Chelley legal before most people ever heard about BASE. He was a visionary that recognized that jumping off of fixed objects was the natural progression for a certain kind of jumper. The ones who wanted to remember the reason we all got in the sport in the beginning.
I know many of the early Norwegian jumpers and I encourage everyone to learn more about this part of our history.

Rick Harrison
BASE 38

That is true. The history of BASE(Ba-Se) mentioned on most websites is the history of BASE(Ba-Se) in the USA. It is not the WORLD history of BASE(Ba-Se)! Therfore it is necessary with some contrapropaganda and you can find it here http://www.offheading.com/gpage3.html.html (now aviable to everyone, since the serverproblems are solved), or you can watch it on Fox News... Is that the real history of BASE(Ba-Se), or is it just another conspiracy theory???

Actually, BASE jumping started way before that........

Ever heard of a guy called Armand Firman.... well in 852 AD he jumped off a tower in Cordoba Spain... then there was Leonardo DaVinci's design in 1310... then there was Faust Vracics-Homovolans a Croatian 1n 1350's...... infact BASE is the oldest form of parachuting, as even DaVinci couldnt get his aerocraft to fly, so they had to use towers in those days.

Its not such a surprise when you think about it!

Blue skies
Richard

I am not sure if it has been mentioned before but the book "The Big Umbrella" neatly outlines most if not all the very early attempts people had at parachuting(before flight).

As soon as ballooning was something people wanted to watch there was a BASE ancestor ready to jump from it with anything and I mean ANYTHING that looked close to something that would hold air above them.

Now-a-days people would jsut call that Eastern NC jumping but the rest of the world seems to be catching on.

Clicky.

Reissued as 'The Silken Canopy' by Airlife Publishing in the UK in 1997.

Also check out "The Sky People" by Peter Hearn.