Читать книгу Falling Upwards - Richard Holmes - Страница 9

Falling upwards by helium party balloon may sound unlikely. But on Sunday, 20 April 2008 a forty-one-year-old Catholic priest, Father Adelir Antonio de Carli, made a heroic ascent using a very similar method. Father de Carli was known locally as Padre Baloneiro – ‘The Balloon Priest’ – and he flew for charity. He took off from the port city of Paranaguá, in Brazil, strapped into a buoyancy chair suspended beneath a thousand small multicoloured helium balloons. They were grouped into five vivid clusters of pink, green, red, white and yellow. His aim was to raise money for a truckers’ rest stop and spiritual centre. He was known for his human rights campaigns, and that January had made a successful four-hour charity ascent suspended beneath six hundred helium party balloons.

On this second flight, armed with a thermal flying suit, GPS system and satellite phone, he rose successfully to some nineteen thousand feet, near to the edge of the sustainable atmosphere, where the sky becomes dark blue, and human breath forms glittering ice crystals in the ever-thinning air. Here, close to heaven, he cheerfully reported back by phone to his flight control. He also gave a phone interview to the Brazilian TV channel Globo, in which he said he was ‘fine, but very cold’, and was having trouble operating his GPS device. But he was also being carried out to sea, and was now thirty miles off the coast. At 8.45 that Sunday evening, he lost contact with the coastguards. An air-sea rescue search was mounted early the following Monday morning, but without success. A surviving cluster of fifty balloons was found floating in the sea late on Tuesday, but without Padre Baloneiro attached. The Brazilian naval search was called off on 29 April. But his parishioners continued to believe in his miraculous survival, and prayed daily for him.

Three months later, on 4 July 2008, an oil-rig support vessel found the remains of his body (lower torso and legs only) floating about sixty miles off the Brazilian coast, still attached to his buoyancy chair. It seems that part of the helium balloon rig must have separated or failed in some way during the first twenty-four hours of his flight. Possibly some of the balloons began bursting at high altitude, but this of course would have automatically reduced his lift, much as planned, and brought him back comparatively gently to earth. Except that now there was no earth beneath him. It seems that Padre Baloneiro must have spent some time meditating in the sea. Finally, he was probably eaten by sharks. But he was a brave man, a daring balloonist, and possibly even a saint.^fn1