Father Yod
video
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Yod
On December 26, 1974, the Source Family sold their restaurant and moved to Hawaii. On August 25, 1975, despite having no previous hang-gliding experience, Yod decided that he would go hang gliding. Yod used a hang glider to leap off a 1,300-foot (400 m) cliff on the eastern shore of Oahu. He crash-landed on the beach suffering no external injuries, but was unable to move and died nine hours later. The Source Family refers to this day as “Black Monday.” After three days of vigil, Yod was cremated and his ashes put to rest at Lanikai Beach in Hawaii.
Ken de Russy writes:
One of my early students Gary Bencar moved to Hawaii and knew of the story first hand and related it to me at the time. The cult apparently kept the body for some days expecting that he was either not dead or would rise from the dead.
Makapuu was a hotbed of hang gliding, one of the first places where unlimited airtime was easily achievable by anyone who survived launch. The first loops were done there as early as 1973 or 1974. Yod's commune was situated close by where this extraordinary sight of humans flying as long as they wished. Such a sight is intoxicating.
Yod's egocentricity likely told him it was a simple skill that he already possessed. I encountered a few such Dunning Kruger types in the many years I taught but only rarely did any act on their delusion like Yod.
If he in fact crashed on the beach his judgment must have been very close to right. Having survived the launch was quite an achievement and by the time of landing he would have had a pretty fair level of drive skills.
In those days I met a concert violinist who by chance encountered some pilots preparing to launch Haleakala, struck up a conversation and then having only seen one or two people launch before him and never having seen hang gliding before that, proceeded to fly 10,000' down to the beach. There are other credible stories of people just hooking in and launching off big places with no training or exposure and surviving. Too bad Yod didn't succeed. The story can be found in several places with a Google search. I recall that there is a YouTube video that covers this person, group, cult and hang gliding death.
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