It was August 1, 1950, near the Belarusian city of Borisov. One by one, three athletes jumped out of an airplane. As expected, their parachutes opened above them. But… only one of them began to descend. The other two were unexpectedly caught by rising air currents and carried upward.
No matter how hard the athletes pulled on the straps to reduce the parachute’s surface area and thus decrease its lift, nothing worked. The powerful updraft continued to lift them higher. It took 40 minutes for the second parachutist to land, having been carried 5 miles away from the starting point. The third, however, vanished into the clouds…
He was lifted to an altitude of nearly 11,500 feet and landed 8.7 miles from the jump site almost two hours after the leap.