Darwin Award

The Darwin award is an annual honour given by forensic scientists to ‘a dim witted person who has done the human gene pool a great service by killing himself in an extroadinaly stupid way'. In 1995 it was awarded to a man in Arizona. In Arizona a police car came across a pile of smouldering metal pressed into a cliff. The cliff was at the apex of a tight curve in a two lane road. It looked like an aircraft crash site. But it turned out to be a car. Forensic scientists were called in to reconstruct what had happened. The award winner had got hold of an air force JATO. A JATO is a jet assisted take-off solid fuel rocket. It is sometimes attached to military transport planes taking off from short airfields. The Darwin winner had driven his car into the Arizona desert and found a long straight stretch of road. He attached the JATO tot he rear of his car. He jumped in, got up to speed and then fired the rocket. Once a JATO is switched on it cannot be switched off; it simply burns until all the fuel is gone. As far as can be determined, he was travelling somewhere between 450 and 500 kph when he came to the curve in the road.

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