This isn't a "true" Darwin Award, since the moron survived.

Subject: Latest Darwin Award

Some of you may have heard about this award.  The Darwin Award is given
to people who do something incredibly stupid.  True Stories!
You'll recall a Darwin award from not too long ago where a guy decided
to strap a cargo plane rocket booster to his car to see how fast it
would go, and ended up hitting a cliff several hundred feet in the air.
The latest winner is..............Larry Walters.  He is among the
relatively few who have actually turned their dreams into reality.  His
story is true, as hard as you may find it to believe.
Larry was a truck driver, but his lifelong dream was to fly.  When he
graduated from high school, he joined the Air Force in hopes of
becoming a pilot.  Unfortunately, poor eyesight disqualified him.  So
when he finally left the service, he had to satisfy himself with
watching others
fly the fighter jets that crisscrossed the skies over his backyard.  As
he sat there in his lawn chair, he dreamed about the magic of flying.
One day, Larry had an idea.  He went down to the local Army-Navy
surplus  store and bought forty-five weather balloons, and several
tanks of helium. These were not your brightly colored party balloons,
these were heavy-duty spheres measuring more than four feet  across
when fully inflated.  Back in his yard, Larry used straps to attach the
balloons to his lawn chair, the kind you might have in your backyard.
He anchored the chair to the bumper of his jeep, and inflated the
balloons with helium.  Then he packed a few sandwiches and drinks, and
a loaded BB gun, figuring he could pop a  few balloons when it was time
to return to earth.
His preparations complete, Larry sat in his chair and cut the anchoring
cord.  His plan was to lazily float into the sky, and eventually back
to terra firma.  But things didn't quite work out that way.  When Larry
cut the cord, he didn't float lazily up; he shot up as if fired from a
cannon!  Nor did he go up a couple hundred feet.  He climbed and
climbed until he finally leveled off at eleven thousand feet!  At that
height, he could hardly risk deflating any of the balloons, lest he
unbalance  the load and really experience flying.  So he stayed up
there, sailing  around for fourteen hours, totally at a loss about how
to get down.
Eventually, Larry drifted into the approach corridor for Los Angeles
International Airport.  A Pan Am pilot radioed the tower about passing
a guy in a lawn chair at eleven thousand feet, with a gun in his lap. .
now there's a conversation I would have given anything to have heard!
LAX is right on the ocean, and you may know that at nightfall, the
winds on the coast begin to change.  So, as dusk fell, Larry began
drifting out to sea.  At that point, the Navy dispatched a helicopter
to rescue him, but the rescue team had a hard time getting to him
because the  draft from their propeller kept pushing his home-made
contraption  farther and farther away.  Eventually, they were able to
hover above him  and drop a rescue line, with which they gradually
hauled him back to  safety.
As soon as Larry hit the ground, he was arrested.  But as he was led
away in handcuffs, a television reporter called out, "Sir, why did you
do it?" Larry stopped, eyed the man, then replied nonchalantly, "A man
can't just sit around!"
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From: Michelle