Operation High Dive (also known as Project High Dive) was a secret project carried out during the 1950s by the

United States Air Force The United States Air Force (USAF) is the Air force, air service branch of the United States Department of Defense. It is one of the six United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. Tracing its ori ...

. It tested high-altitude parachutes using anthropomorphic dummies. The dummies went into a 200

rpm Revolutions per minute (abbreviated rpm, RPM, rev/min, r/min, or r⋅min−1) is a unit of rotational speed (or rotational frequency) for rotating machines. One revolution per minute is equivalent to hertz. Standards ISO 80000-3:2019 def ...

flat spin, which would be fatal to a human. Further investigations on this led to

Project Excelsior Project Excelsior was a series of parachute jumps made by Joseph Kittinger of the United States Air Force in 1959 and 1960 from helium balloons in the stratosphere. The purpose was to test the Beaupre multi-stage parachute system intended to be ...

. It may later have been confused with Project Mogul and thus helped form the account of the

Roswell incident The Roswell Incident started in 1947 with the recovery of debris near Roswell, New Mexico. It later became the basis for conspiracy theories alleging that the United States military recovered a crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft. The debri ...

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External links

History of Research in Space Biology and Biodynamics - Part IVAnthropomorphic dummy balloon drop test
Ballooning Military parachuting Airborne operations Military projects of the United States Cold War military history of the United States {{Aviation-stub