BASE jumping
activity where participants jump from fixed objects and use a parachute to break their fall
BASE jumping () is the activity of jumping from fixed objects, using a parachute to descend to the ground. BASE is an acronym that stands for four categories of fixed objects from which one can jump: buildings, antennas (referring to radio masts), spans (bridges) and earth (cliffs). Participants jump from a fixed object such as a cliff and, after an optional freefall delay, deploy a parachute to slow their descent and land. A popular form of BASE jumping is wingsuit BASE jumping.
In contrast to other forms of parachuting, such as skydiving from airplanes, BASE jumps are performed from fixed objects that are generally at much lower altitudes, and BASE jumpers only carry one parachute.
BASE jumping is significantly more hazardous than other forms of parachuting and is widely considered to be one of the most dangerous extreme sports.
History
Precursors
Fausto Veranzio is widely believed to have been the first person to build and test a parachute, by jumping from St Mark's Campanile in Venice in 1617 when he was more than 65 years old. However these and other sporadic incidents were one-time experiments, not a systematic pursuit of a new form of parachuting.
Birth of BASE jumping
Precursors to the activity date back hundreds of years. In 1966 Michael Pelkey and Brian Schubert jumped from El Capitan in Yosemite National Park.
“BASE jumping” enters the record as activity where participants jump from fixed objects and use a parachute to break their fall. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what BASE, jumping and activity can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q809831. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1617 and 1966.
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This entry incorporates text from “BASE jumping” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.