You can hear them screaming out in the video and it becomes clear that he's not going to make it. You know, people were crying and wailing. 'The crowd.they were just stunned and didn't know quite what to do. 'It was very surreal, almost cartoonish and a pretty traumatizing thing to witness,' he said. a really interesting, really interesting guy,' he said.Ĭhapman who was at the launch with his wife, a photographer, was filming when it ended in disaster It's kind of hard to say for sure.'Ĭhapman said Hughes had shared a range of conspiracy theories with him but was 'a really sweet guy.' 'His publicity representative told me yesterday that that was just a publicity stunt and just to gain more attention and more sponsors for the rocket launches, ' he said. Chapman said after the crash, Hughes' longtime publicist told him that stance was all about getting noticed. 'He said that his ultimate goal was to go to the the edge of space to see what shape the planet was,' Chapman said.īut whether Hughes was sincere in his 'Flat Earther' beliefs is unclear. He said they are looking into whether his department should have had prior notice of the launch.Ĭhapman said Hughes 'first and foremost described himself as a daredevil.' Sherwin said they first learned of the crash in a call from the San Bernardino County Sheriff, although sheriff's officials ultimately recovered the body without help from fire authorities. 'Therefore we had no response because we weren't aware that the incident had occurred.'

'We were not notified that there was a planned event that was going to take place nor that a crash had taken place,' said spokesman Eric Sherwin. The crash site falls within the jurisdiction of the San Bernardino County Fire Department, but officials there said they had no communication from the launch planning team. It shot up extremely high and then it did an arc and then nosedived straight down into the desert floor.' 'And the parachute deployed and got caught in the thrust of the rocket and pulled the rocket off course.

'The rocket did in fact hit the ladder and ripped off one of the parachute cans,' Chapman said. Chapman said Hughes's team argued against him using a steel ladder to climb into the rocket's cockpit, worried the rocket would hit the ladder on launch.

Flat earther launches rocket