After floating nearly 200 miles in a lawn chair with helium balloons attached, Kent Couch made an emergency landing.
He flew halfway across Oregon using only balloons.

He was safe, but his equipment and video footage were lost, swept up by a gust of wind.

But now, nearly a year later, his incredible first-person footage and equipment have been found by a family on its ranch.

The stunning long-lost video shows Couch’s beaming smile and aerial views of airplanes below him as he floats for nine hours and more than 193 miles in his lawn chair. He is captured popping balloons with a letter opener and accidentally inhaling helium, making his voice squeak.

“Uh-oh,” Couch says to the camera, his pitch high. “I’m talking with helium in it.”

While in the air, Couch took time to admire his surroundings.

“It’s beautiful,” he says on the videotape with Oregon’s landscape seen below Couch’s feet.

The quirky flight started as the fulfillment of a childhood dream. “You look up and see the clouds,” Couch says. “And you say, what would it be like to sit on the cloud?”

The fanciful odyssey had an inspiration: Couch had once seen a television show about how such a feat could be accomplished.