What could be more horrifying than to leap out of an airplane at 2,500 feet without a parachute?

Landing without one.

Absurd, suicidal, crazy - choose an adjective.

But radical adventurer Jeb Corliss is determined to pull it off, controlling his descent in a wingsuit that makes him look like a flying squirrel, then landing on a specially constructed ramp on the Las Vegas Strip.

Technically, it's not flying; Corliss can't gain or maintain altitude.

But it's close - close enough to provide a glimpse of a new form of flight.

"It's so far out there, people can't wrap their heads around it," said Corliss, a Californian who has made wingsuit flights in Colorado. "When you think about it, how many millions of years did it take for a flying squirrel to evolve from a creature who could jump from altitude and land on the ground without injuring itself?

"That's what makes human beings so special. We don't need to spend millions of years morphing our bodies. We can use technology and our mind to evolve rapidly. All of a sudden, in a matter of a few short decades, you're jumping out of aircraft and landing without a parachute."

In a free fall, a human would tumble to Earth at a terminal velocity - or maximum speed - of about 120 mph.

In a wingsuit, Corliss slows his descent to 30 mph for a bit - slow enough to hear himself laugh and talk - though he's still moving horizontally about 75 mph.

Two years ago, Corliss and Luigi Cani flew under the arm of the famous statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a flight so precise it caught the attention of crews from at least five other countries, each of them determined to become the first to fly through the air and land without a parachute.

By year's end, Corliss was meeting with engineers about the possibility of building a landing ramp in Las Vegas, one that borrows from the principles of a ski jump.

"We're not basing this on luck. I'm working with engineering firms that have developed acceleration systems for NASA. The runway is the absolute crucial component," he said.

"My runway won't be on the ground. My runway will be suspended in the sky. What we're developing has never been built before. It's going to be quite literally an engineering marvel.

"And it won't be successful unless I can do it over and over again without being injured. It has to be a safe process or it's pointless. If the Wright brothers had said, 'We're going to create something that will be flown only once,' then who cares?"

Jean Potvin, a physics professor at Saint Louis University and a sky diver who does parachute research for the Army, told The New York Times: "All of this is technically possible. The thing I'm not sure of is your margins in terms of safety, or likelihood to crash."

Corliss is raising money for the project, which other extreme athletes say isn't as fanciful as it sounds.

"I think it's possible; I just don't want to be the one who does it," said ski-BASE jumper Max Kuszaj, who, like Cani, represents Denver's Go Fast Sports. "It's a little far-fetched, a little over the top, but it's definitely something that can be accomplished if it's done the right way."

Unaided flight hardly is a novel idea. It preoccupied the ancient Greeks, who passed down the story of Icarus, the first extreme sports enthusiast, whose wax wings melted when he flew too close to the sun.

The dream accelerated with the invention of the parachute in the 1780s, the hang glider in 1880 and the airplane in 1903.

Birdmen - or wingsuit fliers - came onto the scene in the 1930s. During the next three decades, 72 of the original 75 wingsuit fliers - 96 percent - died during testing because of inferior technology.

In the 1990s, the availability of synthetic materials opened the way for the modern wingsuit, which is made from a specially designed fabric that is sewn between the legs and under the arms.

The flaps under each arm and between the legs serve as wings, dramatically increasing the body's surface area and cutting the velocity of the fall by two-thirds.

Corliss made his first wingsuit flight nearly a decade ago, becoming instantly hooked.

"It's like a dream," he said.

Corliss might be the right man at the right time.

A romantic individualist to the extreme, he hasn't dressed in anything but black since he was 12, says an office job would "kill" him, finds intellectual stimulation from sticky situations where survival can't be taken for granted and brushes off the specter of death.

When his stepfather offered him $1 million to abandon his wingsuit dream, Corliss told him to keep his money.

"I grew up traveling the world because my father was an art dealer. We'd go to places like Nepal, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India. I spent my childhood traveling the world, seeing different cultures," he said.

"I never had stability. My life has never been conventional. My life has always been in chaos. (But) at my most chaotic moments, I have my most focus. When I'm doing the things that are most horrifying, when my life is most on the line - that seems to be when I'm most at peace."

As a child, Corliss collected rattlesnakes and scorpions.

"I kind of liked fear as a child. I was kind of attracted to things that were scary," he said.

Looking for bigger and bolder thrills, Corliss made his first BASE jump at 21 near his Southern California home, the first of more than 1,000 from planes, bridges, cliff faces, skyscrapers and landmarks around the world.

In 2006, Corliss was fired from his job as host of the Discovery Channel's Stunt Junkies after being arrested while trying to jump from the observation desk of the Empire State Building.

"That got national, if not international, exposure," Kuszaj said. "People say there's no such thing as bad publicity, so . . . I think he plays the character a bit when he's on camera."

At the inaugural Go Fast Games in 2003, Corliss saw wingsuit partner Dwain Weston die after slamming into the Royal Gorge Bridge, a moment that might have prompted another athlete to step back from the void.

Not Corliss.

"My life is about having experiences - all the way until I die," he said. "That's all I'm here for. I don't have any other reason. If that's not how you're looking at it, then, dude, you're just spinning your wheels. Your just waiting for your time to die."

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