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"I'm not a superhuman, says Jeb Corliss. "Exactly as scared as you would be standing on the edge of a 1000-foot building, that's how scared I am. The difference is, I want to jump off that building. That's my dream. The difference is, my dreams are other people's nightmares, but they're mine. I love them. I live them. Everyone has a gift. It just so happens that mine is dealing with gut wrenching horror."

Corliss, 33, is an agitated, animated Californian who is probably the most famous BASE jumper on earth. After latching onto the idea as a suicidal teenager, half-hoping he wouldn't survive, Corliss' first jump was in 1997. Since then he has hucked himself off of pretty much every major outcropping and edifice on earth (including the Eiffel Tower and Malaysia's Petronas Towers) over some 1200 jumps, including two that went very, very wrong. In 1999, he was blown into an African waterfall, broke several ribs and his back in three places and spent a month prone in a hospital bed. In 2003, his friend and fellow jumper Dwain Weston died in front of his eyes while the two were attempting to become the first duo to fly simultaneously over and under the world's highest suspension bridge in Colorado. Weston crashed into the bridge and was killed instantly.

The two men were wearing wing-suits, an evolution of BASE jumping that now preoccupies most of the sport's top athletes, Corliss included. It is also a critical element of his current goal: to become the first person to leap from a plane and land without a parachute.

"To really do something we've never done before is getting almost impossible," Corliss says. "To land something at basically terminal velocity and walk away? That's human achievement. It's every bit as important as climbing Everest the first time, but you can do it on the ground, in Vegas, with 500,000 spectators there watching it live."

The attempt is currently stalled due to fund-raising hurdles; Corliss needs to drum up $3 million to pay for the contraption he's dreamed up to facilitate the landing, which will be built by some former NASA engineers and is most often imagined as a sort of slide built at an angle that he will match as he flies in, then impact and use good old friction to slow him down. (Corliss is keeping the actual design secret for now.)