2015 Darwin Awards

Rico's friend Doug forwards this:

It's that time again, and the 2015 Darwin Awards are finally out, the annual honor given to the persons who did the gene pool the biggest service by killing themselves in the most extraordinarily stupid and creative way.
Last year's winner was the fellow who was killed by a Coke machine, which toppled over on top of him as he was attempting to tip out a free soda.
This year's winner was a real rocket scientist (honest).

Remember that each and every one of these is true.
The nominees were:

Semifinalist #6
A young Canadian man, searching for a way of getting drunk cheaply because he had no money with which to buy alcohol, mixed gasoline with milk.  Not surprisingly, this concoction made him ill, and he vomited into the fireplace in his house.  The resulting explosion and fire burned his house down, killing both him and his sister.

Semifinalist #5
Three Brazilian men were flying in a light aircraft at low altitude when another plane approached.  It appears that they decided to moon the occupants of the other plane, but lost control of their own aircraft and crashed.  They were all found dead in the wreckage with their pants around their ankles.

Semifinalist #4
A 22-year-old Reston, Virginia man was found dead after he tried to use octopus straps to bungee jump off a seventy-foot railroad trestle. Fairfax county police said Eric Barcia, a fast-food worker, taped a bunch of these straps together, wrapped an end around one foot, anchored the other end to the trestle at Lake Accotink Park, jumped,​ and hit the pavement. Warren Carmichael, a police spokesman, said investigators think Barcia was alone because his car was found nearby. "The length of the cord that he had assembled was greater than the distance between the trestle and the ground",  Carmichael said.  Police say the apparent cause of death was 'major trauma'.

Semifinalist #3
A man in  Alabama died from rattlesnake bites. It seems that he and a friend were playing a game of catch, using the rattlesnake as a ball.  The friend, no doubt a future Darwin Awards candidate, was hospitalized.

Semifinalist #2
Employees in a medium-sized warehouse in west Texas noticed the smell of a gas leak. Sensibly, management evacuated the building after extinguishing all potential sources of ignition; lights, power, etc.
After the building had been evacuated, two technicians from the gas company were dispatched. Upon entering the building, they found they had difficulty navigating in the dark. To their frustration, none of the lights worked. Witnesses later described the sight of one of the technicians reaching into his pocket and retrieving an object that resembled a cigarette lighter.
Upon operation of the lighter-like object, the gas in the warehouse exploded, sending pieces of it up to three miles away. Nothing was found of the technicians, but the lighter was virtually untouched by the explosion. The technician suspected of causing the blast had never been thought of as ''bright'' by his peers.

Now, the winner of this year's Darwin Award (as always, posthumously):
The Arizona Highway Patrol came upon a pile of smoldering metal embedded in the side of a cliff rising above the road at the apex of a curve. The wreckage resembled the site of an airplane crash, but it was a car. The type of car was unidentifiable at the scene.
​ ​Police investigators finally pieced together the mystery. An amateur rocket scientist had somehow gotten hold of a JATO unit that is used to give heavy military transport planes an extra 'push' for taking off from short airfields.
He had driven his Chevy Impala out into the desert and found a long, straight stretch of road. He attached the unit to the car, jumped in, got up some speed, and fired off the JATO
The facts​,​ as best as could be determined​,​ are that the operator of the 1967 Impala hit the JATO ignition at a distance of approximately three miles from the crash site. This was established by the scorched and melted asphalt at that location.
The JATO, if operating properly, would have reached maximum thrust within
​five​ seconds, causing the Chevy to reach speeds well in excess of three hundred miles an hour and continuing at full power for an additional twenty-plus seconds.
The driver and soon to be pilot, would have experienced G-forces usually reserved for dog fighting F-4 jocks under full afterburners, causing him to become irrelevant for the remainder of the event. However, the automobile remained on the straight highway for about two miles before the driver applied and completely melted the brakes, blowing the tires and leaving thick rubber marks on the road surface, then becoming airborne for an additional mile and impacting the cliff face at a height of a hundred feet, leaving a blackened crater three feet deep in the rock.
Most of the driver's remains were not recoverable. However, small fragments of bone, teeth​,​ and hair were extracted from the crater​;​ fingernail and bone shards were removed from a piece of debris believed to be a portion of the steering wheel.
Epilogue:
It has been calculated that this moron attained a ground speed of approximately four hundred mph, though much of his voyage was not actually on the ground. 

You couldn't make this stuff up, could you?