The evening the Human Fly crashed

In the fall of 1977, the Olympic Stadium was used to major events. The Olympic Games had been presented there a year earlier, the Expos and the Alouettes attracted considerable crowds, and in such a madness of grandeur, the next step was undoubtedly to plan a disco evening during which a motorcycle stuntman would attempt to jump over 26 yellow buses.

A crazy idea? Not in the eyes of a certain Human Fly, anyway. With his team, this mysterious masked stuntman, dressed in red like a superhero, reserved the evening of October 7, 1977 at the Stadium to try to do exactly that.

“He was a guy who bragged that he could do better than Evel Knievel,” recalls Bill St-Georges, then a radio DJ at CKOI. “In my entire life, I have attended two shows that were big flops, and that night was one of them. I don’t remember much, honestly…”

In fact, Bill St-Georges remembers one thing above all: “The guy went crazy. »

This stunning story begins somewhere in the mid-1970s, in the Aliments Roma factory in Montreal. At the head of the company at that time were two brothers, Joe and Dominic Ramacieri, who wanted to do something other than sausage. They decide to found a company, Human Fly Spectaculars Limited, named after a character, the Human Fly, a stuntman who will be called upon to make the crowds run, defying death each time.

It is in tune with the times ; in the United States, Evel Knievel, a stuntman who wears a cape and a white star-studded suit, is already very famous for his taste for risk, and for this motorcycle jump which almost cost him his life at the end of the 1960s in Las Vegas.

The Human Fly wastes no time getting noticed. In June 1976, he was strapped, standing, onto an airliner for a brief ride over the Mojave Desert. On his return, he appears on the set of the show 90 Minutes Live to CBC to announce a series of audacious projects, to say the least, including a possible jump from the CN Tower!

That’s when he decides to call Ky Michaelson, himself a stuntman, to make a special request.

I used to get these calls because I often worked with stunt people. Most of the time it was nonsense, but this guy really wanted me to build him a special motorcycle so he could jump over 26 buses, and he asked me what I thought about it. I told him I thought he was going to kill himself.

Ky Michaelson, stuntman

As the weeks pass, the Human Fly tells Michaelson that his body is 60% metal, due to multiple surgeries after a serious car accident.

He will also reveal his real name or, at least, the name he wants to reveal: Rick Rojatt.

After several weeks, Ky Michaelson began building the motorcycle, a Harley-Davidson equipped with two rocket engines, a machine that would, perhaps, allow the Human Fly to achieve its success at the Olympic Stadium. The stunt team will pick Michaelson up from his home in Minnesota and drive him to Montreal to wait for the big night.

“It was all very strange,” he remembers. I remember that a few evenings before the event, I was in a bar in Montreal with some members of the Human Fly entourage, and the bartender, with a stern look, asked me: “Do you know who are these guys?” If I remember correctly, they gave me $12,000 for my services, and I was the only one who got paid. »

The event at the Olympic Stadium, called A Space Age Extravaganza, also features two disco singers, Alma Faye Brooks and Gloria Gaynor. Pierre Parent, then director of promotion at Polygram, remembers picking Gaynor up at the airport to go to the Stadium with her.

“At that time, she had not yet launched I Will Survive, which would be his greatest success, says Parent. In 1977, Gloria Gaynor was singing in nightclubs. She didn’t sing in stadiums! When she arrived and saw all the empty benches, she was pretty depressed. It was cold, there was no one there, no atmosphere. I think she sang three or four songs on pre-recorded tracks. She wondered what she was doing there. »

At CKOI, Bill St-Georges remembers that the evening of October 7, 1977 was announced, “because the ad was often on the airwaves.” But Pierre Parent claims that almost no one knew the organizers of the evening.

“It came out of nowhere, we didn’t know at all who was organizing it,” he explains. They tried to fill the Stadium by selling tickets for $9, which was still quite expensive at the time. The posters were all in English, there was no buzz around it, so they started giving away tickets. The promoter must have lost his shirt. »

The next day, the newspapers reported a crowd of 2,500 spectators, but Pierre Parent did not believe this figure. ” No way ! I don’t even know if there were 300 people…”

For the Human Fly, the evening will not go exactly as planned. First, upon arriving at the Stadium, Ky Michaelson noticed that the dimensions of the launch pad were not at all the right ones.

He also remembers that, a few weeks earlier, he had learned that the Human Fly had been insured for $1 million. “It was all quite strange,” he adds. I insisted that the organization replace the ramp, and with all the time it took, the spectators started heckling and booing. »

There is also the fact that the Human Fly, disappointed, it seems, by the very modest crowd, took a while to come out of his locker room. “When he finally arrived, he walked around the track for 20 minutes,” says Pierre Parent. Then he took off, he took off like a rocket… and he crashed between two buses. »

The images available on YouTube show a crash that is nonetheless violent, with the Human Fly emerging lying on a board, triumphant despite everything, both arms in the air.

This will be his last lap.

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Over time, the continuation of this story has aroused passions in certain corners of the web. A first documentary on the Human Fly was started in the mid-2000s, then abandoned. Another, started by a British team, would be on track.

Ky Michaelson ended up buying the Human Fly motorcycle from a man in Florida about ten years ago. This collector’s item is now in his home in Minnesota.

The character’s secret identity has also been the subject of several rumors. Thus, Rick Rojatt was reportedly seen recently in Ontario, as well as in Calgary. Some have suggested that the ex-stuntman is a Quebecer named Richard Rajotte.

Michaelson never saw the Human Fly again.

“A few weeks after the Olympic Stadium party, there was a guy who called me,” says Michaelson. It was him. He wanted to thank me for saving his life…”

The Human Fly at Marvel

Quite surprisingly, the American giant Marvel gave the green light to an adaptation of the character Human Fly to its superhero universe, for 19 issues. So the first issue was published in September 1977, about a month before the Olympic Stadium failure. A little over a year later, Marvel published the final issue of the series, in November 1978, without ever following it up. But another company, IPI Comics, plans to release new Human Fly stories in the summer.