Fact Check

Bungee Leap of Faith

A video does not show the world's first "wireless" bungee jumper. It's a promotion for the Ikea furniture chain's wireless chargers.

Published Nov. 6, 2015

Claim:

[green-label]Claim:[/green-label] A video shows the world's first wireless bungee jump.

[dot-false]FALSE[/dot-false]

[green-label]Example:[/green-label] [green-small][Collected via e-mail, October 2015][/green-small]

Is this video real? For a magnet to function in this fashion, it would have to be "Supercooled" with Helium as used in Magnetic Resonance Imaging. The ground magnets in this video don't even appear to be locked onto the ground, so why don't they move away from the jumper as he approaches them.

How does the jumper finally get down on the ground? If the magnetic was just switched off, he would fall quite a distance from what the is seen on the video.

[green-label]Origins:[/green-label] A video purportedly showing the world's first "wireless" bungee jump has been circulating online since June 2015, when it was first uploaded to YouTube by Ikea Belgium:

The video was widely circulated on social media sites, and it's possible that many of the people who encountered the above-displayed footage did so somewhere other than via Ikea's official YouTube account. This may have contributed to the notion that the "World's First Wireless Bungee Jump" was real, but if those viewers had watched the entire 3-minute video to its end, they would have encountered the following message from the Ikea furniture chain describing the phenomenon of wireless bungee jumping as something that might be a reality someday (in contrast to Ikea's wireless chargers, which are available now):

wireless

In other words, while Ikea is now offering wireless chargers, the company has not yet developed the technology that would allow for wireless bungee jumping.

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[green-label]Last updated:[/green-label] 6 November 2015

[green-label]Originally published:[/green-label] 6 November 2015

Dan Evon is a former writer for Snopes.

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