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Johnny Strange Gets Guinness World Record For Pulling Plane With His Ears

By Anne Sewell
Published on: 00:16 PST, Sep 9, 2015

Johnny Strange has been dubbed “The Man with Ears of Steel” after pulling a Cessna 172-P plane using chains attached to his earlobes. Strange, 26, will be featured in the latest edition of the Guinness Book of Records to be released Thursday.

Apparently this isn’t his first Guinness World Record, but it is possibly the most unusual. Strange (his real name reportedly) hooked chains on to the pierced holes in his ears to drag the Cessna 172-P, weighing 677.8kg, for 20.4 meters at the North Weald Airfield in Essex, England.

While this happened back in October 2013, it has only now hit the media, just prior to the release of the 2016 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records.

Strange has been performing stunts since the age of 10 and has earned eight Guinness World Records during his lifetime. The Mirror quotes the escapologist and sideshow performer as saying, “I started off at the age of ten in Blackburn, Lancashire.”

“At first I juggled balls, then clubs and went on to knives, fire sticks and now its chainsaws.”

He says he is delighted to have won yet another Guinness World Record, but he has one problem.

“I am always delighted when I get another Guinness World Record and being featured in the book never gets old for me, the only problem is I’m starting to run out of places to hang up my certificates now.”

He did, however, say it was difficult preparing for the plane-pulling stunt.

“Preparing for the plane pull was tough. I’m not going into detail but I have to stretch my ears and create tough scar tissue so they don’t rip.”

Strange is a believer of the impossible and says he has “always been interested in the unusual and the bizarre.”

“It’s the obscure things that skew the perception of normality that really fascinate me.”

According to his official website, Strange became an amateur escapologist after studying the works of Harry Houdini and has since mastered several unusual skills including, but not limited to, juggling running chainsaws, lifting weights attached to his now famous ear piercings, sword swallowing, and walking across broken glass.

He once swallowed a magnet, then retrieved it by swallowing a sword. In another stunt, he swallowed a 2000v glass neon tube, which could then be seen glowing through his flesh. It seems his daring is pretty much never-ending and very inventive.

Besides his many and various Guinness World Records, Strange has toured extensively throughout the world and has also been featured in publications like Ripley’s Believe it or Not! and on TV and radio.

Getting back to his airplane stunt, Simon Lowman of the North Weald Flying group was amazed.

He said, “In all my years flying I have seen some extraordinary things but I have never seen an aeroplane [sic] moved like that.”

“I am surprised he didn’t rip his ears off.”

Lowman went on to say that these planes “aren’t easy to move at the best of times with the engine running,” adding that he was fully expecting to “get the super glue out afterwards to stick his ears back on.”

Strange’s ears did survive the experience and no doubt will be used for even more peculiar and daring stunts in the future. See some of his stunts in the video included below.

[All Images by Amy Plumb / CC BY-SA 4.0]

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