Birds fly. Men drink. 'Nuff said.
"Not within a thousand years would man ever fly."
-- Wilbur Wright (1901)
Born out of boredom in 1959 to combat the formal propaganda of the First Flight Society in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on one of those "dark and windy nights when nothing flew." It was December 16, the eve of the ceremony honoring a pair of bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, and their alleged first flight. As often while drinking and thinking, they drank and thought until "the myth of the Wright Brothers' flight in 1903 became as hard to swallow as the bootleg rye they imbibed." This was pre-internet when, if you made a ludicrous claim, all knew you were joking, a crackpot, or both.
Myth and folklore primed the imagination of the masses, from Icarus to Cupid, Pegasus, the fabled Arabian carpet, and even storks delivering babies. Small wonder that humankind, nourished on nonsense, would believe that humanity could fly. The Wrights' father sure didn't, remarking that men will never fly, because flying is for angels.
Combatting all these challenging tall tales have perpetuated, the Society has "fought the hallucination of airplane flight with every weapon at its command save sobriety" and remains "dedicated to the principle that two Wrights made a wrong at Kitty Hawk." Members of the Society aren't opposed to flight, often being aviators themselves. "Birds do it, Bees do it, even educated fleas do it, as Cole Porter once said. But when you stop to think about it, do you actually believe that a machine made of tons of metal will fly?"
Each year the Society gives out the Orville Proxmire Award and the Aviation Hall of Infamy Award to notably newsworthy failures of flight. All done with tongue in cheek and drink in hand.
Source: http://www.manwillneverfly.com/
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