The strange, sad odyssey of ‘Lawn Chair Larry’

Larry’s boyhood dream was to fly — and by God, he does.

“So many people have dreams and they never follow through on them.”

-“Lawn Chair Larry” Walters

On July 2, 1982, Delta and TWA airline pilots were stunned as they began their descents into Los Angeles International Airport and radioed in a UFO. They claimed to a mystified control tower that the unidentified object appeared to be a man seated in an aluminum lawn chair with a pistol in his hand, cruising along at 16,000 feet.

They were absolutely correct — the UFO was 33-year-old Larry Walters, fulfilling a childhood dream which ultimately took his life — but not in the way one may initially think. “When he went up into the clouds, and heard engines of planes, and he couldn’t see them, and they couldn’t see him, he went ‘oh my goodness,’” the lawn chair-riding pilot’s fiancé later told a UPI reporter.

It was the understatement of 1982, and possibly the decade.

Icarus ascending

A resident of North Hollywood, California, 33-year-old Larry was just about as average a blue-collar, hard-working American as anyone. He was employed as a truck driver for a television commercial production company, and in his spare time…