American daredevil Erendira Wallenda dangled from her teeth from under a helicopter in a series of eye-watering acrobatic moves over the teeming waters of Niagara Falls on Thursday.
US media said her stunt set a Guinness World Record for height, breaking a record established by her husband Nik when hanging from his teeth 250 feet above Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri.
Dressed in a black body suit, the mother-of-three sat and dangled from a large hoop tethered to the bottom of the helicopter, at one point hooking her feet over the hoop and hanging upside down with her arms stretched toward the water.
Wallenda hung above the falls for around seven or eight minutes. She did splits hanging off the hoop backwards, before biting into an iron jaw and briefly dangling by her teeth about 300 feet in the air. Wallenda comes from a family of stunt artists and world record chasers.
Yesterday’s stunt marked the fifth anniversary of her husband’s walk on a tightrope over Niagara Falls, which straddle the border between Canada and the United States.
Speaking to reporters, Wallenda described the experience as “amazing” and “beautiful”, and said she had hung twice from her teeth, listening to music throughout so as to block out any sound from spectators below.
Her stunt adds to the lore and legend of the renowned Wallenda family, famous for astonishing audiences around the world with their jaw-dropping stunts executed from dizzying heights.
In June 2013, Nik Wallenda became the first man to cross the Grand Canyon on a tightrope, completing that record-breaking feat in under 23 minutes.