On August 20, 2005, about 280 people gathered at Hunter S. Thompson’s farm in Colorado to watch his ashes fired from a cannon on top of a 150-foot tower shaped like a fist holding a peyote button. Johnny Depp paid for it, reportedly more than $2 million. Thompson had asked for it in a documentary years earlier. Most famous people are buried in cemeteries, but a few have chosen something stranger.
1. Hunter S. Thompson: a cannon in Colorado (2005)
The author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas shot himself at home in February 2005. His send-off, set to Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man”, was as loud as his writing, and fireworks went up with the ashes.
2. Gene Roddenberry: into orbit (1997)
The creator of Star Trek died in 1991. In 1997 a small capsule of his ashes was launched on a Pegasus rocket in one of the first space memorial flights, and it circled the Earth for several years before burning up. His wife, Majel Barrett, joined him on a later flight.
3. Eugene Shoemaker: on the Moon (1999)
The planetary scientist who trained the Apollo astronauts in geology and co-discovered the comet that hit Jupiter in 1994 had always wanted to go to the Moon himself. After he died in a car crash in 1997, NASA put some of his ashes on the Lunar Prospector probe, which was deliberately crashed into the Moon in 1999. He is the only person buried there.
4. Clyde Tombaugh: past Pluto (2015)
Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930. When NASA’s New Horizons probe launched in 2006, it carried an ounce of his ashes, and in July 2015 they flew past the planet he found. They are now heading out of the solar system.
5. James Doohan: Scotty in space (2012)
The actor who played Scotty, the engineer of the Enterprise, died in 2005. After two attempts, a portion of his ashes reached orbit on a SpaceX rocket in 2012. Some of his ashes were also smuggled onto the International Space Station by a private astronaut.
6. Mark Gruenwald: inside a comic book (1997)
Mark Gruenwald, a Marvel Comics writer and editor, died suddenly in 1996. At his request, some of his ashes were mixed into the ink used to print a collected edition of his comic Squadron Supreme, so he became part of the book itself.
7. Fred Baur: in a Pringles can (2008)
Fred Baur, the chemist who designed the Pringles tube in the 1960s, asked to be buried in one. When he died in 2008, his children stopped at a pharmacy on the way to the funeral home to choose the flavour. They went with Original. Part of his ashes were buried in the can.
Tombaugh’s ashes are the furthest from Earth of any human remains, and they are still travelling at more than 50,000 kilometres an hour.