“Mad Mike” Hughes died on February 22 when the parachutes on his homemade steam rocket failed to deploy and he augured into the sagebrush near Barstow, California, like a giant lawn dart plummeting at more than 300 miles per hour. I helped to kill him.

Not because I designed or built the rocket, and not because I belted him into the cockpit. But because I was there, ostensibly covering the event as news even though I knew—like nearly everybody else watching the launch—that it was a pointlessly stupid stunt.

“Thanks for coming all the way out here. I really appreciate it,” Mike told me about an hour before the crash. I think he honestly meant it. Because it was people like me who imbued his quest with some larger meaning. Without an audience, he was just a lone lunatic shouting incoherently in a barren desert.

Since then, I’ve read long, dry obituaries in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. All of them prominently featured Mike’s harmlessly harebrained belief that the Earth was flat. While these august publications didn’t make the point explicitly, the implication was clear: Here was another madman who got what he deserved. To be sure, Mike was a conspiracy theorist par excellence. He was convinced that shadowy international cabals were running the world. He thought the lunar landing had been a hoax. At the time of his death, he was under indictment for extortion, thanks to a scheme based on his theory that spelling a person’s name entirely in capital letters entitled someone else to their entire estate (or something like that).

But, of course, his biggest delusion was that there was widespread interest in his antics. And we in the media enabled him. At least I enabled him. And I’ll always regret it.

Mike Hughes taking a break in August 2019 while prepping his rocket for a launch in the Mojave Desert. Photograph: Andrew Hetherington

I met Mike through Waldo Stakes. A self-taught engineer tinged with genius, Waldo had designed motorcycles that set speed records at Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats. In 2012, I wrote a story about the car he was building in an effort to break the sound barrier. I was fascinated by his plan to repurpose space-age-era NASA and military-surplus components to bring the land speed record back to the US from the UK. He, in turn, was fascinated by daredevils, from Evel Knievel to Annie Edson Taylor, the retired schoolteacher who plunged down Niagara Falls inside a barrel in 1901.