Gary Brooks Faulkner

Gary Brooks Faulkner (born 1958) is a former construction worker and landlord who was arrested in 2010 in Pakistan carrying a sword, pistol, night vision goggles, a map, and a Bible on his one-man hunt to capture Osama bin Laden, the founder and leader of Al-Qaeda.

Faulkner claimed that he was on a mission from God to capture Bin Laden.

Faulkner spent ten days in the custody of Peshawar police before being released with no charges in what was reported to be his seventh visit to Pakistan to find Bin Laden, but according to Faulkner, it was his eleventh.

Early media reports said that Faulkner intended to kill Bin Laden, but Faulkner said that he planned to hand him over to Pakistani authorities.

Faulkner was born in 1958 in Los Angeles, California.

When he was ten years old, he and his family moved to Colorado where Faulkner lived in Denver and Greeley where he currently resides.

In 1981 and 1986, Faulkner served prison sentences on burglary and larceny convictions.

In 1996, Faulkner was sentenced to one year in Denver County Jail for a domestic-violence assault conviction.

Faulkner said that he had the idea to hunt Osama in 2004, after reading an article about Bin Laden hiding in the mountains of Pakistan.

A coworker of Faulkner's commented that Faulkner had a dream which involved him getting to Pakistan "without his feet touching the ground."

Faulkner's first attempt to travel was by boat and he bought a 21-foot yacht called the Pia Colada.

However, the boat was considered illegal for use as there were no life jackets, flares, and other necessary safety equipment.

He traveled from San Diego hoping to cross the Pacific Ocean, but a hurricane blew his boat south to the Baja California Peninsula in Mexico.

His next attempt, the following year, once again involved another boat.

After dislocating his shoulder, he sold that boat and used the money to buy a plane ticket to Pakistan and arrived a week later.

He traveled from Islamabad to Lahore, and then to Sialkot where he stayed on a military base before being directed to a town in a northern tribal area of Gilgit.

From there he began to explore the remote mountains of the country.

Faulkner's fourth, fifth, ninth, and tenth attempts to find Bin Laden revolved around searching the Chitral region.

On his first trip to the area, he claims to have come in contact with a senior Al-Qaeda official when he shared a car with a man who had an "unwelcoming" demeanor.

Faulkner said that he wandered for four days in disguise among "Al-Qaeda workers" near a cave.

He described the people in the area as "running around with axes and all kinds of stuff, working on cutting down trees and making the new cave."

On his second trip, he said that he slept on a bed of pine needles in the mountains where he could watch the cave waiting to see if Bin Laden would show up.

He was unable to reach Pakistan on his sixth, seventh, and eighth attempts to travel there.

His sixth attempt involved flying to Pakistan through hang gliding, though he had never used a hang glider before.

He decided that the best place to practice hang gliding was in Israel.

He described it as "I've got to test it somewhere, so in my mind: Well, if I go to Israel [sic]—the Dead Sea! Hit the water, you float!"

He purchased a hang glider which he then cut up into six-foot pieces that would fit into a ski bag.

He used copper tubes from a cabin he was renovating to craft brackets for reassembling the glider.

In 2006, he was arrested on a misdemeanor for failing to appear on a warrant from Larimer County, Colorado for not having car insurance.

Faulkner maintained a living working in construction as a general contractor and carpenter.

In September 2006, while in Israel, he put the glider back together and prepared to launch himself off a cliff by the Dead Sea.

He broke his ribs and dislocated his shoulder on the attempt.

Faulkner claims to have been to Pakistan eleven times, with his final trip being the one that led to his arrest in Pakistan in 2010.

Faulkner, who had no military experience or training, was determined to find Osama Bin Laden on his own.

His obsession with capturing Bin Laden stemmed from the September 11 attacks.

According to his brother Scott, after the attacks "it became his passion, his mission, to track down Osama and kill him or bring him back alive".

Scott also said that Gary was trained in martial arts particularly in hapkido, a Korean martial art, and the sword and dagger were his "weapons of choice".

According to Chris Heath of GQ, who interviewed Faulkner, it was Faulkner's belief that Al-Qaeda was going to detonate a nuclear device in Mecca unless Bin Laden was captured by a specific date.

He also believed that upon the successful completion of his mission, he would become the king of a Central American country.

The 2016 film Army of One starring Nicolas Cage was based on him.