I had the honor to spend two days with Neil Armstrong while he filmed a Discovery Channel show at Sikorsky back about 12 years ago. He was absolutely humble, but keenly intelligent and (of course) a fine pilot.
It is funny to see some folks "go Hollywood" like that fellow who is trying to get us to fund his "world record" and then you bump into a quiet, confident man who epitomizes the heroic virtues that we prize. Combat fighter pilot, 4,000mph X-15 pilot, Astronaut, world champion glider pilot, Master's in aerospace engineering, and regular guy - Neil Armstrong.
Here is one Neil Armstrong story (from a great bio in Wikipedia) to show the kind of things he has done:
"Armstrong would be involved in several incidents that would go down in Edwards's folklore or be written about by others in their memoirs. The first was an X-15 flight on
April 20,
1962 when Armstrong was testing a self-adjusting control system. He first rocketed to a height of 207,000 feet (63.2 km) (the highest he flew before Gemini 8). As he descended, he kept the nose of the craft up too long and literally bounced off the atmosphere back up to 140,000 feet (42.7 km) where the atmosphere is so thin that aerodynamic surfaces have no effect on the attitude of craft. He flew past the landing field at Mach 3 and over 100,000 feet in the air. He ended up 45 miles south of Edwards (folklore at the base has that he flew as far as the
Rose Bowl). Descending enough he turned and headed back to the dry lake beds, just managing to land without crashing into
Joshua trees at the south end. It was the longest X-15 flight in both time and distance of the ground track"