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Last month, Beaverton engineer Alan Case fulfilled a lifelong dream.
On Aug. 24, at the Smith Creek Dry Lake Bed in Nevada, Case got onto his back and raised his legs while holding up a powerful cross-bow contraption known as a footbow that he built in his garage.
With his bare feet and arms, he drew back the string with all his strength, straining to control about 300 pounds of force.
With a loud twang, the bow string released, shooting the arrow from the bow at a speed of more than 800 feet per second.
Alan Case proudly shows the arrow he made in his garage that set the new national record in August 2025 during official competition at Smith Creek Dry Lake Bed in Nevada. His arrow went 2043.1 yards or about 1.16 miles, breaking a record that had stood since 1971.
courtesy of Alan case
“Woo!” Case exclaimed and pointed upwards in a video posted online afterwards. A tiny puncture hole in a slip of paper at the end of his bow showed a clean shot. “Look at that!” he said, “Perfect!”
The short, sleek arrow — with a tip like a bullet and razor-blade tail — arched over the open playa.
At an elevation of 6,200 feet, the thinner air at Smith Creek offered less resistance, enabling arrows to travel much farther than they would at lower elevations, and the wide open expanse provided a safe arena to launch projectiles farther than a mile, making it an ideal location for archers around the world to convene each year for the annual USA Archery Flight at Smith Creek competition.
His arrow landed more than a mile away: 2,043 yards, 1 foot, 7 inches to be exact, which is 46.6 feet farther than the record that had remained unbroken since 1971.
“You did it Alan,” his wife, Ardianne Lorimor-Case, called out as she filmed the historic moment on her phone. “You just broke a 54-year-old world record!”
This quest was more than a project for Case, more than a hobby. It could justifiably be called a lifelong obsession.
Flight archery’s long draw
Though Case is one of a relatively small subgroup of competitive archers, the challenge to see who can shoot an arrow the farthest has been a human pursuit since ancient times.
The Ottoman Empire is known for taking flight archery to its height. The farthest documented arrow distance in Ottoman times was recorded as 924.65 yards, just over half a mile.
Those records stood unbroken until modern interest in flight archery revived the challenge in the 20th century. Bowmaker Harry Drake became an innovator and leader of this sport, setting a series of records.
He was the first to break the ancient Ottoman record and the first to shoot an arrow longer than a mile. On Oct. 24, 1971 at Ivanpah Dry Lake in the high desert of California, Harry Drake shot an arrow 2,028 yards using a footbow he had designed and built himself.
At the time, the Guinness World Records recognized this feat as the farthest distance any human had launched a missile by means of muscle power alone.
Drake then topped his own record in the early 1980s, using a crossbow he’d designed himself, setting the furthest distance an arrow has ever been shot: 2,047 yards.
Case has been on a lifelong quest to match Harry Drake’s accomplishment, and this year he finally crossed the line he’d read about as a boy.
He set a new national record with his footbow, coming within 4 yards of Drake’s world record of the farthest an arrow has ever been shot in human history.
A lifelong quest to best Harry Drake
Case first encountered Drake’s accomplishment when he was just 10 years old, flipping through the pages of the Guinness World Records.
“I remember it really caught my father’s attention when I showed this to him, and we often discussed how this could be possible, and how we could come up with a bow capable of doing this,” said Case.
Over the following decades, Case looked to Drake not simply as a competitor to beat, but a hero to emulate.
The decades trying to break Drake’s record have not been without setbacks and injury. In 2021 Case’s bow misfired, sending an arrow into a bone in his right foot, yet the next year he tried again.
And again.
He worked late nights in his garage making his arrows and bows and used his annual vacation time to camp in Oregon’s Alvord Desert to test his designs and push them to the breaking point before returning to refine his work.
I joined Case and two of his daughters, both record-holding long-distance archers, for their annual training camping trip in 2023. When the “Oregon Field Guide” story aired, Case had gotten close and had possibly broken the record, but he had not done it in an official competition.
“Only three people have ever shot an arrow past a mile,” Case said when we filmed him in the Alvord Desert in 2023. “I’m No. 2. And then there’s Harry Drake.”
Alan Case draws back a bow he made in his garage. The crossbow-like contraption is called a footbow. Case uses the strength of his legs and arms to pull the string back with 300 lbs of force. This type of archery is called "flight" and the objective is to shoot an arrow the farthest distance. Case set the world record in August 2025, shooting an arrow 2,043 yards, just over a mile.
Joslin Lorimor
The moment of truth
When it was time to measure where his round of arrows had landed, a search team fanned out across the playa, scanning for the tail ends of tiny arrows jutting up from the hard-packed earth.
They found the closer shots first, and finally, Field Captain Kevin Strother found one way out. He called for the others to come over.
“You lose track of how far out you are, because you look back and can’t see the vehicles at the camp,” Strother said.
He marked the arrow’s location: Arrow 2507. As a sanctioned USA Archery event, each arrow had been carefully inspected and registered beforehand by competition officials.
A pole with a reflector was placed in the tiny hole where the arrow had been. Back at the firing line, more than a mile away, Case peered through a surveyor’s scope, known as a Total Station, and sighted the reflector.
Then, he slowly read the distance, his voice beginning to tremble: “OK, six, one, three zero point five eight nine...”
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He knew he had surpassed the measurement that had been fixed in his mind since reading it as a boy. He had surpassed Drake’s footbow record, and come just shy of the absolute world record.
Case raised his arms in victory as fellow archers and his daughter rushed to hug him.
“That was 20 years!” Case said elatedly.
Indeed, it had taken Case two decades of painstaking work to reach this triumphant moment.
“In the world of flight archery, this is a very big accomplishment,” said Strother. “It was a crowning moment for him, for everybody.”
Just a little further
Sarah Boyd with USA Archery, the national governing body for the sport of archery in the United States, confirmed that Case has set a new national record.
A distance that had evaded him for decades has been reached, and the world record now just a few yards to go.
“It started as curiosity — how did Harry Drake do it?” said Case. “And I still don’t know how he did it. But I know how I did it.”
Now, at last, his boyhood hero is no longer a rival, but a peer. And next year, Case can return to the desert once again, with the distance of longest arrow ever shot feeling closer than ever.
