A disembodied woman who secretly hitched a ride on an weather observation jet has finally returned to earth, nearly a month after she claims to have exited the jet at 38,000 feet.

Julianne Morrison, who died in 2002 at age 28, was an expert skydiver and self-professed “thrill seeker.”

“So it was pretty depressing to die from West Nile fever after presumably getting bitten by a mosquito while gardening,” she said. “I thought I couldn’t have any fun after that. I did some of the standard skydiving after my death, and I had some pretty respectable hang time, the longest being 13 hours, but I quickly got bored. So I decided to stowaway on a NOAA jet.”

That’s a specially outfitted GulfStream operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that routinely investigates the global jet stream. Morrison says she boarded the jet in Oahu, Hawaii, on May 16 and landed near St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, June 13.

John Okrent, the founder of the Last Drop Skydiving Club, said, “We’ve got no reason not to believe Julie. She sent us an email just before boarding the jet and we got her email yesterday that she’d landed in Canada. We’re going to recognize this as a record.” The club is considered by most disembodied skydivers to be the official record keeper.

Morrison, a Denver native, is back home with her family after several commercial airline flights.

Morrison’s husband, David, said he’s happy she’s home but wasn’t concerned about her absence. “Julie said she could be gone a long time. If she’d landed over water, it might have been years before she made it home. I know it sounds weird, but I’m happy she’s still willing to risk it all, even after she’s dead. She wouldn’t be the woman I married if she gave up doing crazy things like this. The only thing I worry about is what her next project will be.”

Morrison said water was her biggest concern. “I knew I was over Canada and all I was thinking was please, please let me go down over land. I’ve landed on lakes before and usually depend on the wind to eventually blow me to shore, but the Atlantic’s just a little bit bigger than Cherry Creek Reservoir,” she said, referring to a Denver recreation area.

NOAA scientists profess no knowledge of their stowaway, but Albert Statton, a meteorologist aboard the jet, is a longtime friend of Morrison and a fellow skydiver. “I talked to Julie two days before. I thought she was back in Denver and had no idea she was already in Hawaii.”

Statton said he doesn’t even know how she could have left the jet. “We’re at 38,000 feet. It’s not like we open the door.”

Scientists do release dropsondes into the jet stream, however. These small packages can drift for hours in the jet stream and are released through a special hatch in the aircraft. Morrison claims she found a way into the hatch and was released with the sonde. She estimates she traveled about 5,500 miles from where she left the aircraft.

“I wouldn’t recommend it. About the second week, I was really starting to get tired of drifting.”