In the world of combat sports, there are very many ways to incapacitate your opponent. From punches, knees, elbows and kicks, to chokes, slams, and even banned strikes such as headbutts, the techniques by which fighters leave their foes unconscious are seemingly endless. After watching thousands of fights, most hardcore fans exist under the illusion that they’ve seen it all.

Every now and then one bears witness to something with the potential to shatter that illusion and make one question whether what they’re seeing is real. One such is a fighter being knocked out by a strike that lays only two fingers on him.

Jonathan Goodwin, the man delivering the strike, is not a martial artist but a self-described TV escapalogist. Goodwin has been buried alive, locked inside a box with 200,000 bees, set in concrete, burned at the stake, sealed in an airtight vacuum bag, and sewn up inside a dead cow to name just a few of his feats.

In this video, he explains what’s really interesting is that a punch is not the most efficient way of transferring energy. [The fist] is quite a wide surface area. If you could make that narrower, it would be more efficient.

In a highly dramatic display, Goodwin positions just two fingers inches in front of a volunteer’s chest before delivering a blow that causes the volunteer to hit the mat like he had been shot with a gun.

Decide for yourself whether the two-finger knockout blow is real or an illusion and tell us in the comments.