99% Invisible - 582- Rocket Man

Episode Date: May 14, 2024

In the twentieth century, the jetpack became synonymous with the idea of a ‘futuristic society.’ Appearing in cartoons and magazines, it felt like a matter of time before people could ride a jetpack to work. But jetpacks never became a mainstream technology, leaving many to wonder... why did they fall off the radar? 582- Rocket Man

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Last fall, producer Chris Berube found himself in an aerospace museum just outside of Washington, D.C. The museum is inside a large aircraft hangar, with rows and rows of warplanes and Air Force uniforms and even an iconic American spaceship. The Space Shuttle Discovery looks, it almost looks like a cardboard replica of the Space Shuttle Discovery. Like it doesn't look real up close. This is amazing. Chris also found some exhibits that were less exciting. Male astronauts could wear a urine collection hose and bag assembly. This is literally just a diaper in a glass case.

This is not what I'm looking for. Okay, keep walking. The museum was cool, but I was getting impatient. That's because I was in Virginia for a very particular reason. I was there to see a jet pack. And according to the website for this museum, they had one. I just wasn't having any luck finding it. Okay, I haven't found the jetpack, but I have found a mailbox that looks like R2-D2.

Okay, why is it this this hasn't even gone to space? Why is this here? I know it may sound, I don't know, immature for a 30-something year old man to wander around a museum and mutter to himself about the lack of jetpacks inside the museum, but hear me out, I had a really good reason. When I was a kid, my dad used to work at a hydro plant in Niagara Falls, and when he came home, he'd tell me and my brother all these stories about his time at work, like pranks or travel to interesting places, but there was one story my brother and I never got tired of hearing

about. According to my dad, one of his coworkers had a jetpack. At least, my dad thought he did. Apparently this guy knew how to fly a jetpack, and my dad told us he even talked about putting one on the roof of the plant, I guess in case of emergencies. For years, Chris wasn't sure if this jetpack man existed, or if jetpacks even existed. My dad died in 2010, so I never had a chance to ask him about this as a journalist. For years, I just had this story in the back of my head, but the details never totally added up. For example, according to my dad, the jet pack guy had flown one in the movie Superman 2.

So I watched Superman 2 and you know what? There's no jet pack. I started to wonder, did my dad make this up to entertain us? I mean, there surely wasn't some guy flying around Southern Ontario with a jet pack in the early 90s. So I didn't put too much stock in it. It was just some family story.

A thing I would tell people at parties, kind of half remembering all the details. But it turns out I wasn't alone. So this story for me really started from a memory. I wasn't even sure it was a real memory that I had. This is David Taylor. He grew up in Washington, D.C. in the 1960s, and he had something similar. His own hazy half-memories about a jetpack guy. I just had this image in my mind of a figure dressed in a white kind of an astronaut suit

hovering over the National Mall. David also wasn't sure if this memory was real until he started looking through the archives. I found a photo from the Washington Post in 1967 of a guy wearing a jet pack on the mall who was giving this demonstration at this pageant of transportation. It's sort of twin canisters on a backpack.

It has sort of an arm, a metal arm on either side. It was like a motorcycle handlebar, but running back to his back instead of in front of him. The photos were proof. David really had seen a jet pack in action. I felt completely validated and I was thrilled. And I thought, okay, this can be the start of actually something that's a story that I would be part of rather than just some unrooted dream. David wrote about his experience for the Washington Post. And after I read his article, I realized two things.

One was that his jetpack guy, the one he saw back in 1967, he sounded suspiciously like my dad's jetpack guy. But the other thing I realized is that absolutely definitively, jetpacks are real. American scientists actually developed one back in the 60s, and it worked pretty well. 50 years ago, magazines were filled with claims that pretty soon there'd be a jetpack in every garage. The jetpack seemed like the future. It's not just me and David who have been obsessed with this search for a jetpack. For decades, scientists, lots of people have tried to bring the jetpack into reality. So what happened? Why has the jetpack fallen off our radar? Ever since humans have dreamt of flying through the air, in defiance of God, we have wanted

jetpacks. A Russian scientist came up with a drawing for one in the 1910s, but it was never built. Jetpacks showed up in pop culture a few decades later, in things like Buck Rogers comics in the 1930s, well before they became a reality. By mid-century, they came to represent the whole idea of a futuristic society, alongside flying cars and servant robots. The Jetsons was, you know, I would watch it on Saturday mornings as the cartoons then, and so that was my sense of, you know, space travel.

There was jet packs in the Jetsons. And so that got linked to this memory. Let's go George, up, up and away. Yeah, but not too high, my ears will pop. Jet packs may have been the stuff of cartoons, but scientists weren't far behind. You might be thinking of a classic jet pack, like a backpack with flames coming out of the bottom, but it took a while to get there.

Other technologies were tried out first, like flying shoes with propellers on the bottom, or a platform that could be lifted by compressed air. None of these baubles really panned out until the military got involved. A lot of the cutting edge technology, sadly, is developed by the military because, number one, the military's got deep pockets, they got money to spend on this stuff. Steve Lado is the author of the book, The Great American Jetpack. Anything that can give you an advantage in war is something your military wants. So people were thinking, hey, if we could strap rockets to soldiers who are running across a field, if it made them run faster, it'd be harder to shoot, they'd get farther, that kind of thing. In the 1950s, the U.S. military took

a serious interest in jetpack research. This was a very tense period of the Cold War. That's Colleen Anderson. She's a rocketry expert at the Smithsonian. I think it speaks to the fears of the Cold War. That's Colleen Anderson. She's a rocketry expert at the Smithsonian. I think it speaks to the fears of the Cold War, the kind of unknown aspects of the Cold War, and if the Cold War would become a hot war, what tools would be needed to fight? The military kicked it out to the regular contractors to see if anybody wanted to build

a jetpack. Multiple aerospace companies came up with prototypes. None of these quite hit the mark. Until the Bell Aircraft Corporation entered the fray. They had a division called Bell Aerospace that focused on jets and rockets. In the race to make a jetpack, Bell had one giant advantage over their rivals, an engineer named Wendell Moore. Wendell Moore, how do I put this?

He looked exactly what you think a 1950s aerospace engineer would look like. He had a flat top haircut and these big thick glasses and a neat little bow tie. But beneath his square exterior, Wendell Moore was eccentric and talented enough to build his own experimental plane… in his suburban garage. This is Bill Souter. He worked for Moore at Bell Aerospace. space. The ascender, or the ascender, is the pronunciation they would use.

It was a rear propeller, rear engine, airplane, experimental. You know, we used to get the biggest kick out of it. At Bell, Moore developed rocket thrusters to help jet planes change direction at high altitude. So when the military called and asked about jet packs, Wendell Moore didn't have to look far for inspiration. And Wendell Moore was looking at him one day and said, you know, if we made those little rocket thrusters a little bigger and strapped them to a person, maybe he could get off the ground. In the mid-1950s, Wendell Moore drew up a design for a device he called the Rocket Belt. Moore's design looked a lot more like the jet packs

from cartoons and comic books. The Rocket Belt, it has a harness or a vest that you would put over the shoulders, and then it has tanks for the propellants, and then the exhaust would come out. The Rocket Belt included two arms the pilot could hold onto, and to propel the device, Bell Aerospace

would fill the tanks with one of the most dangerous substances on Earth, highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide. So you can go to a drug store and buy hydrogen peroxide and use it to clean cuts and take things off, you know, and clean with and whatever. But that's a very, very low percentage of hydrogen peroxide, like 3% solution. If it's closer to 90 or 95%,

it's actually extremely volatile. The Bell design was elegant in its simplicity. On the metal arms, there was a throttle, like you'd see on a motorcycle. And when you twisted the throttle, it would cause this violent chemical reaction. The powerful reaction would create steam that was so strong, it could propel a human being

through the air. The rocket belt was designed to be kinesthetic, which means that pilots could pivot their body to move the belt backwards and forwards. The idea that you can control something through your body movements in an obvious manner, you know, like you lean the direction you want to go. We've all heard of like the Segway scooters. The Segway scooter was supposed to be that you could get on it and use it almost instantly without thinking about it.

Wendell Moore said, you know, I think if we actually put this thing on your back and put the nozzles in the right place, in the right direction, we could get this thing to fly the direction you want it to go by simply leaning, or leaning this way, you go that way. The Rocket Belt was a sci-fi dream come to life. But to be clear, the rocket belt wasn't a jetpack

technically speaking, because it didn't use a jet engine. Instead, it was powered by steam. But still, even back then, lots of people used the words jetpack and rocket belt interchangeably. Because, I mean, it just kinda seemed like a jetpack. With funding from the military, inventor Wendell Moore completed his first prototype for his design in 1960. The next step was to actually fly that sucker. Moore set up an indoor test rig at the Bell Aerospace Office in Niagara Falls. The office had an old airplane hangar, so there was lots of room for flights. In an act of either bravery or incredible stupidity,

Wendell Moore nominated himself as the first test pilot. Wendell Moore would drive to work, strap on the rocket belt, twist the throttle, and up he'd go. He would take it up a couple feet, and then a couple more. The rocket belt was heavy. It weighed over 100 pounds. It was noisy too, creating a sound many people compared to a jackhammer.

And it was really hot, with steam reaching over 1300 degrees Fahrenheit. Despite all of these inconvenient features, the rocket belt worked. Wendell Moore was doing the impossible. He was the first person ever to fly a rocket belt. He was also the first person ever to fall while using a rocket belt. Here's Bill Souter. They had a nylon rope for the safety tether, melted the rope, and he dropped to the floor broke his knee so and that's when when Bell told him more you're done flying. Despite this incident the program kept going and the first true rocket belt flight without tethers

happened on April 20th 1961 with a pilot named Hal Graham. The flight was momentous, but also kind of small. Graham bent his knees and he pushed up, and suddenly in this big cloud of steam, Hal Graham was in the air. Then just as quickly as he was up there, he started to come down, and hit the grass with this kind of running tumble. We couldn't talk to Hal Graham for this story because he died in 2009, but he did record a song about his time as a rocket belt pilot that you can find on YouTube. The team is fleeting fast. The task before you people is to groove up on the path. Howe Graham did several flights on the rocket belt, including a demonstration for the president.

Graham flew the rocket belt in front of JFK, who was said to be slack-jawed as he watched a man gliding through the air. Bell Aerospace was eager to promote their new invention. The company had an art department that created drawings that showed the rocket belt out in the world. Their work imagined a society with office workers and American soldiers using rocket belts.

Okay, so here's actually a guy in like an army uniform. Yep. Yeah. He's got the requisite serious expression on his face for going into battle. Don Irwin is the president of the board at the Niagara Aerospace Museum, which has copies of many of these drawings. In one drawing, a fleet of US soldiers are marching on, guns in hand, rocket belts carelessly flung over their backs.

This is an artist's rendering of how the rocket belt might be used, and on half the panel we see an infantryman wearing the rocket belt with his helmet and fatigues on. And in the background, some of his buddies are scaling a cliff, right? So you can see where they were thinking in conventional warfare. The media was paying attention. Magazines ran articles about the potential uses for the new flying machine from military applications like saving people trapped in a war zone to everyday uses like delivering the mail. Wenzel Moore told Popular Science Magazine the rocket belt would be publicly available within two to three years, even though there wasn't really a plan for that to happen.

The rocket belt was a long way from being deployed in a war zone, let alone showing up in every driveway. In fact, testing was starting to turn up some pretty serious limitations, the main one being flight duration. It's extremely heavy for one person to have to carry themselves, and this 50 pounds of this hydrogen peroxide propellant only works for about 20 seconds. And they're like, okay, can we extend that? And they're like, probably not by much. If the idea of the rocket belt was to get soldiers out of danger, 20 seconds wasn't gonna buy a whole lot of time,

especially when the weight of the pack itself would slow soldiers down. You also couldn't really use it for search and rescue because you needed the arms to steer, so your hands would be busy, you couldn't really pick anybody up. Practically, it just didn't make a lot of sense. The military decided to pull funding,

and this very well could have spelled the end for Bell's rocket belt program But Bell wasn't ready to give up and they decided to try one last thing to capture the public's attention and bring the rocket belt To the next level to keep the dream alive Bell aerospace decided to take the rocket belt on the road People were really excited after reading about it in newspapers and magazines. And now they actually wanted to see the thing in action. So Bell hired a promoter with experience on the county fair circuit to book a series of public demonstrations. To pull off these spectacular public demos, they were going to need more pilots,

somebody young and stupid enough to fly this thing. I was young and stupid, and fly this thing. I was young and stupid. And that's the way they wanted you. Don't ask any questions, kid. Just get in there. We'll tighten it up. Remember, this is Bill Suter from Bell Aerospace. Before he worked there, he was actually Wendell Moore's neighbor growing up. And when Bill was just 19 years old, he became, I would say,

understandably curious about the rocket belt. I was pestering him all the time, you know, I want to fly that thing, I want to fly that thing. Bill didn't have much work experience, other than, you know, cutting Wendell Moore's lawn. But that did not stop Wendell from recruiting Bill Souter to become a rocket belt pilot. Nepotism is a wonderful thing. Wendell Moore wanted to show that pretty much anyone could strap on the rocket belt and make it work. If Bill could do it, then surely, say, an American soldier could do it too.

In 1964, Bill started testing the rocket belt, doing tethered flights at the Bell office. The first thing he noticed about the rocket belt was the intense noise it made. It was 130 decibels. The helmet was padded, you know, for sound and all, but I'm wearing ear-fra- hearing aids nowadays. I don't think it's from that. I think it might have been from the jet pack. By this point, the rocket belt could still only fly about 21 seconds, which to be fair, can feel like a long time when you have a rocket strapped to your back. If you watch a sweep hand on your watch or a clock or something, 21 seconds is a long time. To have a 800 to 1000 horsepower rocket strapped to your back, it can be an eternity.

When things start going wrong, they go wrong real fast. You know, we used to, we used to have a phrase, it's the grass in your ass. The thing about a 21 second flight is that the rocket belt was going to stop working after 21 seconds, even if the pilot was still in the air. To make sure the rocket belt pilots didn't wipe out midair, Bell developed a special helmet with a built-in warning system. It was a vibrator, mind your business now. It was a vibrator that fit against the back of your skull

because they tried lights and everything as warning system and the mental overload, they ended up with the vibrator on the skull. You can't ignore it. Your teeth vibrate. So at 10 seconds you get a buzz and then you get one every second for five seconds. Now you're at 15 laps time, you got six seconds left. So get your affairs in order.

Granted, the helmet didn't solve all possible safety problems, Bill Suter remembers his first bad test on the rocket pelt. I rose up the flight plan was to go straight up 20-25 feet inside the hangar and then move forward and stop turn around come back and land. I rose up when I'm about 25 feet up, I put it in the hover position and the throttle handle came off in my hand. Thanks to the safety tether, everything turned out okay and Bill wasn't hurt. But this is the kind of accident

that would turn off certain people, people like me, from the idea of a rocket belt. But not Bill Souter, he loved the challenge. He says he got the hang of it quickly and the controls, they felt like ice skating. He developed this rhythm with the belt that he called body English. After his training was complete,

Bell Aerospace decided Bill Suter was ready to show the world what the rocket belt was capable of. So he packed his bags and shipped out to glamorous Sacramento, California. Miss Teenage USA or something like that to do with some national contest every year, wanted to know if Belle could bring the rocket belt to display it here at the teenage fair or whatever it was. It was the first time I'd ever seen the ocean or I'd never been out of Youngstown." Bill Souter had never been on an airplane before. He'd never even stayed in a hotel. And he certainly hadn't flown a rocket belt over a crowd of thousands of cheering spectators under a spotlight at night. Well the light from the outside fairgrounds made it like twilight.

Well, it was darker than twilight, but then they wanted all the lights in the racetrack. It was supposed to be a surprise. That's a fart with a lump in it. It certainly was a surprise and this brilliant bright big spotlights right on me. I said, that light's blinding me. I gotta get that out of my eyes. Just before the flight, the lights went down. For this trick to work, Bill had to fly just over the crowd, close enough they could see him and the rocket belt, and then make a very careful landing on a narrow stage.

So on cue, I take off and I'm to fly down the racetrack, the grandstand is behind here. Well, nobody had warned the orchestra, which was in the orchestra pit, of what was about to happen. And I'm coming in, I'm coming down as I'm coming in. Below me there's a blizzard, sheet music. And all I see is assholes in the elbows of the musicians climbing over. They don't know what was happening. They're panic stricken.

I'm distracted by that. Somehow, despite all that, Bill managed to touch down and land on the stage, and nobody got hurt. The crowd might have stood up and cheered in rapturous applause. Bill Souter was just happy to pull it off. Did you feel like relief when that happened?

Oh, man. Yeah. And almost every flight I've ever made is relief. That was my introduction to showbiz. After the first flight, Bill kept showing off the rocket belt at the Sacramento Fair. Every day, three times a day, for ten more days. People loved it. Then Bill started sending him farther afield.

He toured the country making $147 a week. And then we went to, I think it was Las Vegas, to fly over the Flamingo Hotel swimming pool, the Los Angeles county fair, and then up to Seattle to Mount Billingham, Washington. He flew in the first Super Bowl, which, okay, the first Super Bowl wasn't a big deal yet, but still, the Super Bowl. We're just looking through pictures of the rocket belt in different scenarios. This one's flying next to a Navy ship. This one is at Disneyland in front of the castle.

Here's Don Irwin of the Niagara Aerospace Museum, which has hundreds of photos of the rocket belt in action. They demonstrate a lot by flying over things. And what I like about this picture is you can see they're flying over an airplane. Here's a shadow dangerously close to the airplane itself. So he's either demonstrating how easy it is to control and detail, or he's out of control. Bell did a great job keeping the rocket belt in the public eye. Here's Steve Leto.

They made a concerted effort to get these things into the media, not just in front of newspaper reporters, but on camera, on television. So there's an episode of Gilligan's Island, where Gilligan finds a jet pack. Good heavens, look what you've made me do. Sorry, professor, but we're dying to find out if this jet pack is gonna be able to fly to Hawaii. Well, there's a chance, Skipper, but... Oh, did you hear that, Gilligan?

One of us might be able to fly to Hawaii. Isn't that great news? In 1965, the Rocket Belt had its biggest break. Bill got the call to appear in the James Bond movie Thunderball. The producers had an idea for a stunt, where James Bond is being chased around this French villa, and he'll climb up to the roof and then casually ride a jetpack all the way down to a waiting Aston Martin. Of course, it was too dangerous to put Sean Connery on a rocket belt, so Bill and a colleague named Gordy Yeager were picked as his stunt doubles. When Bill and Gordy got to France for filming, the producers had a surprise.

In their opinion, James Bond wouldn't wear a helmet while flying a jetpack, a prospect that was way too dangerous for Bill's suitor. But the producers tried to make him do it anyway. The first thing they do is try bribing us with money. Just this once. Just, you know, that wouldn't work. So they got some brown shoe polish somewhere. They tried to make it look like hair? Well, just get it brown, you know? The crew had to go back and do reshoots to make everything work, but in the final sequence,

Connery straps on the jet pack, yes, wearing a helmet, and escapes some pesky goons, soaring over a French castle and landing next to a luxury car. Then Connery delivers an iconic line about the rocket belt. for a French castle and landing next to a luxury car. Then Connery delivers an iconic line about the rocket belt. No well-dressed man should be without one. No well-dressed man should be without one. Yes, very practical.

By the mid-60s, things were going really well with the rocket belt, but there was a gap between reality and the public dream of a jetpack in every driveway. A year went by, and then another, but the rocket belt didn't feel any closer to being available to the public. Here's Steve Lado. There was a bit of over-promising going on. Newspaper reporters would say, these things are on the horizon, we've got one doing this now, and pretty soon we'll be doing that. And we don't know where that stretch came from, but it got into the culture that pretty soon we're all going to have them.

We were promised jetpacks. We were. We were. Bill Suter says the media got carried away when they talked about the rocket belt. By the late 1960s, in the public imagination, the novelty started wearing off. Millions of people had seen the rocket belt, but it didn't have any new tricks. Even Bill Souter started getting tired of it. Did it ever get routine? Yeah, it did.

And once I got married and started a family, it wasn't fun anymore. Bill flew the rocket belt for five years, in 12 countries and 42 states. But by the late 1960s, Bill and his wife Cheryl had kids. And every time he landed the rocket belt and felt that little pang of relief,

he wanted to be back home. And it was becoming obvious the military wasn't going to bail out the program by ordering a giant fleet of these things. The handwriting was on the wall. Lyndon Johnson, he cut the space program to, you know, his great society. You know, he had to use his money for social programs. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but science needs it too.

Anyway, there's no way we're going to continue with the jet belt. Bill flew the rocket belt at the New York State Fair in 1969. The emcee noticed that Bill was standing next to the governor, and he told the audience to welcome Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Rockefeller. After that, Bell Aerospace wrapped up the program. Wendell Moore, the inventor, developed a prototype for a jet belt powered by kerosene, and he got to see it fly without tethers one time,

before he died suddenly of a heart attack in 1969. Bell Aerospace gave away their rocket belt prototypes to the Smithsonian and other schools and museums and with nothing to do Bill Souter left the company. Bill ended up taking a new job at the State Power Authority in Niagara Falls, New York. There he wowed coworkers with stories of traveling the world. Co-workers like my dad Roger. Bill Souter, he's the jetpack guy. He's the one I'd always heard about.

Bill doesn't remember my dad. Probably because, you know, my dad didn't have a jetpack. Bill may have left Bell Aerospace, but he didn't give up on jetpacks. Over the years, inspired by the rocket belt, various hobbyists have built their own, and they called Bill Souter for help with test flights and public demonstrations. Bill's last big ride was over the 1984 Olympic Opening Ceremonies, an event that was watched by the entire world. 2.5 billion people. That's what I said to myself. I'm standing up there and my father died years before that. When I'm telling my father, well, you know, in my mind I'm telling him, look at this, look at this. Did you ever think it would come to this? Over the years, jet packs have come a long way. Flight times are longer. Some designs today are actually built

with small jet engines instead of hydrogen peroxide tanks. So we finally have real literal jet packs. But the reality is people aren't as enthusiastic. There's a jet pack pilot named David Maimon who lives in Australia. And a couple of years ago, he flew his machine over the Sydney harbour. The footage is quite something but in an interview with The Guardian Maimon said he was surprised by the reaction. Here's

a quote, I still remember flying around close enough to see the joggers and the people walking around the botanical area and some of them did not look up. The jetpack is loud, so I promise you, they heard me. But there I was, flying by on a jetpack. And they did not look up. Maybe in a world full of drones and billionaire rocket launches, the jetpack just isn't all that surprising. Bill's working with a class at a university in Buffalo to see if there's some way to do jetpacks sustainably. But his attention is on other things like climate change or his grandkids hockey game or the Christmas ornaments he's carving in his wood shop. The jetpack can feel totally beside the point.

Yeah, you know, I don't have any any problem with any of it. But we've got to move on. the point. The rocket belt is a technology of the future that belongs to the past. But I understand why Wendell Moore and Bell Aerospace kept going. I understand why hobbyists kept trying to develop a better jet pack. Even after it was obvious, there wasn't going to be a jet pack in every driveway. They just had to know what was possible.

It's the same reason we go on a first date or go to the moon. It's the same reason I had to find the Rocket Man. And the same reason I went to not one, but two aerospace museums looking for an old rocket belt. Just to know for sure that they exist. We're going to take this out so you can... Wait, really? We can actually do that? Oh my gosh, Don.

Don't tell my boss. I'm in trouble. Sometimes the magnet of curiosity is just too strong. Sometimes we just have to know more. Oh, wow. Oh, man, finally. I can't believe it. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha Pack Hoaxes. More with Chris Berube after this. We are back with Chris Berube. Chris, you have been working on this story for quite

a while and it is finally here. I know. Yeah, I did my first interview for this story two years ago, I think. Yeah, two years ago. So why did it take so long? It took a while largely because I had to persuade Bill Souter to speak with me. So I sent him an email after I read David's article in the Washington Post. And his first response to me, I have this written down, I have no idea of how a podcast works nor do I care to learn.

So that was his reply. We communicated on and off for two years and I guess I won him over eventually because he's in the story. I mean, I think he might be onto something about podcasts though. You got to keep track of so many podcasts. It's not worth it. Don't start if you haven't started. That's probably the best advice. Probably true. But thanks for bearing with me during the reporting. I know this was a long one, but I want to talk to you about something that came up for me while I was reporting this, while I was talking to people about jetpacks for the last

two years, which is I heard from a couple of people, oh, jetpacks, the invention of jetpacks, like what the Nazis did. Like a couple of people said that to me when I was bringing up this story. So where did they get that idea? They got it online, believe it or not, the source of all knowledge, the internet. And I talked to Steve Leto about this. Of course, he wrote The Great American Jetpack, a very important book in this story, great resource for jetpack history.

Anyhow, Steve told me it is very common to find stories like this online. And this particular one, the Nazi one, is not true in his reporting. In fact, it's part of this big lineage of fake jetpack news. There were a bunch of hoaxes I ran across while researching jetpacks. And one of them was that the Germans had invented

the jetpack in World War II by strapping the engine of a V1 buzz bomb to the back of a soldier so he could hop over trenches. And that struck me as being false for a bunch of reasons. Number one, trenches were World War I. Number two, the buzz bomb engine was actually quite heavy. It was a pulse jet engine. And none of it made any sense.

So where does this story come from? Steve looked into it. This story appears to have come from a Holocaust denier. Oh, goodness. Okay. And I ran the origin down to a guy who was a conspiracy theorist who liked to go on TV shows and rant about how much he hated certain ethnic groups. And he found out that he said, I want to go on there and rant about ethnic groups. They wouldn't let him. But if he said, I want to get on there and talk about German invented jetpacks, they go, oh, come on out.

And he just invented the story. He admitted it later. He later said, I made the story up. And yet I found websites that had repeated the story as if it was true. And they even had photographs. And the photograph of course, the GI Joe with a model of a pulse jet glued to his back. And it's kind of blurry. It's like, it's obviously a model. Yeah. So Roman, I know I've shared the link with you if you want to take a look at the picture. Okay. I got to see this. Okay. Oh my God. That is a doll. That is not a person. That's not a person. It's a little blurry. So like at first glance, if you're not

looking very carefully, it kind of looks like a person. If you're not looking carefully and you've been hitting the head. You've never seen a doll before. Yeah. Exactly. of looks like a person. If you're not looking carefully, and you've been hidden in the head. You've never seen a doll before. Exactly. Or a human. The prescription's out of date. Yeah. I know.

It's so silly. Okay, so that's one common hoax, is this idea that the Nazis invented it. Another, there's this story out there about this Romanian inventor who claims that he invented a jetpack that predates the bell design. I invented the jetpack. The Americans stole it from me. They owe me a couple billion dollars. And I traced this story down and there's a museum in Romania that has one of his jetpacks on display and it's obviously not a jetpack. Steve did not get to go to the museum but he sent someone to take photos and yeah it looks homemade like it's not a real jet pack.

And apparently news organizations would call this guy for proof, and he'd send the pictures of Bill Souter, of the guy from our jet pack story. Or Bob Quarters, this other like famous Bell rocket bell pilot. So once again, there's no merit to this story. And sadly, I found news organizations in Romania that ran interviews with the guy and he would talk about his jet pack and they'd slice in images of the bell rocket belts being used. Roman I think this whole thing speaks to a bigger issue that runs through the whole story we've been telling about rocket belts and jet packs and it's how these kind of short-circuit our

brain I think when we think about them, like for science journalists, for everyday people, like our critical faculties can kind of go a little haywire when we're reading about the idea of jetpacks, right? I think we just get so excited, it's like, oh, we want them to be real. And I feel like we don't apply enough intellectual rigor when talking about it.

Right, right. I can see that, and I can also see is like, you see little rockets, you see humans, what's the problem here? You strap one to the other. There's a kind of like sense that you could kind of make one in your garage. And so I think that sort of weakens people's defenses when it comes to these kind of things.

Right, totally. And I think it's what runs through this whole story is like everybody is looking for the jet pack. Like there is a part of us that really wants it to become something. So I feel like that hope kind of overtakes our rational thinking around something like this. Totally. I think that's the cornerstone of your story,

is that there's a piece of everyone's brain that is searching for their jetpack because we want it so badly. And it makes sense to me completely. I had so much fun watching the story develop. Thank you so much for reporting it and for your persistence of getting Bill Souter, who that man is a gem. Thanks so much, Roman.

I really appreciate that. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Chris Barube, edited by Kelly Prime, mix and sound design by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Real, fact checking by Graham Heysha. Special thanks this week to Bill and Cheryl Souter, the Udvar-Hazy Center, and Dawn Erwin at the Niagara Aerospace Museum, where you can see a real life rocket belt. You can read David Taylor's reporting about Bill Souter and the rocket belt in the Washington Post. Kathy Tu is our executive producer, Kurt Kolstedt is the digital director, Delaney Hong is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Sarah Bake, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Gabriella

Gladney, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Ley, Lasha Madon, Jacob Maldonado-Medina, Nina Patuk, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% of his logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites,

as well as our brand new Discord server. There are about 3,500 people talking about architecture, talking about Power Broker, talking about all kinds of fun things. Please join us there. There's a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.