Art Bell welcomes David Adair, a self-described child prodigy turned rocket scientist who claims he built an electromagnetic fusion containment engine at age 17. Adair recounts growing up in his father's machine shop, originally used for building race car engines for Lee Petty, where he constructed increasingly powerful rockets starting at age 12. His first liquid fuel rocket reached 80,000 feet, and his work eventually attracted the attention of Congressman John Ashbrook and retired General Curtis LeMay.
Adair describes how his mathematical work on fusion containment fields paralleled the research of a young Stephen Hawking, whom he met at Ohio State University in 1969. With congressional funding and military authorization, he built a fusion engine and launched it from White Sands in June 1971, with the rocket redirected to land at Groom Lake. Upon arriving at the classified base, he was taken into the center hangar and lowered 200 feet underground on a massive elevator platform.
In the subterranean facility, Adair says he was shown an engine identical to his own design but scaled to the size of a school bus. He discusses technology transfer from the space program to consumer products, criticizes NASA for the preventable Challenger disaster, and predicts artificial intelligence will soon transform civilization. Adair testified under oath before Congress on April 9, 1997, about recovered extraterrestrial hardware.
