Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 435 - The Strange Tale of the RB2000

Episode Date: October 11, 2026

SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys A decades-long saga involving a failed military weapons project, carnies, stuntmen, methheads, a possible international drug smuggler, a murder, and, of course, a jet pack. SOURCES: Brown, Paul (2009). The Rocketbelt Caper: A True Tale of Invention, Obsession and Murder Mullins, Justin (October 2005) "The Ups and Downs of Jet Packs. New Scientist. No. 2519 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/the-rocketbelt-caper-56202480/ https://rocketbelts.americanrocketman.com/history.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-26-me-23415-story.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/03/where-eagles-dare-the-jetpack-mystery.html https://www.deseret.com/1999/7/28/19457763/rocket-belt-still-missing-but-feud-lives-on/

Hey everyone, it's Joe. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just $5 a month gets you access to our entire bonus episode catalog, as well as every regular episode, one full week early. Access to all of our side series that are currently ongoing and our back catalog of those as well. Gets you e-books, audiobooks, first dibs on live show tickets and merchandise when they're available. And also gets you access to our Discord, which has turned into a lovely little community. So go to patreon.com slash lions led by donkeys and join the Legion of the Old Crow today. Hello and welcome to the Lions led by donkeys podcast, the only military history podcast currently happening in a hotel room in Cork, Ireland. I'm Joe. With me is Tom and Nate.

Fellas, how we doing? We're spread out on the across the room. Nate is sitting on the floor, crisscross, applesaw. Joe is on the day bed and I'm sitting in the cook chair. I mean, do you want me to sit on your bed and get up there and then just do full Rick James, just fuck your bed with my boots

on? Because I only brought one pair of shoes and their boots. Does that make Joe Charlie Murphy? This is the closest thing you have to a couch in here. Yeah. Unfortunately, Premier Inn has a one chair per room policy. You can't have an audience of cooks. I saw

this fucking Instagram story this morning that was like, you've heard of the cuck chair, but there's now a Cuck arms race. Behold the Cuck secretary. And it was a hotel room that had like a desk set to the side with like a full like paint of glass and from it facing

the bed. It was powerful. Are you talking about the, I think it's a British guy selling his home in Cape Town South Africa and there's like the bed, but then there's yeah, like a glass table with a chair that faces the bed. Yes. As though when we're to sit down and take notes whilst. Yeah. I don't

know if it's the same way. I mean, it sounds like it's the same Hey, bro, who says cuck holding can't be a learning process, you know? I'm a visual learner, but I need to take notes. Yeah, it was a Stephen Bartlett is the person, I believe, who owns the home. Kazari sent this to me. It says, I think this is the worst part of Stephen Bartlett's house in Cape Town that he is selling for $9 million. And the picture is this, Joe? Nope, it was a different one.

It's a different one. Look at this. So we have more than one cuck secretary. Yeah, it looks like a like a British campaign furniture style folding camp chair, a table that looks like saw horses with a sheet of glass, an unbelievably gorgeous view

of the mountains, and the ugliest furniture I've ever seen in my life in a room that is, let's say, 75 to 80% empty. I mean, but that's like really taking the conceit of diary of a CEO so far, and that, like, you are learning from the knowledge and experiences of business leaders and Stephen Barlett is also learning from

them as they fuck his wife. Jesus Christ. I saw a thing actually because I stay away from from anything involving shit I'm not working on because I just don't care or rather I wish everybody will. I'm not trying to be a hater. But like when people are like, oh, check out this new podcast. Check this new show. It's like when will I have time? But I saw a clip in the press that Alfie Dundas had a joke that won some award at Edinburgh. I think it was the best joke award they'd gotten from a bunch of things where he's like, diary of the CEO is the most depressing thing I've ever watched in my life. It's arguably the second most depressing diary in history. That's a great joke. I saw a wonderful stand-up set. I would drop his name, but I legitimately don't remember. It was an Afghan stand-up comedian, and somehow he ended up doing a set in front of a whole bunch of, like, soldiers.

And he figured it out. And he went up there and cut like a tight five of nothing but 9-11 jokes. It was fucking sick. Credit to that dude. And like, he was getting some laugh. So, like, it's good to see that not everybody was going to have. Also, it's like, quite frankly, if you're up in front of a group or people who are still currently in the military, like, 9-11 is either a thing from their earliest childhood or, like,

a thing they've read about, like, you know, mysteries of the before times. Yeah. Learning about 9-11 or talking about 9-11 is going to be the equivalent of being like, oh, remember when everyone was worried that D.B. Cooper was going to hijack a plane and you're like, who the fuck is that? I've never heard of this guy before. It's like someone getting offended at, like, a Pearl Harbor joke these days. Yeah, for a large segment of society, 9-11, it occupies the same culture. real space is like Windows XP and drunk driving without consequence.

Ah, you mean my youth. Yeah, because I mean, like, in our cases, like, Joe would have been, what, shit, you would have been 13. I was almost 17. So it was different. I did fly unaccompanied a couple of times before 9-11. I remember, like, my aunt just walked up, was there at the gate. Like, she didn't have to go through security to, you only had to go through security if you were going to get on the plane. And so like things like that, I remember. But then, yeah, you know, it's not as if, um, I have a friend. This is really funny. It's fucked up. really funny. I have a friend who was working in the South Tower and when he happened to take a

bathroom break right before the second plane hit. No, when the first plane hit, they were like, you know, the South Tower is secure like, you know, don't, you know, basically they didn't want people to evacuate because it was going to be a huge crowd on the ground and there was debris falling. He's like, you fuck that shit. He just left. So he's bugged out. Good on him because, I mean, I don't know how high up in the building he was. I don't think he was high enough he would have been caught. But even then there's still a chance. If you don't make it out in 56 minutes, you die. And apparently it's a four block radius that people died. so it's bad. Anyway, he wasn't even there to get cruised.

No. Well, yeah, we talked about the cruising site, but now he, this is unrelated to cruising, but I mean, I suppose you could be forgiven for thinking that it might be related to cruising because the next day, he's like, man, that shit looked fucked up on the news. He got on his rollerblades and he went to ground syrup. He's like, yeah, I wanted to check it out. He's like, yeah, there was dust. Everyone was smoking. The smell was bad. It's like 20 years later he got fucking cancer. And I was like, do you think that maybe was that rollerblade? And he survived. Thank God. You know, he caught it really early. he caught it really early, he got treated,

he got fucking money for the victim's payout, so like, you know, respect to him. But at the same time, though, I was like, the world's most consequential roller bleeding trip. That, yeah, the world's most consequential, but different type of dedication to the blade.

I mean, yeah, it's like, if you saw a picture of a guy rollerblading down basically, like, I don't know, the FDR highway or the west side highway, right of 9-11, like the smoke and the wreckage, like you would be forgiven for thinking

that it was like a new cut scene from Metal Gear Solid 2 with a guy on rollerblades who throws balls. He got really, really jacked and he got good at his job. Someone handed Hideo Ghiba a single photo in this guy, but he was like, I have an idea. I had a great idea. Speaking of something that shoots a bunch of fire and fails,

we're talking about jet packs today, boys. Hell yeah. How do you feel about jet packs? I am a big fan. The pinnacle of jetpack design in video games was in Ratchet and Clank too. I hold fast on that. I have no reason to dispute that. Ratchet and clank, you know.

scientifically based. I don't really have an opinion on jet packs. When I was a kid, I used to think they were going to be a thing. Oh, yeah. I feel as though we're close enough in age that you can recall with movies like the Rocketeer. You're like, well, if they could do that in weird old-timey jazz age radio shit in the movie, then in the future everyone will have a jet pack.

But then I think much like we don't typically walk down the street and have hairier jets fucking taking off, doing vertical take off and landing because there's some problems involved. I have a feeling we're not going to be entrusted with jet packs. It's kind of like why flying cars would be horrible, right? All of the terrible things that come with using a car, but now they're hurtling overhead. You have 360 degrees of traffic jams and also car accidents. We all know that person.

Could be a girl, could be a guy, could be non-biner, could be anyone. I'm admittedly thinking of a girl I knew where like, you really shouldn't own a car. And then it's like, you really shouldn't own a gun and a car. And as imagine if you had a flying car, that's like, and you know she's going to have the gun and she's not going to be good at driving. but now the car can go up and down as well as... I mean, you can attach the gun to the car. Yeah, you can do weird road rage shit.

I don't know, at planes, at birds, at anyone. Instead of a drive-by, you get hit with a strafing run. But today we're not talking about just any jetpack. We're talking about the RB 2000. And I do have to tell you guys something. I have to admit something. This isn't really the story of a jetpack. This is not the story of a failed piece of military technology.

Is it the story of the invent? mention of a wet roast beef sandwich? I feel like a dry roast beef sandwich sounds way worse. Okay. Instead, this is the story of how a jetpack was involved with an insurance salesman, a meth-addicted car stereo technician, a stunt man, a kidnapping, more than a dozen lawsuits, and a murder. History is great because, you know, so many vocations have been wiped out due to technology

and neoliberalism that no one can be a meth-addicted radio car. radio technician anymore. I know, it's a shame. They got rid of the spinning, Jenny, and the car radio technician. Like Nate kind of alluded to, military jet packs have been something that everybody is dreamed of since the very first concept of a jet engine. Like Buck Rogers' stories that, like, our grandparents probably read were a thing. They had sweet jet packs all began flying around sometime in, like, the 1920s.

I think Buck Rogers started in 1928. And just to connect that character to this show even more, because this is, you know, a great, recent character that we talked about. This is eventually turned into a movie, you know, old-timey movie. I think it's black and white. But it's starring Buster Crabb. The same actor that Lionel Crabbs co-workers sarcastically nicknamed him after because he was good looking. It's the Crabman. He returns.

Yep. Jet packs, like I said, are kind of like flying cars, an inevitability of the future that everybody would be using. Isaac Asimov once wrote that by the 1960s, they would be just a normal piece of everybody's commute, the people flying on their, what they called rocket belts over traffic on their way to the office by 1990. Yeah, don't look up anything else that Isaac Asimov wrote in a personal capacity. Read his books, not his personal opinions on a matter of subjects. See, this is why, where I agree with you, the death of the author only works if the author's actually dead, in my opinion. I'm actually unfamiliar with Isaac Asimov's problematic opinions.

It's for the best. Really? We're just going to leave that hang. Are we talking prejudice towards ethnicities and religions? Are we talking Arthur C. Clark bad? What are we talking? We're talking about the... Robert Heinlein bad.

We're talking the age of consent. So Arthur C. Clark bad. Yeah. Okay. And I'm going to use a term rocket belt and jet pack pretty interchangeably throughout this episode. And it's probably going to piss off like any engineers that are listening. They really boil down to being two different things in a very small scope. Like one is powered by a rocket and the other is powered by a jet.

And I cannot stress enough for the context of this story, it is completely unimportant. I am excited for the eventual response episode, released by Friends of the show, failure to launch in response to this episode. Yeah, this is made specifically to piss Quinn off. I'm not an engineer. I'm not going to go into all of the... the finite details of what makes a rocket belt and a jetpack different because they, and this is the important part for us, they look exactly the fucking same.

Problem for me is that every time you say RB 2000, all I can think of is, let's all meet up at RB 2000. Why is my roast beef sandwich tasting dry? Oh, Arby's. I'm sucking off a guy. How did you know this is what I do whenever I go to Arby's? So where is the military side of this whole thing? Where does the military history of the jet pack begin? Well, according to lore, the Nazis, because of course.

Of course, yes. They were the first to create one, spearheaded by everyone's favorite rocket Nazi Werner von Braun. The jet pack was called the Himmel Sturmer and powered by the same jet engine as the V1. And if that sounds incredible, and maybe even a little unbelievable, it's because it is. It never happened. the Nazis never even tried to build one. For starters, the V1 rocket is four meters long. Yeah, I mean, Himmelsheimer means sky stormer, basically,

which I guess it would do if you had a V1 rocket on your back. You would storm across the sky in a great big parabola, and then you would land really badly fast, and that would be it. Really more of an imperial Japanese design, which is just the Oka rocket. And then there was a guy, an unphotographical guy in New York who's like, these things are cool, but what if they made you extremely horny? Oh, I was going to pivot towards Gravity's Rainbow, too. I was like, what if a guy always got an

erection before a V2 rocket hit London? What if an evil German guy was like, we can't build a guidance system? I have to put my twink acolyte in to work the levers and fly the rocket himself. What if one third of the book was in German and it was really horny? You know, the amount of times Gravity or's Rainbow comes up on this show is kind of concerning at this point. You should read it. All of you at home should read it. It's actually really good. I will say this, though. It is actually a book where I would recommend having a reading guide, not because you're not a smart enough reader to handle it, but because the book is full

of so many things that, like, are just going to be completely incomprehensible because Thomas Pynchon didn't give a shit if the reader understood technical manuals about rockets from the 1940s and also like the history of Central Asia. A lot of German language. And getting a book deals used to be way easier. Oh, I mean, Gravity's Rainbow won the people. Pulitzer for fiction in 1973. And so the committee was like, we're just not awarding a price this year. Fuck this. We hate this book. We hate this guy. There's a shit eating scene. There's a naval fleet with a boat that's made up only of toilets that implies that all the sailors have to jump between boats to use the toilet because the Germans are so fixated on efficiency.

It's a great book. I would read it. People burst into song. It's basically this podcast. So that brings us to a question, right? Not about the toilet ship. That's what I'm keeping for later. But how exactly did this story about the Himmelstermer get created? One guy who we've actually talked about before, way before you two were on the show. Well, you were producing Nate, of course. Christoph Friedrich. Well, that's his pen name. His real name is Ernst Zundel.

Do you guys know who Ernst Zundel is? I absolutely do not. It's so long ago that I produced that episode that it feels like a half-remembered dream. It's probably for the best. he is a guy who was charged with spreading a holocaust denial bullshit in Canada. So he hired a fellow psycho named Fred Lukter, a man who has emailed me a death threat for the last episode we did.

He is an unlicensed engineer who freelanced as a guy American prisons would hire to build gas chambers. Now Fred was hired as an expert to go to Auschwitz and chisel pieces of the death chambers to smuggle back to the U.S. in his dirty underwear so he could then have an analyze to prove that no Zyclon B was ever used there. The labs that he submitted those to,

like obviously they could not accurately test the samples given to him because how they were transported and all lot of other stuff. But the labs were never told what they were testing. In case you're wondering, yes, Zendell lost the case. We did an episode on that several years ago. I just really have to bring up the Holocaust-anying jetpack guy whenever I'm given a chance. I just also, I'm just like, I'm going to go desecrate this historical site to like, man's inhumanity to man.

So I can be like, actually, I'm going to own you and the ring of logic and ideas. I'm going to, I have this theory. I'm going to prove in the way I'm going to do it is by chiseling away at Auschwitz and snuggling it in my drawers. Well, you should. It's a lot easier to do that if you think the Holocaust didn't happen. Hey there, blimpie boy, flying all over Germany. Hey there, blimpie boy, soon we will be so juden free. I'm just thinking to my... I'm just thinking like, can you imagine this is probably predating the era of the body scanner, like LIDAR, whatever the fuck it is, things that you know, you stand in when it checks to see.

Oh, this is before the advent of airport security at all. So basically like if you were suspected of smuggling, they were going to search you, but I'm just thinking about this. Be a little anachronistic with me for a second. Imagine all the stuff you're expecting a dude to have smuggled in his underwear. Like you think it's going to be like Coke or. X to see your hair or something. He's like, it's pieces of Auschwitz. The world's most exhausted customs guy on Earth has to do with him. Oh, Fred is also, he likes to answer your emails. Um, he's still alive. He's evil Nome Chomsky. Yeah. Well,

Nome Chomsky is evil Nome Chomsky. The real first jet pack was the brain child of a guy named Thomas Moore who got a $25,000 contract with the U.S. government to build it in 1952. Thomas Moore was his name. Yeah. Like Sir Thomas more like Utopia. I know it's a different guy, but still... Completely different guy. But still, it's funny to envision that the guy when he was writing about the Utopia, he was also like, we're going to have shit on our backs that let us fly.

Christian backpucks. And then once again, bringing this back to Nazis, this was thanks to Werner von Braun. So it's still kind of a Nazi jet pack at the end of the day, isn't it? Thomas's design did work. He even tested the thing himself. But the money ran out before he was done. And the army just didn't really feel like it was worth the time or money anymore.

The next attempt was Project Grasshopper in 1958. spearheaded by two Mormons in Utah. So we also have a Mormon jetpack. Ah. They apparently allowed the user to go 25 feet up into the air and sprint at 30 miles an hour. I have a question here. For the religion that doesn't let you masturbate or drink coffee, they're okay with jet packs? Well, sure.

It doesn't make you come. Unless it does. I mean, depending how much you're vibrating on that belt. Yeah, I mean, I guess in a way, you've got to redirect that energy somewhere. And so in their eyes, it's like, well, you know, you can keep yourself free. from sin because the wind rushing through your hair will make you forget about the raging erection that you've got.

Brigham Young is weirdly neutral on jet packs. That's how you ensure the continuation of over the jeans humping. Is that the jades are held up by a rocket and belt? Also, if the back blast from the rock is, you know, strong enough to keep you up 25 feet above the surface,

it's probably going to blow away a lot of dirt and stones. It might uncover some golden plates. It might uncover graveyards where they haven't written down the names of people they can jump in Mormonism posthumously. I mean, to be fair, we are maybe 15 years away from the Mormon saying Joseph Smith, how to jet pack? Maybe he did. Maybe he did. Their so-called jump belt was demonstrated in front of the military top brass at Fort Bragg North Carolina, but again, funding dried up and the project was shelved. Enter the Bell Rocket Belt. Wendell Moore was one of the engineers

behind the X-1 Supersonic Jet that pushed Chuck Yeager beyond Mach 1. And he quite literally took this engine design and thought, I could strap this to a guy. And to that, I salute him. He built up a test rig which was tethered to the ground and the engine was powered by nitrogen and he strapped it to his back and fired it up. After some fine tuning, Moore eventually built something that could fly a single man about five meters in the air. Before long, Moore was contacted by the Army's transport research and engineering command and then started developing it for military use. By 1960, he was testing the new design. It was getting better, but it was nearly impossible to control in any direction other than going straight up. Like backmounted

backpacks could only be invented by white people because you need the flattest ass people on the planet to wear them because otherwise the propulsion would just your cheeks smooth off. But also it's like what you've just said, I think is quite important. You can only go up. So like what's what's the point? Yeah, you could just say all you. You know, I was going to say you were doing the same thing a hot air balloon does. But like it's debatable whether or not you will be able to get down. And I'm really up high right now. Cool. It's way cooler than a hot air balloon. And to be fair, a guy later on that's involved in the rocket game is also involved in the hot balloon game. So maybe those two things are more connected than you originally thought. The highest altitude jump ever performed on planet Earth

is from a hot air balloon. That's true. It wasn't from a rocket or rather a rocket backpack. It would be cooler if it was. Yeah. But then one day, the tethers that were holding more to the ground while he tested the rocket belt snapped and he was slingshotted by one of the other ones that were still connected. And he and his jet pack slammed to the ground four meters below, shattering his knees. A fucking acme ass injury. Yep. This is the kind of shit that only has. happens to like, Wiley Coyote. Yeah.

We have to sit you to the specialized Wiley Coyote Clinic. The Wiley Coyote Aviation School. It's where the 9-11 hijackers went as well. Moore wouldn't be able to fly again, so he picked a different guy named Hal Graham to take his place, a man with no flying experience whatsoever. But by 1961, they had their first flight without a tether, which lasted about 30 seconds. Hal didn't die, but the jet engines did vomit out so much steam he could not see where he was flying.

And it also made as much noise as, well, having a jet engine strapped to your fucking back. And Hal was barely able to control the thing over a distance that was less than the first Wright Brothers flight. But everyone loved it because, you know, rule of cool, right? It's the same rules that dictate Warhammer.

This shit is too cool to be stupid. After some more fine-tuning, it was unveiled to the public in June of 1961 and thousands of people came out to watch. More demonstrations would follow, like he flew over water. He flew from a grinding craft. And of course, he flew around in front of President Kennedy, who was probably so impressed that he was trying to figure out to stick his dick in the jetpack.

I was going to say, President Kennedy, she's like, yeah, that's really cool. As his head is just like a miasm of thoughts of cheating on his wife and getting more pain pills. Would you think, gentlemen, that this jetpack is kind of a blonde? Right, right before he knelt's in the jetpack, he just gets a vision of his dead brother in the plane. Then hell crashed and nearly died, so he retired from piloting a jetpack. Bell hired more test pilots for more demonstrations, including Air Force pilots from the Korean War, and two teenagers, a 17-year-old and a 19-year-old. And as insane as that is, the 19-year-old Bill Souter would become the main pilot moving forward and something of a protagonist in our story for a little bit. At this point, the Army was losing interest in the jetpack,

and there was a very good reason for this. Despite working on it for years, betting hundreds of thousands of dollars and really millions when adjusted for inflation and requiring an entire highly trained ground crew in order to make it work. For the cost of 19 liters of fuel, the jetpack could fly for approximately 21 seconds and cover 150 meters. What fucking scale are they building this? It has nearly 20 liters of fuel and it's on someone's back. Yeah, I mean, jet packs are huge. They don't look cool when they're actually used in real life. I also am just thinking about this too. It looks like a small plane attached to you. the same time that this was happening, you also have a lot of developments in aeronautics

for rotary wing aircraft and helicopters are getting way better and way smaller too. And at a certain point, it's like, what can this thing do that you can't do like an ultra light helicopter, quite frankly? That's kind of what happens. Yeah. Because like, okay, maybe that's not as cool, but like a helicopter is at least proven that you can kind of not die sometimes when being in one as opposed to this feels debatable. It's like 50-50.

And when you think about it, they couldn't actually fly for 21 seconds. they could fly for about 18 because you had to immediately start lowering yourself to the ground. And Hell's crash demonstrated that there was no safe way for a jetpack to fail. Like if a plane fails, they can glide. If a helicopter fails, they can auto rotate. If a jetpack fails, you just fall to Earth like a fucking meteor. 150 meters. Like, what's the point?

Yeah, there's no point at all. That's not that far. It's like, like, whatever obstacle you're trying to surmount, you can probably just get a dude to run at it. and he more likely get there safe than this. Yeah, if he falls down, he can just get back up. Yeah. So, of course, the army canceled the contract. But that left Wendell Moore with a jetpack to harness the civilian commercial market,

which is something that existed. The crew would be rented out for $25,000 as an attraction for events like the World's Fair, the Calgary Stampede, and just, you know, state fairs, football matches, like for halftime. He became a jetpack Carney. I mean, you know, this is, the world could have been so much cooler if the, you know, America's greatest rocketry dark maid didn't blow himself up. And instead had been involved in this than like the Nazi.

And instead, we could have had like rockets at like county fairs where you could like fly around and look at like people eating corn dogs rather than army recruiters, seeing how many pull you can do for a free t-shirt. Yeah. I feel like it would be an interesting alternate future where Francois Olawn, for example, was caught going to visit his mistress on a jetpack instead of on a Vespo. It'd be a lot easier to catch him.

Yeah, but what if it was so ubiquitous? What if people were on backdrops all the time? And so he thought no one's going to notice that I'm the president of the country on my jetpack, going to sheet on my wife. And, you know, when things slip from like, you know, the Bell Company and government oversight, you get, like I said, this starts to be run like a carnival act.

And with all of the, let's say, not so safe practices that come with the world of carnies, at the California State Fair during one performance, the pilot, Sutter, blinded by his own exhaust, because this is always a problem,

flew directly over the orchestra and nearly killed a guy. But they did make a ton of money. They toured the world, and they kept putting money into developing the jetpack further. And then Wendell Moore, the only guy who cared about this project at all, died in 1969, and the project died with him. At least the Bell version did, because the Carney Jetpack circuit had proven so lucrative, someone was definitely going to try to get into it. Wendell Moore, another fatality of the end of the sober of love. He's like, kind of like the Jimmy Hendricks of Jet Packs.

Instead of getting addicted to heroin, he just got really addicted to jet packs. Yeah, exactly. Well, that's the problem. They thought they were going to be making a statement and saving money by having the Hells Angels do maintenance on the jetpack. I just kept stabbing it. A lot of people don't know about Altamont.

Does there's a dude with a jetpack flying around? A guy named Nelson Tyler would eventually build his own version in the 80s. But Tyler, like Moore, was a professional. He was an aeronautical engineer. He'd gotten into the movies. He won an Academy Award for building. a kind of stabilized camera rig so they could like move around

and shoot action scenes. But we're not an engineering podcast. We're not going to go into the nuts and bolt to that thing either because that's not really my jam. Once again, listen to failure to launch. Yeah.

It's also not that important to our story, but just know that the Tyler Rockabelt, the version that he built, as it would be known, was pretty much the same as Moors.

He built it using a lot of Moore's original designs. It's a copy. He made a few things to make it a little bit better. Tyler's goal was to do tours just like Moore had, and he does, and he makes a fuckload of money. Obviously, we're all a little bit too old to know about this one, but eventually his version end up playing a part in the

1984 Olympics. What? Yeah. Yeah, there was something with a jetpack, wasn't there? Yep, that would be Tyler's. All right. Okay. Using that publicity as leverage, he sold the Rocketbelt to a theme park in Sweden. And one of the pilots of the Tyler Rocketbelt was a guy named Kenny Gibson, who, for a time, would work for that theme park because, you know, you do have have the whole market kind of cornered where you are the only jetpack pilot in the world? It's a good thing that it was the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles because the Soviet Union boycotted that one because of the Soviet Union had seen all these jet packs in person. Can you just imagine how many satellite republics would just have like humans shaped scars in

buildings from like mandatory jetpack practice? Yosef Tito Bros just has the best promo foe of him flying through that wearing a sombrero with a jetpack on. Now eventually Gibson decided he didn't really want to work in Sweden anymore so he goes back to the US and I'm getting too much pussy. The food is too sour. I'm too popular with this jetpack. I gotta go back home. I'm actually overdosing on these meatballs, man. I gotta go on. I've got to go out. So when he leaves the park obviously has no use for the jetpack so they just sell it to him. And then he takes it back to the US with him. Once again, before 9-11, you could bring anything on a

plane. Oh, don't worry. Jetpacks are still legal in the United States. What? Yeah, you can buy a jetpack. Yeah, but like, I'm talking about bringing it through TSA onto a plane. I mean, I suppose you'd probably have to put it in your checked baggage, like a gun, which is also legal at a minute. Yeah, I, I have only ever been to the US twice and it was when, or actually, yeah, twice, one when I was in my early 20s and like one when I was 12 and I went to Disneyland. And it's just like become a recurring thing where I'm just shocked at the places you can bring a gun in America. That's why you see all those signs at the airport that have to remind Americans, like your gun has to be in your checked bag.

Yeah, I'll just tell you this because of something I used to do in the job I had once. I actually could imagine you could bring a jet pack as checked baggage. It would just have to be drained and purged. And it's probably going to be too big to fit. So it would have to be like freight hauled. But you could put a generator, which I mean, I mean, you can put stuff that uses high octane fuel as long as it doesn't have any of that fuel in it in the plane. I thought you were going to go a different way.

is that like, you got really pissed off at work so you started shooting the friar at stake and shake. And back in 1981, Gibson had flown his friend Brad Barker out to watch him demonstrate the jetpack and Barker became obsessed with this thing. It also probably helped that he had recently been fired from being an insurance salesman and then got divorced and lost his house. So this is happening in like the 80s, in California? Well, Gibson is operating out of California, but Barker's from Texas.

So somewhere between California and Texas in the 1980s, and you're basically giving the protagonist from falling down a jetpack. Yeah. He has a jetpack related midlife crisis, which, to be fair, is cooler than most midlife crises. So with nothing else going on, Barker was hired by Gibson to join his rocket belt team in California. Like I pointed out, Barker was an unemployed insurance salesman. He had no technical expertise whatsoever. He was just going to get aeronautical engineering on-the-job training, which might just be the last job that should have that outset of I suppose surgeon.

We love an autodidact on this podcast. They teamed up with a guy named Thomas Lawrence Stanley who was apparently a Vietnam veteran that this is heavily disputed. He turned into afterwards was what is let's say known as an aeronautics buff.

He isn't an aeronautical engineer. He is a pilot, but he meets Gibson and Barker during a skydiving trip and then immediately gets put in charge of distilling their peroxide based fuel for the jet pack. So he's basically Walter White.

Kind of, but Walter, Walter White was a chemist. This guy is just like a huge fan of flying. So he's basically Tucco. Yeah. No, he's fucking like, he's, Mike.

He's, no, he's rocketry popcorn sultan. Actually, he is Mike. And I'll tell you why later. He's really into flying. Like, he has private pilots license. But like I said, he's, of flying. He's an electrical engineer, so he's the most educated guy on this crew. But those

are two very different things. He is the guy who was in the hot air balloon game, like I alluded to earlier. He just loves flying. I'm not sure how that qualifies him to brew up their jetpack fuel. But if the other guy is a former insurance salesman, Stanley is the most qualified guy in the team somehow. I mean, did you know that as a side note that the word in French for a hot air balloon is on Mongolfie, like the Mongolia brothers who invented it? That would be like if hitting your head and the elevator ceiling was called a Cassavian. That's what I'm calling it now. Anyway, within a few years,

Barker and Stanley had a falling out. You see, Stanley was very, very wealthy, and everyone assumed that money came from the fact that his family owned an oil well, and some of it did. But Stanley was actually, and again, this is disputed, an international drug smuggler. Hence all the flying.

Yes. Finally an actual expert. He had borrowed Barker's personal plane, which is something that he owned and retrofitted to make long-range flights to Mexico without telling him. And then when he got caught, he simply abandoned it in a hangar in Seattle, leaving Barker to foot the entire bill of it sitting there for several months. Stanley also ripped Gibson off for about $50,000 before just vanishing in the wind. All technological innovation either comes from drug trafficking or pornography. So, you know, that's true.

And war. Yes. By 1990, Gibson had put Barker in charge of working on the rocket belt. while he was away doing stunt work in the Philippines as one does. That was when Barker got a call from Gibson's wife, Sherry, saying that Stanley had suddenly reappeared and was breaking into their storage unit trying to steal the components of the rocket belt so he could build his own. What the fuck is going on?

Oh, Tom, it's about to get a lot weird. I'm doing stunt work in the Philippines and I go off from my wife and you're like, I don't need this right now, babe. I'm about to do this really great job with John Landis. Oh, no. There's a guy called Miguel who really needs his Domo transported. Barker does what anybody does, what any one of us would do in a situation where he needs to go protect his jetpack from being robbed. He decides he's going to stop Stanley by force.

First, he calls up his friend Rob Fisher, who is a local karate instructor. Yes. Oh, yes, God. Now we have, we have the local karate man. We've got like the theft of a jet pack. We've got Countdown to show guys, I promise this gets so much weirder. The jetpack, dim mark is about to happen. He drives out to the oil field that Stanley owns. And there they run into Stanley's hired goon, Bernie Robinson, a retired Navy SEAL. Bernie Robinson, great name for a hired goon, by the way.

And this is from the book, The Rocket Belt Caper, quote, according to Barker, Robinson swung at Fisher and then tried to make a dash for his car, where he kept a loaded gun. But Barker claimed, quote, Rob went into his karate routine and, in literally three or four seconds, just beat

the shit out of this Navy SEAL. Yeah, because the Navy he was too busy doing like his warm up and like bowing and stretching and just goes straight in the nose. He just got fucking karate kicked in the head. Then Barker broke Robinson's leg with a baseball bat while demanding to know where Stanley was. Then Stanley drives up and seeing this admittedly insane scene playing out in front of him decide to take Barker to where he had taken the stolen goods after being threatened with the same bat that he crippled Robinson with. Afterwards, Gibson Barker and the Rocket Belt joined the Michael Jackson World Tour and made a million

dollars. Fuck. Yes. I really like that Rocket Man. No, I'm not going to cut a record with you,

Mr. Rocket Man. You leech. You go talk to Elton John. This is something that Elton John will love.

Can you fucking imagine, though, if you were just whipping ass on a, like a rocket pack with Michael Jackson's

Earth song plane. That would be the coolest thing you've ever done in your life. That's what Gibson got to do.

It seems the pilot. They don't really care up, bow, rockets. What about rockets? Were you saying that he was doing rocket pack shit for the tour? Or was he doing like karate man?

No, no, no. The karate man was a different guy. Crowdy man isn't in the rocket belt. So it was solely rocket pack related. Yeah, yeah. Michael Jacks did not hire Gibson and Barker for the karate abilities. John picks up the phone. He goes, but Benny and the Jets.

Gibson inspired all of this. In the months afterward, Barker and Gibson's relationship began to break down as well, mostly because Barker kept bringing his 15-year-old son to work and allowing him to tinker on the fucking rocket belt. I think he got the wrong way around as well. I think he was inspired by Elton John because go by Yellow Wreck Road came out in 1970.

Whatever. I mean, I was going to point out that there was like a temporal glitch there, but at the same time, it sounds like every single person in the story to include Elton John is so highest balls on drugs that like, it might as well have been synchronous. Oh, that's coming. Don't we haven't introduced the meth head yet. This sounds like such a methhead dream.

Like, when methods are beating each other up over scrap metal, like they all believe it's a rocket pack that's worth a million dollars. Like, I'm on Barker's side here because I got on, like, if I'm Barker, I got on the job training to work on the jetpack, why can't my 15 year old son? Also, you know Michael Jackson would have had so much fun with this jetpack. Yeah, I mean,

knowing what we know about the things he was into, like outside of the fucked up shit, we're talking like Ferris wheels and roller coasters. You're like an actual real life jet pack. Yes, I could see life. flying Jackson. If the jetpack game remained in business long enough, he would just been kept on retainer at Neverland to fly around whenever Michael got bored. Now, Barker got himself fired after, you know, having his kid work on the jetpack a few too many times. And now he

was out of work. But he was going to be goddamned if he's in let his rocket belt dreams be crushed by Gibson. It was the only time in his life where he had a steady job that allowed him to not couch his way around Texas, even if he did at one point on a personal plane. So he decided shit. If Gibson could build a rocket belt, so can I. Oh no. Oh no. Now just from the beginning, you can see Barker's coming from a profoundly stupid place. Gibson hadn't built the rocket belt Tyler had. And the rocket belt that like Gibson had was built on the original designs made by Moore while he was working for Bell. All of this was funded by the US government. Barker didn't even know any of this, but he was not going to let that stop him. First, he called up the best

engineer he knew. Joe Wright. What kind of engineer do you think he was? Descendant of Orville? HVAC. Car stereo technician. Fuck. Yeah. I mean like this is... A car stereo technician from Michigan. Of course. Of course. And we're talking, this is now written the mid 80s. So this is like we've moved kind of past eight track into like the real cassette era. Yeah, he's making a killing. Joe Wright is actually doing really well for himself, which is a credit to him seeing how he was also a meth head and an alcoholic. And after that, he realized that he would need financial backing to build the rocket belt. This is something that costs a fuckload of money. So he immediately picks up the phone and calls Larry Stanley again, the guy who his goon, like their goons just

fought. They haven't fought yet, but their goons fucked each other up. You know, a grotty instructor, Navy SEAL got in a standoff outside of the oil rig. Thankfully, both of them were willing to overlook everything that had happened between them because they both knew how much money Gibson had made with the rocket belt and they want some that cash for themselves. With the added bonus, of course, pissing off Gibson, who at this point had fired both of them and was refusing to speak to them. Nate, I have a question that I want to throw to you, given that this man is from Michigan, it is the mid-80s and he is a method. What do you think his test cassette is that he puts in every car he fits a stereo in? Because my answer is raw power. I was going to, no, raw power.

I feel like it wasn't actually that popular, like as an album, quite frankly, certainly not in the 80s. that definitely had kind of a renaissance, aside from a certain cache. It was absolutely, look with the cat dragged in by poison. Yeah, that's fair. The two men also founded a company, the American Rocket Belt Company in 1992, and it was based out of Sugarland, Texas. And they began work on the Rocket Belt 2000 or the RB 2000. I have to say this one thing, too, just as a side back to what Tom said.

It was also, it couldn't be raw power because that is the worst mixed album on the fucking planet. Why would you test a stereo with that? Also, for listeners, you did not see the look Nate gave me as we both turned when Joe said Sugarland, Texas. I know Sugarland, Texas. Yeah, Sugarland sucks. And the RB 2000 was going to be a direct copy of the Tyler Belt. By direct copy, I mean, as remembered by a former and Sharon salesman who worked on it from time to time, along with some pictures he took of its wiring. He didn't have blueprints or anything.

And just to underline here, how ridiculous this whole venture is, we should think about the very concept of jet packs and rocket. at this point. In the decades that these things have existed, both in real life and science fiction, only two functioning models had been built, and only one of them, the Tyler model that Gibson had, was privately constructed. They gave all of these photos and sketches to the only aeronautical engineer that would be on their crew, a guy named Doug Malviki, who is probably best known for building Robosaurus. Yes. I feel like this is the most meth head story we've talked about. Yeah, yeah, this really is kind of like, like, like, is, is not a meth head. He's a legitimate

engineer. No, but I'm talking about like the spiritual meth head energy. Yeah, I agree. 100% an errant quest driven by a sort of fantasy mechanical object that can solve all of your problems. Like, all roads lead to jetpack. This is, yeah, I guess, so what we're saying is, the concept of a jetpack is spiritually a meth addict thing. Meth slash just carny energy. Like, these guys are all Carnies through and through. Yeah, if this

story occurred maybe like 20s, 25 years later, these dudes would have been so into like backyard robot wars. I mean, that's what Doug Melvicki was doing. That's what Robosaurus kind of was. Okay. He predates backyard robot wars, but

spiritually they're the same. Like, it was a giant fire breathing dinosaur robot that would bite cars in half during like football halftime shows. Okay. That's cool. He was also on the TV show, Junkyard Wars, which if you've never watched it is truly amazing. But Melviki was an actual engineer and was immediately suspicious of these guys. So despite sounding like he was going to work with them, he really only exchanged

letters and phone calls with them from time to time. He is not involved in the saga of the RB 2000. Development continued into 1993 and the mid made sure to secure their prototype in a locked shipping container, probably because they didn't want someone to unleash a different karate instructor and or a navy seal on them and try to steal it again. And this is to make the entire situation even more ridiculous, the whole operation was moved into the corner of Wright's car stereo shop so they could save money on rent in Texas. You know, I'm so sorry, Joe,

but this whole time all I've been thinking, this whole time, I thought, is it going to come back to Wright in the car stereo shop? Oh yeah. Because I thought in my mind of a stanza that won't leave my mind. And it goes, at the driving in the old man's ford down behind the bushes till i'm screaming for more down the basement lock the cellar door and baby build rockets for me god damn you now in order to separate the two

workforces because you have the american rocket belt company and the car stereo shop in the same warehouse barker hung a big sign up on the wall for the shop employees that read in all caps do not touch the jet pack. If this doesn't sound like a solid humming business, I don't know what does. I thought I was bad at running a company. I look like someone that should have like a CEO podcast compared to these guys. This is kind of like if that guy who was going around me like I built this magic device, this actual fusion, but you can't open it up and it looks like a like my arm is in a cast or something, but this is weird. He looks like a like a crusty. If it was actually a fusion

reactor. Then you had to somehow recreate it and monetize it when it was just like, no, we've invented cold fusion, but it's this guy who looks like he was on bumfights, who did it. How would you actually make that into a business? How could you professionalize that? That's what sounds like. Comell Slice inventing the backyard nuclear reactor. In June of 1994, in a meeting with a lawyer in order to make legal ownership of the jet pack, the companies rather than either individuals, because neither of these guys trusted each other. Stanley and Barker note they had so far invested $120,000 into the project, which is noted in legal document saying that it was all borrowed

from each other's mothers. Once again, spiritually meth head. Like, my parents love me. I don't think they love me enough to loan me jetpack money. I think that it would finally be the thing that would convince my mom to, like, hit me. Like, if I asked her first, like, mom, could you, like, spot me some money? I'm really trying to bankroll a jet pack. I think that's when my mom finally hits me square in the mouth.

I'm not saying nothing. I was going to say, I didn't realize there was a threshold. I think when I started asking for a jetpack investment, you're like, another one's on drugs. By October, the jetpack was complete with two years of work.

The problem was they didn't have a pilot for it. So they reached out to Bill Sutter, who had touched a jetpack in about 10 years and gone back to having a normal job. He had, by his own mission, probably gained too much weight to try slapping on a jetpack, again, but he agreed to test it anyway.

He's going to weekly meetings for Jetpack Anonymous. They're all sitting in a circle. Like, just lean over, it's like, you know, there's nothing like the thrill of when, like, when you first take off. But I know if I go back, it will ruin my marriage. And everyone just, like, claps. You know, the hardest part about quitting jetpack usage is, like, every time, like, I hurt my back or I go and get, like, a tooth removed at the dentist, like, the doctor just

give me, like, a pill bottle full of, like, 300 refillable jetpack hits. I'm looking at you as a man and as a former jetpack pilot. And I know if I get one time, one minute on that jetpack a week from now, my life's going to be in the shitter. And I'm only going to have jet packs. Won't have a clothes. Won't have a house. Won't have a wife.

Won't have kids. Just be jet packs. And I had to live with that every day. Every day is a struggle, brother. You never stop being a jetpack user. You know, you just become someone who's aware of their jetpack usage. And, you know, you have to wake up every morning and say, you know, like, God give me strength to accept the things that I can't change

and the strength to change the things that I can serenity. I had to accept my higher power. My higher power is gravity, unfortunately. Except the jet packs that I do not have. The first step is putting your foot on the ground. What is it? Your fourth step is you have to make reparations to all the people that you've offended by whipping around

on your jetpack. You have to go apologize to the guy in the orchestra. You almost killed. I'm qualified to be in every Alonon meeting on earth because of my fucking brother. So I'm allowed to make those jokes, okay? Oh, I don't even need to begin why I qualify.

You don't even need a fucking qualify. You think I know Serenity, word for word. In regards the jet packs. Yes.

And so like, Sutter agrees to take this on, even though he absolutely shouldn't, but he also agrees with a different part of the work offer, which is he has to teach

Barker and Stanley how to fly it. And after a bit of messing around, Sutter took flight for 20 seconds. So the jet pack did work. Then, with the understanding that he'd come back after, he went back home

to work his day, job because these guys didn't have any money to pay him yet. However, Stanley and Barker would soon turn on each other, which is not surprising. No shock there. First, it was a small detail that Barker had been stealing tens of thousands of dollars from the company. Standard. Then it was

an argument over which one of them would get to fly the jet pack first between them, despite the fact that neither of them had taken a single day of training yet. But Stanley had, in preparation for the flight, been crash dieting along with taking an insanely dangerous diet pill known as Fenfenn. Are you guys familiar? familiar with fenfenn.

Yeah. So for people who don't know, it's an illegal diet pill. Actually, it probably is legal again. But at the time, it combined two different kinds of amphetamine-based stimulants that when they were mixed, they would and often did cause catastrophic heart failure. Yeah. So, yeah, in the days before, GLPs, they had some drugs that did help, but they were just ultra-stimulants.

Yeah, they were all just infatamine-based. Yeah. Yeah. When you do enough speed, you ain't eating for days. Yeah. Fenfin worked. It just killed a lot of people. There was the joke about this in the onion.

Do you remember the story about like, I lost 40 pounds in two weeks and I died? The two of them started getting an all-out screaming match with one another while at the office, both accusing the other of being too fat to fly. Then during one of these arguments, Barker grabbed Wright's gun, which of course he always kept at his desk and began threatening to kill Stanley. Something had become so common within the audio shop. that nobody paid any attention to it anymore.

Barker put the gun down and began just punching the other guy, leading to an all-out fight. The two dudes burst through the shitty plywood walls into a different office in the same warehouse, punching, kicking, and Barker claims biting one another. Eventually, they were separated. Barker went to the hospital with a broken finger, while Stanley went to meet a guy named Cal Jacobs.

A man I can find nothing about other than he just happened to be another goon that Stanley had on call. Like, there's... These story is so crazy that there is only one person. person that I could trust to direct a movie about it. And it is Werner Herzog in the way he directed a bad lieutenant to. They did

make a movie about this and it sucks real bad. That's disappointing. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, like this is a this has shades of the Rocket Man or the rocketeer. This has shades of cabaret. This has shades of raising Arizona somehow. Bursting through the walls. I think the movie was called Pretty Bird because it was like

the nickname that they gave the jetpack and it's it's not a good movie. And together Stanley and Cal Jacobs go back to the office. They told right about Barker stealing from the company and then they loudly say they're going to quote, teach him a lesson, thinking that he was still at the hospital. However, unbeknownst to them, Barker was actually the next room over, having already returned. So he'd listened to everything that they were saying. Barker dramatically burst into the room armed with a bullpen hammer. Stanley looks at him and screams, I'm going to kill you, motherfucker. And then Barker smashes Stanley in the head with the said hammer. Oh, ball, which end of the ball pain? Unknown. Okay. The ball or the peen. Got hit with the peen.

Cal Jacobson wraps Barker in a bear hug, trying to get him to stop. But Barker starts hitting Stanley again. Somehow he hits Stanley so hard, he severs one of his fingers with a hammer. Oh. Then he crushes what of Jacob's kneecaps with the same hammer and kicks him in the head. Look, Barker's got pure, like, frantic energy at all time. This is meth energy. He's not the meth head.

That's right. No, but I know. It's math energy. That's true. The cops eventually show up and arrest both men. The hammer attack and death threats, as Barker puts it, quote, probably brought our partnership to an end. Yeah.

You might say, yeah. Barker and Wright then quickly meet with a lawyer and make a new company without Stanley. They call it Duritron and purchase all of the property belonging to the old company, Jetpack included, and then removed it all from the stereo shop. But in case you're wondering, that sounds really illegal. That's because it is. They never made a second jet pack. It was just the one jet pack.

They just made the one jet pack. They've made no money from it. Nor will they ever. This jet pack is kind of like a chaos ruin and that like it drove everyone insane. Man cannot be allowed to own a jet pack. This is what happens. Stanley, despite being hit between eight and nine times with a fucking hammer and losing a finger, wasn't so mad about the company being stolen from him as much as he was about these two

Carney stealing his jetpack. Meanwhile, Wright and Barker kept trying to test their jetpack out with Bill Sutter, who crashed it and nearly died. Sutter, arguably the closest thing to a jetpack expert still alive on Earth, said the thing sucked and flew like, quote, a truck with a steering problem. But that was unimportant, right? Like, the whole point in this very stupid venture,

beginning with the aping of technology from the U.S. Army and Tyler, was to make money from it. And they finally got their first gig, flying the incredibly dangerous and hard-to-control jetpack over crowds and the 1995 celebration of the Houston Rockets winning the NBA championship. Sutter didn't crash, but he did lose control and blasted journalists with his jetback wash,

knocking him unconscious. For Duratron, and the carnie-ass jetpack built in a car stereo warehouse had produced not one, but three incidents of assault, things were looking bright. They made $10,000 from this flight. That's what the shit is all about. But, uh, nope.

Sutter was sick of Wright and Barker. He retired and left them without a pilot. and then Barker load the jet pack into a trailer and stole it. Stanley tried desperately to find the jetpack. He hired gangs of goons to break into the car stereo shop, but it wasn't there. I don't, I want to see this guy's roll a dex. How does he have so many goons on call? I mean, I've never had a goon on call.

When you're doing meth activity, you do have like a proximity to goons. Allegedly he was an international drug smuggler at one point. So if anybody's to have a roll of decks of goons, it's him. I was going to say, you imagine this. someone who did that and made money from it successfully, probably knows how to get goons and route pretty quickly. Yeah. They got goober.

It's like Uber, but for goons. I was thinking more along the lines with like, because of the arrow, it's like a goon pager. Yeah, instead of the sky pager, you've got the goon pager.

It's like, yeah, you got to be verified as a goon to get one. But then, uh, yeah, you know, and it's like you can be a job or goon.

You can like a goon job is in your area if you want to pick this one up. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So Stanley, unsure of what to do next, decides to sue Barker in court over the Jetpack's ownership.

Barker simply does not show up to court, give his deposition, or pay attention to the suit at all. He gives the court, his address as a local motel as the place where he lived, but then just left. You could do that in the 90s.

Yeah, you could just disappear. This, of course, left the right to be sued into the ground as his business partner. He, on top of already being over $100,000 in debt, thanks to, in my opinion, being a meth head who invested in a fucking jetpack. So his car stereo shop then went out of business.

Like this jet pack is experiencing a life. Like the actual jet pack is experiencing a life that the only people who ever experience are the kids of meth heads. Like this is just a protracted like 15 year long custody battle. Yeah. The kid is like being stolen by one parent or another. Yeah. They went to jet pack family court.

This is actually what happens in the in between, in between. years in Afterson? Oh my God. So while being drunk, high, and nearly homeless, Wright admitted to Stanley that Barker had stolen the jetpack and Stanley agreed to drop the right portion of his lawsuit if Wright recovered the jetpack for him or told him where it was. Wright completely penniless agreed as long as Stanley agreed to give him $10,000 in top of dropping his lawsuit, which is funny because he's $100,000 in debt.

So it's like, this isn't going to really get you anywhere, but okay. They drew up a contract and then Wright was never heard from again. On July 19th, 1998, Joe Wright's dead body was found in his home beaten to death. An incredibly bad attempt was made to clean up the crime scene. Like the bloody carpet where his corpse was had been torn up and then just thrown into the bathtub. The Harris County Sheriff's Office in charge of the investigation fucked it up from the very beginning. And I know it may surprise a lot of our listeners when I say, you know, cops aren't. good at their jobs, but they didn't bother to collect really any evidence when the FBI asked to get

involved owing to the fact that Wright was connected to this weird jetpack who may or may not be connected to an international drug smuggler. The sheriff's office just refused the FBI's help. That being said, it didn't really require a good cop to work out that Barker definitely did this. And he was arrested while working at his new job, which of course was at the local pawn shop in Houston. The problem was there's no physical evidence to connect him to the crime because the sheriff's office hadn't collected any or accidentally destroyed it in the process of stomping through the crime scene in their cowboy boots. Barker's alibi did not check out, and he in turn blamed Stanley for the murder, which is unsurprising these two guys hate each other. But after being held for three days with

no evidence, Barker was released and the murder has never been solved. Not to defend Barker here, but Wright had a seriously fucked up life as most swindling meth heads who invest in jet packs probably do tend to have. He had a lot of money to a lot of people, including loan sharks, gambling sharks, and a meth dealer who had taken a life insurance policy out on him at one point. And to be clear, a life insurance policy on right is a pretty solid investment in comparison to all the other investments that we've talked about on this episode so far. Soon afterwards, according to Stanley, Barker began to stalk him. So he went and got a restraining order and bought a Desert Eagle 50 caliber pistol for self-defense.

Bro. One day while showing his gun to some friends, he accidentally fired it and nearly killed a woman in his backyard. I know this sounds worrying to some people, but this is what in Texas we call a hobby. Yeah, standard deagle owner behavior. Yeah, nobody's serious, spies one of those guns. With Wright dead, everyone paranoid, high and drunk, the civil court case that Stanley had started found Barker and everyone else guilty of conspiracy to steal a jetpack and defraud

Stanley. Stanley was awarded $10 million by the court. Barker still refused to take part in any part of the case at all and didn't even show up to the judgment. He didn't give a fuck. He claims he didn't know that the trial was going on and said, quote, I wasn't even worried about losing 10.2 million or whatever it was that they said because I didn't have it. I just left.

They should have asked for $100 billion. I didn't have any money at all. Yeah, that's real common take it behavior. I respect like the dude's a fucking hustler. I have to be honest, though, hearing about all this stuff and the tangential or more than tangential connections to substance abuse, quite frankly, this makes me like for all the times growing up in the Midwest. and the levels of like unhealthy drinking and drug use we grew up with. This makes me want to like go live in a vegan Ostrom and only do yoga and meditate and shit.

Like this makes me want to never touch any substance ever again. Like everything you talk about is just sounds like, this is going to sound fucked up. But I'm thinking of like the guys I have seen in life who resembled this kind of attitude and behavior in the crazy side quest that meth heads go on. And somehow I keep thinking of like everything from dudes I've seen getting arrested, having crashed their cars or the guy driving like a truck with like so many pallets. on the back of it that it was going to crash into like a highway overpass. Then I think of that video, the fucking helicopter news broadcast in California, the 90s where the dude was like fucked up out of his mind and like set his truck on fire and shot

himself. And like, that's all I can think of. These guys are insane. And like, I'm sorry, but drugs cook your brain. Actually, the guy who said his car on fire wasn't on meth, uh, he had AIDS. Yeah, he was, it was a complaint to his HMO for not covering his health care. Yeah, but America. The level of desperation and madness we're talking about. Like, all I can think of is like it's all sort of tied up. And it's like, this just sounds so grim. Like, a jetpack would be cool, but this is, I don't know. Is it worth the cost?

Is it worth like, what if you made like a whole VHS camcorder budget version of the movie casino, but you actually killed your friends that you asked to be in your movie? That's what it feels like when you describe this. Gibson and Tyler made out okay. Those are the last normal guys to ever touch this jetpack. You're probably asking, what is Barker doing in the meantime? Well, working on a new flying machine, of course. He was attempting to build a flying saucer that was shaped like a beer can so he could then sell it to Pepsi and Budweiser.

So, yeah, a hovering beer can. Would you believe that this didn't work out? It also was really hard to find people to fund something when you're widely considered a murderer who's $100 million in debt via court order. Then he was arrested for trying to rob the flying beer can business partner because of course he was. This is just something that he keeps doing. And while he was in jail, Stanley stole Barker's trailer thinking the jetpack was inside, but it wasn't. It's 1999 at this point. These guys literally refused to quit.

A few months later, Barker accepted a job offer with a stuntman named Chris Wenzell in L.A. and flew out to meet him. He landed, met the guy in his team, and then he was promptly kidnapped at gunpoint. Wenzel demanded to know where the jet pack was. Barker said he didn't have it. And then his news story was he put it up for collateral for a loan from the mafia. Oh no. Which is not true.

But in the context of this story, it sounds like it could be. Wensel chucked Barker in a box labeled scuba tanks and then nailed it shut. Each day he'd be questioned about the jetpack and the murder of Joe Wright before being locked back inside the box. Eventually, after a week in captivity, Wensel had Barker signed a notarized document seating the jetpack to Stanley. And as soon as the paperwork was signed, like something out of a terrible straight to Netflix thriller, Stanley stepped out of the next room. He had orchestrated the whole thing. Oh my God.

Still, Barker refused to tell him where the jetpack was, so he's locked back inside the box, but someone messed up all nailing the box shut this time, allowing him to kick himself free and get away. Once free, the first person he called was the FBI. And what had to be the strangest interview of all time, Barker told a responding agent the entire saga of the jetpack, the kidnapping, the murder he was accused of, the embezzlement, everything. The FBI agent had to be like, uh,

I'm supposed to be on vacation today. Fuck. Like technically jet fuel is like explosive. So can we give this to the DEA? Maybe this is the ATF. Yeah. All as I know is I don't want to do with this guy anymore. This is the first case that Michael Chickles,

his character gets at the end of the shield. Stanley Winsell, the notary and everyone else was arrested for the kidnapping extortion and false imprisonment by violence of Barker. Their defense was honestly kind of classic. You see, Barker was on bail for the robbery charge and left Arkansas to go to L.A., effectively violating the terms of his bail while doing so. So Stanley, who orchestrated the whole thing and therefore knew he'd be breaking his bail terms

by going to L.A. for the job that he made up, created a real bail bondsman company, hired Wenzell and his goons as legal bounty hunters. And as soon as he knew Barker was flying to L.A., he called the Sheriff's Department in Arkansas and said Barker was jumping bail and they were going to pull him in for jumping bail and get the money for it. The defense boiled down to actually me and these strange gunwielding stuntmen were all legal bounty hunters so we didn't break the law. Isn't that also entrapment? Yes. He created the job. Yeah, he's the reason he left. And the craziest part is Stanley actually did do all of these things. And no, this defense did not work. They were all found

guilty. In case anybody's wondering, all those things are legal because America is insane. Like bail bondsman and Bonnie Hunter's... By having a direct incentive for a person to commit a crime that you created a reason and persuaded them to do, the FBI can do that to you. Yeah, you can't do that to someone else. You can't do that as a private citizen. Yeah. When Sell admitted his guilt and was sentenced the six years in prison, Stanley refused to admit he had done anything wrong, fired his lawyer and represent himself during his sentencing, which is always a good move.

He was sentenced to life in prison. But after spending two whole days in prison, Stanley wrote a letter to the district attorney, the name alert here, David Korn, admitting his guilt and asking for a due sentence. Owing to a magical power I call being a white man from Texas,

this worked. Stanley was resentenced two days later for eight years in prison in 2002. He got life just because the judge is like, I fucking hate pro se defendants. I swear to God, I'm sending a message. You technically give a constitutional right to you.

this, but no, you don't. Also, I hate you. Like, all of you people I want to go away. All rise for George Corden. He was the district attorney. Sorry, sorry. The thing is, after all of this, Barker still had the jet pack. He hadn't hawked it out for a mob loan. He hadn't done anything. We actually have no idea what he did with it. But due to the court orders demanding that he handed over, he couldn't try to use it to make money. He had to pretend like he had no idea where it was. he eventually gave it to Rob Fisher, the karate instructor. But Fisher was worried about the legal heat of having the thing in his backyard, so he gave it back. A judge eventually ordered Barker to appear in court with the jetpack or face prison time for contempt.

Imagine being the judge who had to say those things aloud in a courtroom. You, sir, will report in this courtroom with your jetpack in custody. So Barker did what he was told. He appeared in front of the judge with a large metal case, and when he opened it, it turned out to be nothing but a little bit of a collection of random car parts that he put in there. Like, got you motherfucker. Oh. He assumed that the judge would not actually hold him in contempt.

He was wrong. The judge had been dealing with Barker, Stanley, and this fucking jetpack for almost a decade at this point. Like, all of these guys have beef that is running for nearly 20 years at this stage. Yeah. Like, imagine hating someone that much. I can't give. Barker credit for much, but he refuses to back down. So the judge orders Barker to be thrown in jail

until he hands the jet pack over. The judge assumed that after a week or two, Barker would give up, and that would be the end of it. He underestimated the love between a man and his jetpack. Barker never broke down. He refused to cave. And after six months of sitting in jail and never saying a word, the judge broke first and released him. It's just amazing to me. It's like Sammy the Bull Gravano turned state's witness. This guy refuses. I will go to my grave protecting Jetpack Omerta. He flatly

in the book, the Jetpack Keeper, he was like, I'll stay in there for years. I don't care. That is being a different breed. I was going to say that this level of intransigence also crosses over from Methadland into person trying to represent themselves in family court land.

There's a level of like unwilling to, like, sorry, like, I'm governed by Marine law now. Like, it's just, I'm becoming a jetpack sovereign citizen? At the time of the show, the jetpack has never been located. And its location is still most likely only known to Barker, who is still alive at the time of recording, but refuses to give it up to equal parts of love of the game and an absolutely undying hatred for Larry Stanley, who got out of prison in 2010 and died in 2022.

But Barker has still refused to show up with the jetpack. You'll never know where it is. It's like the lost city. Atlantis. It's hidden forever. It's a secret known only to its creator. And it fucking sucks. I'm gonna be a piece of shit. It's really bad to fly. I'm gonna be real. I fucking rate this so highly like being this much of a stubborn con. I respect his pettiness. Yeah. Like Barker's like a piece of shit. Don't get me wrong. But like I'll go to prison for this. I will fight you with a hammer. I will square off with a navy seal. I don't give a fuck. Yeah, I killed Joe Wright. I don't care. I should

point out because Barker's still alive that he still says he has nothing to do with Joe Wright's death the murder has never been solved all fingers are still pointed at him though Bill Sutter the man who hated everybody involved and flew their jetpack once had this to say about the whole

debacle quote it was the dumbest fucking thing I ever got involved with the dumbest and that's the story about how a failed US Army prototype weapon turned into a story of Carney's meth heads kidnapping and murder I don't think Thomas Paine John could have written this story.

No, I don't think so either. I mean, he is American, but I think that, like, yeah, he, he, this feels more like, Thomas Pinchon forgot that I am him. I would say that, uh, yeah, this is sort of like crossover between it's Thomas Pynchon in the concept of the plot, but Dennis Johnson is actually writing the book and it's all about dudes on drugs killing each other. When I first stumbled upon the story, and I know other shows have covered it in the past, um, it's been on our like things to do for a very long time.

And I finally sat down and started reading about it. very few times when I started doing research, am I, like, so enamored in a story. Because I had no idea where I was going to go next. I was like, fucking karate instructor. There's a Navy SEAL involved. These guys are getting in hammer fights. The car stereo warehouse slash fucking rocket lab is just, um, chef's kiss. Obviously, it sucks that, uh, someone murdered Joe Wright.

We don't know if it's connected to the jet packer or the various other people that he owed money to. Yeah. Um, and like the exasperated judge who's like, I've been dealing with you people for a fucking decade. Go to prison. I don't care anymore. Just incredible all around. And all of their backgrounds make no sense. Not a single source that I found could agree on any of these people. Like this guy's a Vietnam veteran, he isn't. He was in the Navy. He wasn't. He was a pilot, but like, some people say he's a cargo pilot, but then like, it was

like personal plane. Or like, Joe Wright's background is also weirdly obtuse. Everybody thinks it would be cool to know Dale Gribble in real life, but this is actual Dale Gribble. Exactly. Well, boys, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion. And if you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion, you can support the show on Patreon or $5 a month. Get you absolutely everything from ebooks, audiobooks, every bonus episode, every regular episode a week early, Discord access, you know, maybe you could take a ride in the podcast Jetpack. We've other levels as well, all of which you can ask us a question from the Legion.

you can ask us on Patreon or on the Discord that you'll have access to. And today's question is, all the times in the show's history, you talk about home brew alcohol quite frequently. But which one would you be willing to try? Oh, I've drank so many. I've drank, you know, poaching, which is the Irish. I don't think the normal ones count. I mean, we're talking like the Soviet jet fuel. We're talking the boot polish on the toasts.

We're talking like Pruno. I drink the forbidden Soviet. Soviet jet fuel. I would do it. Yeah. I mean, like, I remember when I was a teenager, me and my cousin, I found a load of barley and like put it in a bucket and left it for like three months and then tried to drink it. I thought that would make beer. Didn't go well. I mean, I think, okay, so I don't want to go to the Soviet jet fuel because it's like so like obvious. I think I would want to try the boot polished toast that they made. And this is before Tom was on the show, but it was during a Soviet Afghan war series. where Soviet conscripts would put boot polish on a piece of bread and then toast it because the heat would work out

the impurities and they could eat it and have an all-call content and fuck them up. I would try it. I'm aware of what would probably happen to me. If I die, I die.

We've talked about this when we talked about the Pacific War and the island hopping campaign. I think I made reference to the fact that it's covered in great detail in the James Jones novel,

the thin red line. But the fact that you could use World War II, to like mess kitchen cans of fruit cocktail to make some kind of fermented fuck me up juice. Like, I don't know if you had to separate out certain things or it was all the fruit cocktail or just the juice, but like that sold just because it was so hot in the tropics,

they didn't take long to ferment it and to make it into something potent. I would try that. Yeah. That doesn't imply being like on Saipan or something, but like, whatever. If you're there already, you're fucked. Like we might as well get high off Marasino Sherrys

from the 1940s that are racist somehow. Yeah, I mean, Yeah, it's like the Chris Rock bit from, I think it was a bigger blocker, where it's like, you know, if you, if you get rid of all the drugs and put a whole bunch of dudes in a room, they'll just figure out new ways to get high. Like, have you ever put a lime of bean in a bottle and smoked it? You'll get fucked up. Like, yeah, that's just soldiers throughout history, especially when it comes to brewing alcohol. I've never brewed my own, any like weird shit. But, I mean, I've never seen anybody do it because when I was in Afghanistan, I said the adult thing and had my mom mail me alcohol because all of the stories they told you about checking your package. could just were a fucking lie. Yeah, I mean, I had friends who told me that they, they had their family smuggle

with them by putting blue food coloring in Listerine, like a Listerine bottle. I don't just send me straight a bottle of whiskey. Like vodka gin and then they put like a like a drop of blue food coloring in it. But in my case, I don't know. I just never, I didn't drink when I was deployed. Because I was a Boy Scout, I really would have loved to smoke that fucking hash at Fghettistia. But now I did.

I also did that. Yeah, good on you. I smoked a lot of weed with the ANP. Anyway, that's a podcast, fellas. Thank you for joining me. everybody. Thank you for listening. But you guys host other podcasts. Plug those podcasts. Listen to Trash Future. Listen to Kill James Bond. Listen to my band Second Homes. Listen to the sound of me dissociating as I imagine more jetpack related crimes and trying to read the text that's written

on Joe's tattoos and his arms because I haven't seen you in person in a while. So I've forgotten that you've got basically like you've got a whole fucking like, you know, it's like the, what do they call them the, it's like a like a Florentine codex on your arm of various things. But like they're different levels of sunburn. Does that even any text on it? On your left arm there is. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

I don't have another show to plug, Tom. Blood work show about the economy of violence and tangible vibe shifts, a show about how everyone has moments where everything changed. I don't have any other shows. So thank you for listening. Consider leaving us to review whenever you listen to a podcast. It helps us immensely. Buy my book.

It is available on our store or also Amazon or wherever else you want to get your books. leave that a review too if you want to I don't know until next time kill your friend and steal the jet pack bash