|
?:reviewBody
|
-
Of all the crazy Internet stories, this has to be the one fellas love the most. There's something about cars and solid rocket fuel engines that draws them to this tale like happy moths to an unforgiving flame: Example: [Collected on the Internet, 1995] Maybe it's the Wile E. Coyote-ness of it all, the so real you can almost touch it mental image of a smoldering wreck sticking out of a cliff face. Perhaps it's the vicarious enjoyment of a Tim Allen-ish More Power! fantasy carried to its fatal yet hilarious conclusion. Or maybe it's a simple matter of cars and the men who love them, the eternal love affair. Whatever. The boys love it, and that's all that matters. This tale of vehicular velocity ferocity has been popular among servicemen since the late 1970s. In those early word-of-mouth versions, the JATO was taken from a cargo plane or out of a warehouse on base, thereby answering a key question left up in the air in later versions: Where did the intrepid lad obtain the engine? The story is even older than that. One of our readers says he heard it in 1961 or 1962. In that version, two JATO units mounted as lakers (exhaust pipes) on a 1940 Ford were fired on Bayshore freeway while trying to outrun the California Highway Patrol. The car was last seen going end over end across San Francisco bay. Another reader heard it in 1964 while stationed at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. In that version, the unmanned JATO'd car went airborne and smashed into a tree, destroying both car and plant. The version we now know and love (complete with puzzled police and the smoldering wreck of what's left of a car impacted into the face of a cliff), began making the cyberspatial rounds in 1990. In 1992 the incident was said to have happened in New Mexico, with the car being a Plymouth Road Runner. By 1994 the car had transformed itself into a Chevrolet Impala, but now the accident's venue was California. (See how these things mutate over time?) 1995 saw this legend just about take over the Internet as it was flashed from e-mail to e-mail as this year's Darwin Award winner. It's this version which is still in circulation today, the car frozen in time as a Chevy Impala, the location given as somewhere in Arizona. As it appeared in 1995: Nor, so it seems, do good stories. A spokesman of the Arizona Department of Public Safety stated in a 1996 newspaper article the JATO story wasn't true though they continued to get asked about it. We get a call on that about every 90 days, said Dave Myers. It keeps us on the map. There are two fatal problems with the JATO story. First, anybody who understood the extreme forces involved well enough to attach a JATO unit to a car so that it would keep the car going in a straight line (rather than immediately spinning around) would probably know better than to do it in the first place. Second, the Arizona Highway Patrol has a phone number. A call to them will confirm they've both heard the story and no, it's not true. Sorry, fellas. Though the legend of the smoldering Chevy smashed into a cliff face is pure fabrication, JATO engines have been mounted on cars on a couple of occasions. As reported in Motor Trend in 1957, Dodge took a brand-new car out to El Mirage dry lake bed in California, removed the gas tank, and mounted a JATO unit in its place. (The intent was to test the car's brakes and to film the event for TV commercials.) The car went 140 mph. Flynn, Mike. The Best Book of Bizarre But True Stories Ever. London: Carlton, 1999. ISBN 1-85868-558-3. (p. 238). Holt, David and Bill Mooney. Spiders in the Hairdo. Little Rock: August House, 1999. ISBN 0-87483-525-9 (p. 22).
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}