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.
Key Moments
First backyard rocket - 80,000 feet from Ohio: At age 12, working out of his father's race-engine machine shop in Mount Vernon, Ohio, Adair built his first liquid-fuel rocket using liquid hydrogen and kerosene - similar to Saturn V fuels. Tracked with a homemade protractor altimeter and a beeper transponder, it hit roughly 3,500 mph and 80,000 feet on its first flight, returning within half a mile of the launch pad and incinerating a quarter-football-field of yard.
What the engine actually was - electromagnetic fusion containment: Adair finally names what he built: an electromagnetic fusion containment engine. He describes it as 'a chunk of the sun inside a magnetic bottle' - collide deuterium and tritium with particle accelerators, get a fusion reaction, hold it in an electromagnetic containment field, then punch a plasma-beam orifice at one end to release the thrust.
Stephen Hawking helped a teenager finish the math: Stuck in 1969 quantum-mechanics math with only a slide rule and chalkboard, Adair's high-school science teacher Morris Martin took the work to Ohio State, who mailed it to Cambridge. Three weeks later, on Hawking's visit to Battelle Memorial in Columbus, Adair walked in to find his equations all over the boards - Hawking, then in his early 20s and on a cane, had been working on the same containment problem from the black-hole-theorem side and spent two days helping him.
Funded by a congressman, walked through by Curtis LeMay: Adair names the team: Republican Congressman John Ashbrook of Ohio (who ran for president in 1972) routed the funding as an educational grant and got him congressional clearance for fuel pellets from Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Retired General Curtis LeMay - whose parents lived in Mount Vernon and were cared for by Adair's mother, an LPN - was brought in to interface the project with the Air Force.
White Sands, June 20 1971 - Arthur Rudolph and the F-1 boast: Adair lands at White Sands, New Mexico on June 20, 1971, age 17, after a C-141 Starlifter flight from Wright-Patterson. A black DC-9 lands and out steps a silver-haired man in a khaki outfit who introduces himself as 'Henry Wilkerson' - but Von Braun had shown Adair photos: it's Dr. Arthur Rudolph, chief architect of the Saturn V engines. Rudolph asks to see inside the rocket; Adair leans across the panel and tells him, in proportional size, it has 10,000 times the power of his F-1 Saturn V engines.