In an interview with Robert Stanley, space technology consultant David Adair goes on the record about his extraordinary experiences at Area 51 when, as a mere teenager, he was testing one of his electromagnetic fusion engine prototypes.

Robert Stanley: Tell me about the government disclosure letter you are circulating.

David Adair: That letter is based on a series of events that occurred when I first testified for Dr Steven Greer in 1997. It's very simple what we want: a congressional hearing that will grant covert operatives total immunity from their national security oath. Dr Greer is telling us that he has hundreds of witnesses. I know he is not blowing smoke regarding this issue, because in 1971 I saw a lot of people working on these things.

Robert: At Area 51?

David: Right. I saw them underground working on all these different craft and back-engineering lots of stuff. I believe there are people that have spent 30 years or more working on these types of projects. Imagine what they could tell us! But more importantly, they would be able to tell us who paid them, who signed the cheques.

Robert: So you are pushing for public hearings?

David: Absolutely. I really want the world to hear what these hard-core engineers have to say.

Robert: You told me in our pre-interview that this event would radically change our lives, that we could begin integrating some of the more advanced technologies into our infrastructure.

David: Exactly, but unravelling everything poses a problem. I know that while I was at Area 51 and was being taken through offices that were off to the side of the hangars and labs, they took me to a room and locked me in it. And that's where I stayed until General LeMay came and got me. But I saw a lot of people working down there as we were walking past these offices.

Robert: Wait a minute. General Curtis LeMay personally came to get you out?

David: Yes. If you read his autobiographical book called Iron Eagle, he was a former commander of SAC [Strategic Air Command]. "General Curtis E. LeMay: retired February 1, 1965; died October 3, 1990. LeMay was the fifth Chief of Staff of the US Air Force." You will see, in the back of the book, he talks about his parents. They lived in Mount Vernon, Ohio. I lived in Mount Vernon, Ohio, when I built my first fusion rockets. I was on the cover of the local newspaper.

Robert: How did that happen?

David: Well, because his parents' caregiver was my mother, Evangeline Adair.

Robert: What a strange coincidence!

David: Yes, and that's how LeMay came to know me personally. And when our local congressman started funding my second rocket, that's when the Mount Vernon News got wind of the story. It was the fastest vehicle ever built on Earth.

Robert: Is this a picture of the second rocket I'm looking at?

David: Yeah; there were all kinds of newspaper stories printed about me that I have saved. I was being funded by Congressman John Ashbrook. He was chairman of the Internal Security committees of Congress. That's a pretty powerful place to be. He was also on the Education and Labor committees, which is how he funded my work - through the Department of Education. Then when the Air Force showed up to inspect my second rocket, they were totally gung-ho for all the formulas and the prototype I built from scratch. They knew I was on to something, so they funded me through the NSF [National Science Foundation]. Then my mother got concerned because the government people were really getting involved in our lives. So she went and talked to General LeMay. Curtis really liked my mother a lot and he had seen the newspaper stories, so he came over to talk with me. Later he talked with Congressman Ashbrook. The next thing I know, LeMay told me: "David. I am going to be your buddy. I am going to be your project manager." And actually, that was the greatest thing that could have happened to me because I found out much later that it was LeMay that saved my ass.

Robert: That's some powerful protection.

David: Yeah, but what's really interesting is an investigator pulled the records for Congressman Ashbrook from the Library of Congress and found all this documentation. The investigator was shocked to learn that I was telling the truth. In one letter I told the Air Force that without the right electronics and the right formulas to compress and scale down the fusion engine I was building, I would need a really big vehicle to put the engine in and it was going to be a damn big engine! Eventually I found an ICBM, a Titan III, that had been pulled out of mothballs and had been given to the Center for Science and Industry in Ohio. They had recently pulled all the fuel out of it and parked this thing in a storage area. It was flight ready. After a while, I got the Titan. During that time, I had more information-based dreams and from that I eventually reconfigured the fusion engine down to a workable size. Everybody loved that, because hauling a Titan rocket around is pretty tough to do - it's 30 storeys tall! After I told them I could compress this thing down to an engine that would fit in a 12-foot-tall rocket housing, I had to build everything from scratch.

Robert: Didn't you tell me there were two rockets?

David: Yes. You're right. There were two of these prototypes. This one went to the science fair. But here is the one that no one ever saw publicly.

Robert: The one you told me was "stealth"?

David: Right. We built one just for the local people to see what we were working on. The Air Force guys came over to my house every day. They took their uniforms off and walked around in T-shirts and shorts so the locals would think they were just average people helping out with all the rocket stuff I was building. So when the town folks came by, they just thought, "Boy, he's building a big one this time." But we had two of them in production. I set up one that I used to win the science fairs with, but here is the design we used to move past the prototype stage with. Anyway, we had a front operation and another in the back. And it worked well. That was my introduction to covert activities. Al this documentation that I am showing you here, I brought with me to Congress. I didn't want to testify because I was really treading the fine line of National Security. However, I could tell this particular story because I was only 17 years old when that happened. According to constitutional law, the federal government is prohibited from signing a minor to a National Security Oath. Strom Thurman said to me one time, "You're the biggest loose cannon on the deck, boy."

Robert: Let's go back to your experience at Area 51 with General Curtis LeMay.

David: Okay. What happened was, well, it was very simple. I had blown up my own engine. I sabotaged my rocket after it landed at Area 51. I blew it into a billion pieces. After they showed me the engine downstairs, I knew what they were after from my engine.

Robert: Which engine?

David: The Electromagnetic Fusion Containment Engine because they are so fast. There is nothing like it. The liquid fuel and solid propellant engines are like Model Ts compared to a Lamborghini. This thing took off so fast. It went from zero mph to 8,754 mph in about 4.6 seconds. It was so fast that you couldn't even see it.

Robert: It went that fast from a standing start?

David: Right. You couldn't even see it. It would be like trying to watch a bullet leave a rifle barrel.

Robert: That's not possible to see with the naked eye.

David: Right. So everyone else at the launch site thought it blew up. I built most of it out of titanium. We also used inconel and carbonite. We had every kind of known material for lightness and strength incorporated in that rocket. And because of the extreme g-force of the launch, everything inside was just warped.

Robert: But the engine was still intact when the rocket landed at Area 51?

David: Exactly. It came down on a parachute. And that is where it got weird, because there are a lot of characters in this story. The man that was really on my case, he was a bad guy. Dr Wernher von Braun warned me. As a child, I knew von Braun because I was doing all this work with rockets in the early 1970s when we were landing men on the Moon. An hour-and-a-half's drive from my house was Wapakenneta, which is where Neil Armstrong lived. His mother Viola and I became friends. She became like a surrogate mother to me. So I was hanging out with her and I would see Neil around the house. And many times I would go over to her house and I would run right past Neil and go hang out with Viola. And Neil loved that about me because I wasn't interested in his fame; I just loved his mother. Neil was a very reclusive person, almost like a hermit, because when he came back from the Moon mission he literally just disappeared.

Anyway, because I was in that kind of environment, I got to attend parties where all the original Apollo VII astronauts would show up, and von Braun showed up. And that's how we all crossed paths and I started interfacing with him. The thing is, von Braun warned me that if, during my rocket work, I should encounter a man named Dr Arthur Rudolph, I should be extremely careful because he was so dangerous.

Dr Arthur Rudolph was the chief architect of the Saturn 5 engines of our Apollo Moon rocket. He came into the US with von Braun and other German scientists under Operation Paperclip. Rudolph was a full colonel in the Gestapo. He had killed hundreds of Jews personally during the building of the V-2 rockets and Peenemünde. If you made a mistake, he would put a cable around your neck and slowly lift you up, which would strangle you. Then he would disembowel you and leave you hanging there for everyone to see. There were rotted corpses hanging all over the place. They would also feed you sawdust and water. This would take the hunger out of your stomach until you fell over dead, then they would just replace you with more fresh people. This man was the winner of the Most Distinguished Service award - the highest award NASA can give. The Mossad caught up with Dr Rudolph on May 25, 1984. Due to war crimes, he was deported out of LAX to Munich, Germany, where he died [in jail].

Anyway, General LeMay had sent me from Mount Vernon, Ohio, to Wright-Patterson in Dayton, Ohio, where the SAC headquarters was located. From there, me and my rocket and some other colonels all got on board a C-141 transport and flew to White Sands. Soon after we arrived at White Sands, a black DC-9 plane showed up. LeMay had told me that if this plane showed up, it would represent a real problem for me. Anyway, out stepped these guys wearing suits and mirrored sunglasses. And among them was this one little guy wearing khaki uniform. I knew that was Dr Rudolph because Dr von Braun had showed me his picture.

Robert: Whom was Dr Rudolph working for?

David: I'm not sure, one of those alphabet-soup intelligence agencies. But he was primarily working for NASA. And as soon as he got off the plane, he asked to see my rocket. When I asked him who he was, he told me, "Oh, I'm just a guy that inspects rockets for the government." Then I asked him if he was from NASA, and he said he had never worked there.

So we walked over to my rocket and I opened up a side panel. And when he leaned over to look at the engine, he began mumbling to himself and he seemed really upset - probably because I had built something he thought was impossible to do. So I took that opportunity to lean over and whisper in his ear, "Do you know that in proportional size, this engine has 10,000 times the thrust of the F-1, Saturn V engines, Dr Rudolph?" And he stood up and was furious. He wanted to know who I was and how I knew so much. And I told him, "I'm just a kid that launches rockets in the cow fields of Ohio." [Laughter] Anyway, I had friends around me who were Air Force colonels that LeMay had assigned to take care of me.

And I got upset when Dr Rudolph told me that he wanted to change the landing coordinates on my rocket. He was really nasty about it. The navigation system I was using was off-the-shelf stuff. Back in those days, it was all analogue. But I had my system programmed to where the rocket would come back down within a two-mile radius of the launch site. Dr Rudolph had me reprogram the coordinates so that my rocket would land 456 miles northwest of White Sands in an area called Groom Lake, in Nevada.

Well, I immediately pulled out my national survey maps and I looked at Groom Lake and thought, "My God! Why are we launching up to a dry lake bed in Nevada? It's so far away." That's when Dr Rudolph told me, "Just do it!" He was really hostile. And I had been warned many times by von Braun and LeMay that if I ran into Dr Rudolph, not to push his buttons.

So I reset the coordinates on the guidance system and we launched my rocket and it took off perfectly. And sure enough, it landed right on target. And you know, it wasn't until they made the movie Independence Day that I ever heard the term "Area 51".

Robert: How could that be?

David: I always knew this place as Groom Lake. It was the only name I had ever heard for that place, growing up. So we were getting ready to board the plane to go and recover the rocket and I said, "Hey, do you see these rubber tyres on this plane? Would you please tell me how you are going to land this thing on a dry lake bed? This thing is going to plough into the ground and never leave." Someone yelled at me to shut up and get into the plane.

After a while, we arrived in Nevada. And as we flew over the landing site, I looked down at these twin 10,000-foot runways and I said, "My God! There's a huge base down there!"

So we landed at this place that doesn't exist on any map, and that's when I started getting really concerned. I was trying to locate any Air Force emblems, Navy emblems, any kind of logos or emblems that would identify the commanding authority, but there was nothing anywhere on any of the buildings. Normally, standard universal painting of water towers at an airstrip is an orange-and-white chequerboard pattern. But here, everything was painted either solid white or solid black. So they were not conforming to any code.

After we got out of the plane, we got on this go-cart-looking thing. It looked kind of like the electric carts that you see at airports. Then we drove from the landing strip to a series of hangars and headed into the centre one. It was really cool, the way this place was built. There were all these really big lights at the top that had louvres on them so the light will shine down. And when I got close to the buildings, they looked old and ratty, but underneath it was alloy, unlike any alloy I had ever seen. It was an incredible-looking stainless steel type of metal that I thought was really unusual to use for buildings of that size.

When we got inside the hangar, we went down to the basement area. Actually, we drove into the hanger and there were little yellow lights flashing and big hangar doors, and out of the ground came all these little pipes with chains attached that blocked off all the doorways. Then the whole floor - about the size of a football field - slowly dropped down. The entire hangar was an unenclosed elevator.

Robert: So, it was more like a hydraulic lift in a garage?

David: Yeah, but it was built to carry some really heavy stuff. The floor was made of concrete. God knows how much weight that was. The whole thing went up and down on giant worm-screws.

Robert: I see. That's a lot more stable than using a hydraulic system.

David: Nothing can take the load like a worm screw. These things were the size of sequoia trees, and there were at least 12 of them lifting the floor! We went down at least 200 feet until we rested flush with the floor of an underground hangar that was huge. It had a huge arched ceiling, but it went so far that you couldn't see the end of it. It just went forever. And I thought, "My God! You could park a hundred 747s in here and they wouldn't even be in the way!" At that point I asked, "What in God's name did you do with all the dirt?" And they just looked really strangely at me. I guess they didn't expect me to try and figure things like that out. The walls were at least 30 feet high, and all along them were different workshops and laboratories and periodically there were big, huge, work bays. So we kept driving down past all kinds of aircraft that I had never seen. Some of them I had seen, like the XB-70.

Robert: Was this area carved out of dirt or was it rock?

David: I don't know. Everything was coated with a ceramic- like material.

Robert: I thought there were mountains surrounding the dry lake bed? Those must be fairly solid?

David: Yeah. There are all kinds of mountain ranges around that area. I never saw any "dirt", though, because everything had concrete over it or was covered with some type of ceramic material. The most interesting thing about this to me still is how well lit the underground area was. There were no shadows, anywhere. And there were no light fixtures, anywhere. I was wondering how they generated that much light. It didn't look like the walls were glowing, or the floor or the ceiling. But every square inch of this place was lit, and yet there was no visible source of light.

And after we had been driving for a while and we had passed a lot of different aircraft, we took a road to the left that took us away from a lot of the other activities. I could see a lot of people working on stuff. These aircraft appeared to be operational. Some of them I have never seen before or since. They were shaped like a reverse teardrop. And there were others that looked similar to the flying wing. One aircraft, the XB-70, was a delta-wing bomber built in 1959.