This is the text as it appears, possibly most frequently, in usenet repostings: You all know about the Darwin Awards – it's the annual honor given to the person who did the gene pool the biggest service by killing themselves in the most extraordinarily stupid way.
And this year's nominee is: The Arizona Highway Patrol came upon a pile of smoldering metal embedded into the side of a cliff rising above the road at the apex of a curve.
The facts, as best could be determined, are that the operator of the 1967 Impala hit JATO ignition at a distance of approximately 3.0 miles [4.8 kilometers] from the crash site.
The driver, soon to be pilot, most likely would have experienced G-forces usually reserved for dog-fighting F-14 jocks under full afterburners, basically causing him to become insignificant for the remainder of the event.
However, the automobile remained on the straight highway for about 2.5 miles [4.0 km] (15–20 seconds) before the driver applied and completely melted the brakes, blowing the tires and leaving thick rubber marks on the road surface, then becoming airborne for an additional 1.4 miles [2.3 km] and impacting the cliff face at a height of 125 feet [38 m], leaving a blackened crater 3 feet [0.9 m] deep in the rock.
It remained fairly dormant until 1995, when the message surfaced again[4][citation needed] in rec.pyrotechnics with the email header stripped off the introduction, though the main story is still indented.
[6] Cult of the Dead Cow, a hacker group and ezine, published an extensive elaboration in 1998 that claims to explain how the story came into being, describing the most common details of the Rocket Car legend.
Four males under 25 engaged in scouting, welding, drinking, and Rube Goldberg engineering to build a rocket rail car after they happened upon JATOs in a junk pile.
[8] To test the story – the very first myth they tackled – Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage, with help from honorary MythBuster Erik Gates, procured a 1966 Chevrolet Impala, and after they were unable to obtain actual JATOs, they substituted three model rockets in succession to produce an equivalent amount of thrust (3,000 horsepower [2,200 kW] for 15 seconds).