Murder, kidnapping, and all kinds of other stuff
So I’ve written this book called The Rocketbelt Caper, a sort of true crime-meets-popular science tale involving a James Bond-style flying machine called the Rocketbelt 2000. Here’s the blurb:
‘We finished the rocketbelt, and from then on there was murder, kidnapping, and all kinds of other stuff’ – Brad Barker
‘When three friends set out on a quest to build a real-life Buck Rogers-style flying machine, their obsession with the Rocketbelt 2000, or “Pretty Bird”, shattered their friendship and set in motion an astonishing chain of events involving theft, deception, assault, a bizarre kidnapping, a ten million dollar lawsuit and a horrifically brutal murder. From sci-fi to reality, this is the true story of the amazing rocketbelt.’
‘A delight to read… Recommended.’
- Popular Science UK
The backstory is that I first stumbled upon the story while in Los Angeles in 2002, when I read a brief newspaper report stating that a man had been sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping and holding hostage his partner in a scheme to build a Buck Rogers-style rocketbelt. A third partner, the report added, had been murdered.
I wrote a feature for JACK magazine, which was published in 2003. The feedback was pretty good, and there were so many twists and turns in the story that I hadn’t been able to fit it all into the feature, so I expanded it into a book. In 2005 I printed up 250 copies and quickly sold them all, mainly in the US, receiving good reviews and attracting the interest of movie and documentary producers. So I revised the whole thing, and the book was published here in the UK by Tonto Press in 2007. With photos. Hopefully the book will be published in the US soon. As for movies / documentaries – watch this space.
There are various related rocketbelt videos around, and I’ll post some of them over the next few days, plus some more rocketbelt goodies in a week of Rocketbelt Caper-related posts.
[UPDATE: The Rocketbelt Caper is now available in the US as a paperback, and also as a FREE eBook download. Go here.]
