DID JOHN PELLIGRINO launch a rocketcar in the Mojave Desert twenty-two years ago? He likes to tell a tale of how he and three high-school friends found ordnance in a military-surplus scrapyard, welded the hull of a Chevy Impala to abandoned mine cars, along with parts of bicycle inner tubes, and embarked on an amateur rocket-sled project. It was stupid, insane, dangerous, and illegal, he says, but once they got started "there was only one thing left to do: Light the mother and see what happened." The unmanned car/rocket combo ended up pinned in an impossible-to-conceal position -- "with a mountain falling on it." Pelligrino concludes that it was this boyhood stunt that mutated into an even more outlandish urban legend about a rocket-powered Chevy crashing into a cliffside -- a technology-gone-wrong fable that has become a curious, much-discussed staple of Internet culture. Will the speculation come to an end, now that Wired magazine has published the folktale?

The story's been circulating for years, skeptics note, with some versions even predating Pelligrino's boyhood story. "I was first told it by the guy sitting next to me in Mrs. Boyes' math class in 1977," one Usenet poster in New Zealand remembered. "I heard the story circa 1951," added another. An Arizona Highway Patrol officer once noted that he received "about five calls a month from around the country from people wanting to know, did it really happen?" Pelligrino penned his own take on the matter -- a 24,000-word remembrance of rocket cars past -- and when the folklore-loving Webmaster at Cardhouse.com discovered it in 1998, he gave it a permanent berth, but only after reading it six times over, attempting to determine whether it was true. Debunking denizens of the alt.folklore.urban newsgroup went even further. They questioned the suspiciously low g's of acceleration for a JATO rocket, challenged whether it was a '58 or '59 Chevy Impala, and balked at the story's semantics: "[T]he irony of a car named 'Impala' becoming literally 'impaled' in the mountain sets off my crap detector." Hiding behind the e-mail address carinthecliff@hotmail.com, Pelligrino refuses to provide corroborating details, arguing he fears reprisal from law-enforcement officials or the military.

It's jarring to see Pelligrino's homespun narrative re-printed beside Wired's full-page ads for Acuras, Beefeater gin, and Sure anti-perspirant. ("Adrenaline-strength.") Professionally copy-edited, and trimmed almost in half, Wired's version lacks the awestruck single-word paragraph -- "Liftoff" (when the rocket-lighting wires are connected), as well as poignant phrases about the crash itself. "I almost cried... The front end was never going to see the light of day again... And that was the last I ever saw of the Rocket Car." That Wired has introduced yet another variation of an already haunting story doesn't dispel any of the mystery. But it does, in some way, consecrate Pelligrino's retelling.

Mixed with the cynicism over this legend's latest incarnation is a fondness. "It's really nice to see this one, among the most beloved of Internet/Faxlore, developed into a really nice written piece of fictional prose," one reader conceded. As another newsgroup poster put it, "A thorough debunking... would eliminate a lot of the magic for me." Perhaps it's best to accept the tale as a tale -- and heed that all-important line in John Ford's western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. "This is the West. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

David Cassel is an Oakland-based freelance writer on the internet and popular culture.

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