This was established by the prominent scorched and melted asphalt at that location. 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 from the crash site. Then he attached the JATO unit to his car, jumped in, got up some speed and fired off the JATO! He had driven his Chevy Impala out into the desert and found a long, straight stretch of road. It seems that a guy had somehow gotten hold of a JATO unit (Jet Assisted Take Off – actually a solid fuel rocket) that is used to give heavy military transport planes an extra 'push' for taking off from short airfields. The lab finally figured out what it was and what had happened. The type of car was unidentifiable at the scene. the wreckage resembled the site of an airplane crash, but it was a car. 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. Last year's winner was the fellow who was killed by a Coke machine which toppled over on top of him as he was attempting to tip a free soda out of it. 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. This is the text as it appears, possibly most frequently, in usenet repostings: The story was also debunked in 2003 on the pilot episode of MythBusters, titled ' Jet Assisted Chevy'.

In 1996, after numerous inquires, the Arizona Department of Public Safety issued a news release posted on their website concerning the story.

It was originally circulated as a forwarded email. The account of the JATO Rocket Car was one of the original Darwin Awards winners: a man who supposedly met his death in a spectacular manner after mounting a JATO unit (a rocket engine used to help heavy aircraft to take off) onto an ordinary automobile.

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