The Twisted Tale of a Missing Rocket Belt

Oct. 10 -- The rocket belt has been a staple of sci-fi and spy movies for years — from Sean Connery in 1965's Thunderball to Tom Cruise in this year's Minority Report.

But not many people know that working rocket belts actually exist. They were developed for the Army in the late 1950s, and after the Army decided they were not suitable for military use, dedicated civilians kept a few models in operation.

Today, three rocket belts are known to exist. Two are owned by Howard "Kinnie" Gibson, a daredevil and stuntman who acquired the patent on an essential part of the design.

The third belt — whose builders claim it is the most advanced ever constructed — has gone missing, leaving a trail of death and intrigue in its wake. One of its developers was found beaten to death in his Houston home, another is a suspect in the killing, and a third faces a possible life sentence for kidnapping the second and holding him hostage for seven days with a hood over his head.

A Crowd-Pleaser at Stadiums

Starting in the mid-1980s, Gibson, who was a stunt double for action star Chuck Norris, ran a side business exhibiting his rocket belts at cultural and sporting events around the world.

At the time, his rocket belts were the only ones in the world, but in the early 1990s, two men who had worked with him, Brad Barker and Thomas "Larry" Stanley, struck out on their own. Barker had worked on Gibson's ground crew during a run of appearances at Disney World, and Stanley had once owned a hot-air balloon business with him. The two men, who met each other through Gibson, had both fallen out with him in separate incidents.

Barker had been entranced by the rocket belt ever since seeing it in the James Bond movie when he was 9. But after seeing Gibson earn as much as $25,000 per appearance, he had a new motivation: "Everybody wants to be wealthy," he told Primetime in a recent interview. "And that was pretty much it: you know, build the belt, go out and make a lot of money, and that was it."

Barker and Stanley became equal partners in a company they called the American Rocket Belt Corp. Over a four-year period, at a cost of more than $100,000, they paid machinists and engineers to build an improved version of the device. Stanley put up most of the cash, and the work took place at a car audio store in Houston that was owned by Barker's friend Joe Wright, who got a 5 percent stake for his trouble.