Otis Carr

To hear him tell it, Otis T. Carr was the smartest man since Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Nikola Tesla. Not only that but Tesla, the great electricity genius and Thomas Edison contemporary, had confided some of his deepest secrets to Carr when the latter worked as a young hotel clerk in New York City in the 1920s.

­In the mid-1950s, with Tesla long gone, Carr was ready to tell the world and collect the rewards. He founded OTC Enterprises, hired a fast-talking business manager named Norman Colton, and set out to secure funding for a “fourth dimensional space vehicle” powered by a “revolutionary Utron Electric Accumulator.” The saucer-shaped OTC-X1 would undergo its first flight in April 1959 and the following December go on all the way to the moon.