Humourless eh?! Perish the thought! I made this up awhile back and submit it for your judgement.
Prattle and Whitney Corp. today announced preliminary details of its revolutionary new aircraft engine, tentatively dubbed "Rumourjet". The unprecedented propulsion unit has been in testing since 1903 but is only now moving toward certification for commercial and military use. In an interview with this reporter, project design engineer Buzz Claptrap revealed details of the new engine.
"The concept involves harnessing the latent energy contained in the suggestibility/gullibility matrix continuum known to exist in the neo-cortical subliminality field and manifested in the human proclivity to establish and embellish psuedo-factual scenarios"
"You mean it runs off rumours?"
"Er..yes"
"Tell us how the engine came to be"
"Well the idea of the S.G.M.C. had been hypothesized about for some time but two problems were seemingly insurmountable. One was to find conclusive evidence for S.G.M.C and the other was to harness it for commercial use. One of our researchers has a brother who is an airline pilot and, after listening to him talk about his industry, became convinced that this particular profession represented our best chance for finding proof."
"We then recruited ten volunteer pilots and placed them in a hermetically sealed chamber for two days...interesting subjects, they kept pointing a finger in the air and peering upward as if looking for something....but I digress. In short order the subjects began to relate various stories and rumours about their industry and, after about three hours the alarm bells started to go off on the detectors."
"Detectors?"
"Yes, basically a refined lie-detector, we call it a "defibrillator",ha ha ha, get it? De-FIB-rillator?" A little technical humour, heheh."
"Indeed."
"Anyway, we employed all the filters and attenuators we had but the machine failed from being stressed beyond design tolerances. It was remarkable."
"What happened then?"
"Well we now had conclusive evidence for S.G.M.C. and, through a process I can't reveal to you, we were able to extract and contain a plasma which can be oxidized in a slightly modified JT8D."
"But that's an old engine isn't it?"
"Yes but the newer ones were judged to be not sufficiently robust for the immense stress involved in burning BS4."
"BS4?"
"Yes, that's what we're calling it, I'm not sure why."
"I'm told that the new fuel is being rushed through the certification process far more quickly than would ordinarily be the case. Aren't you worried about the possibility of a failure, say, over the middle of the Atlantic?"
"Not at all! The engine is a proven design and even in the case of fuel starvation there is a backup source on board."
"Oh?"
"Certainly, the pilots simply don a S.G.M.C. collector mask and then take over manually."