Dr. Hydrogen

"I had an amazing stroke of good fortune," Billings says. "Bill Lear came by the university, saw my hydrogen car and decided he wanted me to be his protégé." Billings says when he asked Lear how much the position paid, Lear scoffed, offended, and told Billings that if he worked with Lear for two years, he'd quickly become a millionaire.

"So a week later he flew in, picked me up in his Learjet and took me home. And I actually lived in his home and followed him around," Billings says.

Billings flushes with excitement as he cranks up the story to its surprise conclusion. "So three years later, I called up Bill Lear, told him I'd started a company [Billings Energy], the company had gone public and I was sending him $250,000 worth of stock," Billings says. Lear refused. Billings insisted, telling the aviation expert, then in his late 70s, that he just wanted to pay him back somehow for all his help.

Billings leans in, his eyes gleaming, and, after a pause, continues. "And Bill Lear said to me, 'Let me tell you something. A long, long time ago, I had this identical conversation with my mentor, and he told me if I wanted to pay him back, I should help someone else.' Well, he had never said anything about a mentor. So I asked who was his mentor," Billings says. "He said it was Thomas Edison."

With Billings Energy doing well, Billings also founded a computer company and began going to trade shows. He took out patents on some computer technologies that would later lead to a long legal battle with computer company Novell -- a battle that eventually gained him more attention than his hydrogen exploits.

One of Billings' former BYU professors, who later worked for him as a consultant, remembers that his computer venture produced a reliable product -- a compact machine with a good operating system. But Billings the inventor was far outshined by Billings the marketer. "Roger is one of the best salesmen that I have ever met in my entire life," says Gordon Stokes, who saw Billings in action at trade shows. "Roger is so flamboyant. At a computer show once, he had the Billings computers in these really showy chrome cases, and he was standing in front of them in a long coat and a top hat doing magic tricks to draw a crowd."

Billings and Tonja, meanwhile, moved their growing family to Utah, determined to build what they called the "Hydrogen Homestead." Billings obtained a grant from the federal government to buy solar panels that could generate the hydrogen needed to run the house.

"The home proves you can run everything on hydrogen," Billings says. In his book, he shows a color picture of Tonja in a '70s-style tunic slicing lettuce in front of a hydrogen-powered kitchen range. The home was also equipped with a hydrogen fireplace log, a hydrogen barbecue grill, a hydrogen lawn tractor and a hydrogen-fueled Cadillac Seville.

"Before we moved in, we had this big, open house and we had mobs of people come through. After we moved in, people still wanted to keep going through it, so I always had to keep the house in showcase mode," Tonja recalls. "Reporters would come over, and I'd show them how to cook a steak on the hydrogen grill."

The couple lived in the Hydrogen Homestead for three years before Billings felt a spiritual calling to move to Missouri, Tonja says. The couple moved to the town of Gallatin, about an hour outside Kansas City, and built a home on the Grand River -- near the legendary Mormon sacred spot known as Adam-ondi-Ahman. In the late 1830s, Mormon leader Joseph Smith led his followers there after they had been expelled from Jackson County. Smith singled out the 2-square-mile section and called it the sacred place where Adam would one day come back to talk to "his people."

The Billings raised horses and German shepherds on their land, and Billings spoke about Mormon teachings on a local religious radio station for a time. But in the 1980s, he found that he no longer had faith in Mormonism, partly because he disagreed with the religion's decision to turn its back on polygamy. Billings still has only one wife, but in a pamphlet called "The True Dream of Zion," he supports the practice and says that God told him to leave the Mormon church.

Tonja left Mormonism as well, and in recent years Billings started his own Internet church: the Church of Jesus Christ in Zion. The church's Web site identifies it as a nondenominational congregation that "follows the leadership of our Patriarch and Prophet, Dr. Roger E. Billings."