Talking With Chad Emerson: A ‘spy-like’ start for Disney Sat, 13 Mar 2010 Chad Emerson is the author of a new book, Project Future, that documents the origins of Walt Disney World and the lengths to which Walt Disney Co. went to keep its development plans and land purchases secret. Emerson, 37, spoke with Sentinel staff writer Jason Garcia. CFB: How did you get interested in Disney World? Well, I started researching for an academic article I was doing on improvement districts, and I stumbled across how the Reedy Creek Improvement District was pretty unique among all other improvement districts. So I started writing this academic article, and my wife and some other people were kind of reading it for me, and they started saying, ‘If you take out all this legal language and these footnotes, this would be a pretty interesting story in and of itself, about how Disney selected Central Florida and then purchased all of the land. … There are so many secretive and spy-like maneuvers that went on, all legal, but very interesting and intertwined. Full Interview Image Free high resolution Disney photos at WDWmemories. View other stories on the Disney News Archive