Pages

Friday, June 24, 2016

Footprints of Evil

chets_035

My favorite movie line of all time is delivered by Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator. “If it bleeds we can kill it.” But you cannot kill what you cannot find. Every predator, no matter how stealthy, can be tracked when you know what to look for. Then, sometimes, just like in the movie the hunter becomes the prey.
___________________
Cullen Finnerty
Hundreds of people had been looking for him — friends, family and emergency service personnel. Helicopters had braved the driving rain, which seemingly came from nowhere, almost thwarting the rescue attempt. The rural community of Baldwin, Michigan, worked side by side with people bused in from all over the state to participate in the search.
All of them groped for answers as to how something like this could happen.
A call to the sheriff’s department by one local had even asserted that the man was being chased through the forest by Bigfoot. He was finally found by his friends face down and dead in a thickly-wooded area less than forty-eight hours after and not far from where he seemingly disappeared into thin air. His waders were askew and a trickle of blood ran down his nose.
An autopsy done the next day determined that he had a “slightly enlarged heart and slightly cloudy lungs”, but “no trauma to the body at all”. Months later, the initial autopsy, which found no reason for the man to be dead, would be redacted to speculate that he had died of pneumonia caused by inhaling his own vomit, in combination with a half dozen other absurdities(1). The case was closed, just like a thousand other cases like it have been closed before.
Cullen Finnerty was the type of big robust Irishman that the Midwest seems to grow like corn. He was a man who lived for physical confrontation, and he was so good at it that, after a sterling college career he ended up for a while, as a backup quarterback in the National Football League. The New York Times would eulogize that he was “perhaps the most successful quarterback in college football history”.(2)
At six foot two and two hundred and forty pounds of solid muscle, by all accounts, the staunchly Catholic Finnerty ran over defensive lineman and to fights — not away from them. By all accounts, Finnerty had taken one too many shots to the head. He was suffering from a mild case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease prevalent in ex-football players.
Back in December of 2011, he had been in Detroit with some coworkers, when he had phoned his brother Tim claiming he was being followed. In that paranoid episode, the only time Tim had ever seen Cullen afraid of anything, Cullen drove 150 miles to Tim’s house in Grand Rapids in an effort to evade the FBI, whom he imagined to be following him.(3)
By the time he went fishing on the evening of May 26, 2013, in the Baldwin River beneath the green canopy of Manistee National Forest Park, Cullen’s football career was behind him. He was thirty years old, married with two small children, and had a good job in medical sales. His carefully-concealed oxycodone habit was a memento from his playing days. His paranoid episode over a year ago had been an isolated incident, perhaps more likely attributed to overindulgence in Detroit’s thriving cocaine industry, than his imperceptible brain damage and medically-managed addiction to pain medication.
Cullen’s wife and friends had agreed to pick him up from the boat launching area at about 9.30 PM and bring him back to their rented cabin. At 9.27 she received a phone call from him in which he frantically described being followed by two men — one of which was twenty feet behind him, and neither of whom responded when he tried to talk to them. He then inexplicably stated that he was getting out of the river and taking off his clothes. He then hung up.(4 – 21:07)
His wife described him as sounding scared. Two more calls were made at 9.34 and 9.36 with Cullen again saying that he was being followed and he was nervous then hanging up. At 9.36 his friend, who was on the camping trip, asked where he was. Cullen replied that he’s not sure, but it’s getting a little rough. I think a couple of guys are following me. He then hung up again. During the last call, his wife was able to have him give her the coordinates from his iPhone. But when they went to the location, Cullen was not there.
At 10:37, a deputy responded, and it is at this point that the five-page long exercise in sentimental propaganda appearing in the June 8, 2013 edition of the New York Times makes a mockery of both journalism and the mysterious circumstances surrounding Cullen Finnerty’s death. The Times glibly states that the deputy “had a phone company ping his cellphone, and the results came back as far as three miles south and five miles north. Still no answers. Only questions.”(5)
Without missing a beat to even consider the cell phone evidence, the whitewash goes on to insinuate that Cullen died of a heart attack, mentioning pain in the left arm that a professional football player with too many miles on the odometer had been experiencing the week prior. The autopsy never even mentions a heart attack, not even the redacted autopsy.
Cullen Finnerty had with him an iPhone, which contains a Global Positioning System (GPS) transmitter that links to a ground station and then to several satellites. The margin for error on a GPS transmitter is fifty to one hundred feet. When the cell phone company pinged Finnerty’s iPhone, the coordinates that came back were for four different locations. Although the pings were within minutes of each other, the locations were 4.37 miles apart.(6 – 32:40)
The pings that the NY Times seems to find so mundane would ordinarily be good enough to get a murder conviction in any court of law in the western world.(7) Perhaps the NY Times just takes for granted that Cullen was traveling by rocket pack?
In order to get to any one of the four locations, Cullen would had to have crossed a paved road. If he had gone north from the campground where his boat was found, as is indicated by where his body was discovered, he would have traveled through heavily-posted and fenced land.
The area Cullen disappeared in is not so isolated. It is inconceivable that he could have eluded the hundreds of people searching for him — many of them seasoned woodsmen with dog teams — even if he was trying, for two days. Speculative hyperbole aside, the forensic and technological evidence indicates Cullen Finnerty, a man renowned for his physical courage, had been lost in limbo and scared to death.
___________________________
Amber Rose Smith
In early October a few miles to the southeast, the summer of 2013 would end on a much happier note when two-year-old Amber Rose Smith vanished from in front of her home on East 13 Mile Road and Cottonwood Avenue. Her father was watching her and had just stepped inside to use the bathroom. When he came back out, Amber and their two dogs that she had been playing with were gone. When he called to them, the dogs slunk back out of the woods, but there was no sign of Amber.
After a frantic 24-hour search by over two hundred volunteers and a hundred emergency service personnel, she was found the next day, almost two miles southeast of her home, standing in the middle of a two track road and staring blankly into space. She was unharmed except for some superficial cuts and scrapes on her body and face. How a barefoot, two and half foot tall girl wearing nothing but a tank top had managed to traverse almost two miles of some of the most ruggedly-forested land in the lower forty-eight almost unscathed and without being discovered by all those people searching for her was never explained.
Newaygo County Undersheriff Brian Boyd said “It’s hard to imagine how a 2 1/2-year-old can survive that distance through the woods with that kind of temperature.” Temperatures had plunged down to forty-five degrees during the night.(8) He went on to say “there’s some that aren’t convinced she walked that entire distance. Maybe she was dropped off. Those are things we might have to determine in the future.”(9 – 48:04)
________________________________
Richard Shaver’s Return of the Titans
In Return of the Titans, evidence was produced that Richard Shaver, who along with his publisher Ray Palmer introduced the UFO phenomena to the world, had learned his extensive knowledge of forbidden science from National Socialism. If the pun on the acronym of his name, Sharpe Shaver, and the Bolshevik Zionists’ panicked efforts to silence him is not enough, then his use of the SS religion — Welteislehre or World Ice Theory — to explain his art certainly should be.
The SS, Shaver and Hitler himself believed everything Victorian science expounds upon about the history of the earth and man is a lie. They believed that the moon periodically breaks free from its orbit and collides with the earth decimating whatever civilization is on the surface and leaving the earth a barren orb of ice. Shaver said that these past civilizations have all left imprints on the faces of rocks, and he developed a process that he called rock art to clarify those images. Posthumously, Shaver’s rock art has made him an internationally acclaimed artist.
Shaver was an agent of the SS. He was no serendipitous prodigy, as he pretended to be. But there is reason to believe he may not have falsified his story about having been taken down into the hypogean world of the Dero against his will. He grew up in Pennsylvania during the early twentieth century. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has had more children disappear than anywhere else on earth. Missing children were endemic to Pennsylvania from the early to mid twentieth century.(10 – 57:46)
Moon and earth
_______________________________
Raymond Howe, Jr.
On July 16, 1946, nine year old Raymond Howe Jr. went with his three sisters and brother to a park just outside of Pittsburgh for a lazy summer’s day fishing and swimming. Raymond went off by himself to fish in a secluded lake and didn’t return that night. A hundred and fifty emergency service personnel scoured the park for him in the ensuing days and found no sign of him. On August 9, another huge search was launched with the same result.
Forty one days after he disappeared, twenty miles southeast of the park, a man exercising his dogs came upon Raymond’s body at the end of a trail near a bridge. The coroner fixed the time of death at no more than a month and could find no cause for it.
Raymond had somehow managed to wander twenty miles in ten days through a populated area with half of Pittsburgh looking for him.(11 – 47:03)
At the time, Raymond’s disappearance was a major media event, even bigger than the disappearance of Cullen Finnerty. All kinds of questions were asked. No answers were ever given.
_______________________________
Missing 411
The strange disappearances of Cullen Finnerty, Amber Rose Smith and Raymond Howe Jr. are covered in David Paulides’ four volume work, Missing 411, wherein the inordinate amount of people who inexplicably vanish in and around America’s national parks is given long-overdue scrutiny.
Paulides, a noted Big Foot author and a police officer for twenty years, has gathered around him a cadre of retired police officers, search and rescue experts and other professionals.
Together they have logged over 9,000 hours in research and examined over 4,000 missing persons cases, after Paulides was tipped off over four years ago by some park rangers as to what might be the most insidious cover up ever perpetrated against the human race. Paulides’ group call themselves The CanAm Missing Project.(12)
The only consistency as to where the disappearances occur appears to be a lonely place with granite rock in the vicinity (13 – 24:46). In the cases Paulides cites, those that go missing either turn up dead in a place where they are not supposed to be; alive but unable to describe how they got there; or they are never found at all.
__________________________________
Daming Xu and Jake Dutton
In November of 2007, University of Oregon mathematics professor Daming Xu, an experienced woodsman, walked into Willamette National Forest carrying only a bottle of water on a day excursion. His body was never found. In 2012, nine miles away thirty-two year old physical fitness and outdoor buff James “Jake” Dutton walked in at the trailhead near Cougar Reservoir for a three-day hike. His body has never been found.
“There is a mystery here,” Dutton’s mother Cynthia Boucher is quoted as saying. “Both Jake and the professor were experienced hikers on wilderness trails. Two grown men can’t simply disappear from the mountains five years apart.”
Since 1997, 189 men and 51 women remain listed as missing after trekking into the Oregon wilderness.(14)
In his April 2012 interview with famed paranormal researcher Whitley Strieber, Paulides relates an anecdote about two-year-old Keith Parkins, who vanished in April 1952 from his grandparent’s ranch near Umatilla National Forest in eastern Oregon. Nineteen hours later and over two thickly-forested mountains, twelve miles north of his grandparent’s ranch, Keith was found by rescue workers unconscious in a riverbed. His clothes were torn to shreds, and he was suffering from severe exposure.
In the interview with Strieber, Paulides asks the now unanswerable question of why rescue workers were looking for Parkins that far away from where he went missing.(15) chets_036
It may not always be a round trip
In Paulides latest book, The Devil’s in the Details on page 362, he recounts how a seven year old boy was found alive and well two days after and fifty miles from where he had been lost. Another eleven children, some alive others dead, were found twenty or more miles away from their vanishing points. Others were found in areas that had been repeatedly searched before. Two year old Arthur Leo Ivey was found the next day sleeping in a ditch by his neighbor within a half mile of the home he disappeared from, after two hundred and fifty searchers had spent the night scouring the same area where he was found.(16)
_______________________________
Dr. James McGrogan disappearance
On Friday March 14, 2014, thirty-nine-year-old Dr. James C. McGrogan disappeared while hiking with some friends north of Vail Colorado. He had a cell phone, food, water, medical supplies, a GPS and other tools. A fellow physician who was with McGrogan at the time told his father he couldn’t understand how his son had just disappeared from the trail. They had been close together the whole time (17). After a thousand hours of combined effort, search parties gave up looking for him on Tuesday, March 18, when high winds made it too dangerous to continue.
Three weeks later, Vail Mountain Rescue pulled Dr. McGrogan’s body from the bottom of an ice fall four and a half miles away from the trail he had gone missing on. The area had already been searched multiple times. The press reported blandly that Dr. McGrogan had fallen off a cliff, but Paulides’ group using Colorado’s mandatory disclosure laws filed against the county sheriff and coroner for their post mortem reports on the incident.
Dr. McGrogan’s body had been found without any boots on. His boots in fact, although searched for, have never been found. Without any boots on he had somehow managed travel four and a half miles out of his way, on a route his equipment rental company would later describe to Paulides as insane, in twenty to thirty foot drifts of snow in spite of having a cell phone and a GPS.(18 – 1:12:32)
When people are recovered, dead or alive, missing articles of clothing, with footwear being the most frequent (19 – 20.04), are a constant. The dead are almost always found face down.(20 – 24:18)
Violent storms seem to arise out of nowhere, with the calculated intention of stymieing the rescuers (21 – 14:00). Search dogs are useless, and in some cases, have even laid down refusing to follow scent trails (22 – 28:53). Those that are recovered alive are invariably in a dazed state and cannot recount coherently what happened to them.
Most report blacking out right before the vanishing event, with some not even remembering how they left the house. In his September 2012 interview with Strieber, Paulides relates tales told by women who were chased by men on the Appalachian Trail. They are not clear in their descriptions, but one woman said she was chased for three days. She dumped her backpack and consistently hid in order to avoid them. For days, she saw no one else on the trail but her pursuers. She was unable to provide a detailed description of the men, nor give any real details of how she managed to evade them.(23 – 1:08:39)
______________________________
Arteaga and Huff in the Ozarks
Right after that interview, on Saturday September 22, 2012, 53-year-old Linda Arteaga and her 56-year-old brother Eddie Huff walked into the woods surrounding the tiny town of St. Joe in the Arkansas Ozarks. Huff was going to teach his sister backwoods survival techniques. Huff walked out of the woods on Monday and told their niece Shelly Friend that he had seen Arteaga safe on the porch of a relative’s house. It wasn’t until Wednesday that Friend and Huff realized Arteaga was still in the woods. On Thursday morning, about 75 volunteers on foot, horseback and all-terrain vehicles started searching the area for Arteaga. They found her the same day.(24)
Arteaga was unable to explain how she and her brother had become separated on Monday, saying “I thought he was hurt or something, so what I did, I tried to find help for him, but I didn’t know there was nothing wrong with him.” According to Arteaga she wasn’t alone out there. She said “I would see people. I’d ask for help, and they’d act like they didn’t even hear me.” She described herself as being very scared and her plight as freaky, saying “These people were hiding in bushes. They were weird people, very weird people.”(25)
Some tried to rationalize her story by saying she was hallucinating from the berries she was eating to survive.
The internet media giant Daily Mail neglected to even mention any of the strange circumstances involved in Arteaga’s ordeal. Instead they give the medical opinion of backwoods deputy Dewayne Pierce, who said that when she came out of the woods “she wasn’t quite about her head.”(26)
The distinguished deputy’s diagnosis aside, Dr. John Sorg of North Arkansas Regional Medical Center (NARMC) said “I suppose she could have had some toxic ingestion that may have caused, a hallucinogen, in other words; but you know, she’s been very consistent with that story, and today in her mental examination, she seems very oriented and appropriate in conversation.”
The Medical Director of NARMC’s Hospitalist Program went on to say “Whatever she experienced, whether or not it was real or hallucinary, she clearly did experience that.”(27)
__________________________________
Reports of large bears
In 1868, a three year old girl disappeared from her father’s lumber camp in Northern Michigan. After enlisting the help of a pair of professional hunters, who happened on the hysterical search scene by chance, the men traced the little girl’s feeble cries to a dense stand of brush. When the men advanced on the thicket, they saw what they said looked like a giant bear burst from it and run across the river, heading for the distant horizon.
The men recovered the girl unharmed from the brush. She later told them that “Mr. Wolf” would not let her leave, and had eaten her hat from right off her head; although, he had also gathered berries and fed them to her.(28 – 16:42)
On the night of July 2, 1955, Mrs. Curtis, summoned by her distraught older children, arrived just in time to see what she and the children said was a was a huge bear cradling her 2-year-old daughter Ida Mae Curtis in its front paw as it scurried off on three legs from their tent in a lumber camp at the wild Kootenai National Forrest in Montana (29). On July 4, after a search by 350 backwoodsmen in heavy rain, Ida was found dry and safe in a crudely built shelter across a river, just 300 yards away from where she was taken.
Ida would later relate, to the best of a 2-year-old’s ability, being cuddled and comforted by the bear during the time she was missing. The Sheriff became so angry that he actually paid the Curtises three separate visits demanding that they stop telling their story of a bear abducting and caring for their little girl. He told them “quit telling that story. It could never happen. It didn’t happen and don’t say it anymore.”(30 – 54:27)
It was late in the afternoon on June 14, 1969, when six year old Dennis Martin ducked into a stand of woods on Spence Field; a boulder strewn and windswept meadow high up in Great Smokey Mountain National Park. Intersected by the Appalachian Trail, the scenic tourist destination straddles the Tennessee and North Carolina border. Dennis’s bright red tee shirt made him easy to spot in the dazzling sunlight as he circled behind the densely-tangled thickets of mountain laurel and rhododendron, all laden with pink and lavender flowers. The men shared a knowing smile as the boy tried to “sneak” up on them.
His father, grandfather, brother, some friends and their father had lost sight of him for no more than 3 minutes before the search for him began. Within an hour, the mountain was crawling with rangers. The sky opened up that evening and dumped two and a half inches of rain on the park. The torrential downpours would continue on and off for rest of the week, dropping three more inches.
Park rangers, dog teams, firefighters and police, students, boy scouts and hunters, all worked side by side with military personnel. By June 21, 1,400 people were scouring that park on their hands and knees desperately seeking signs of little “Denny”.
About a week later, they were joined by a contingent of 60 battle-hardened Green Berets, seemingly pulled right out of the jungles of southeast Asia. chets_037
Special Forces. Choppered in to search for a lost child?
When the search officially ended in September, over 13,000 man-hours had been logged and helicopters had spent almost two hundred hours in the air. But a washed out footprint half way down the Tennessee side of the mountain, found in the early stage of the search but ignored, is all that would ever be found of Dennis Martin.
Late in the afternoon of Martin’s disappearance, Harold Key was less than five miles to the northwest of Spence Field and unaware of the growing search or the lost boy. He was sightseeing with his family on the Tennessee side of the park when they heard the ear-piercing shriek of a distressed child. Looking up the mountain, in the area where the scream had come, the family saw something bipedal and moving stealthily along the wood line. Then it melted back into the darkness of the forest.(31)
The incident was reported the next day and the Keys were interviewed by a park service agent and an FBI agent. It was then arbitrarily dismissed, with the FBI saying there was no way a man could carry a child and cover the distance from Spence Field to the Keys sighting from the time of Denny’s disappearance.(32 – video 2:40)
The footprint which was en route to the Key sighting was also disregarded because there were indications that other searchers had been in the area before it was found. But there were no children with them and the experienced trackers who found the print measured it and identified it as being made by the oxford shoe of a “little boy”. Dennis Martin was wearing oxford shoes at the time of his disappearance.(33 – video 3:53)
As did everyone else who recently covered the story, Paulides interviewed renowned man tracker Dwight McCarter who participated in the search as a young park ranger. But Paulides is the only investigative journalist ever to get an interview with Bill Martin, Dennis Martin’s father. Bill Martin has steadfastly refused all attempts by the media to talk to him since the time of the incident. He blames them for helping to cover up his son’s abduction.
Bill Martin’s revelations to Paulides make it quite clear that the disappearance of Dennis Martin was officially whitewashed. The FBI agent who had participated in and seemingly directed the Martin search ended up committing suicide. What the Key family had sighted moving along the wood line, and was originally mistaken for a bear by Key’s nine year old son, had something slung over its shoulder.
In his interview with Paulides, Dwight McCarter confirmed that what the Keys had sighted was carrying something. Paulides quotes him as saying “they buried that information. The press would never talk about it and the park service would never talk about it.”(34 – 1:44:17 – 1:47:09)
At the time, Bill Martin, contrary to a deal he had made with the Park Service to be kept informed of any leads on his son, only learned about the Key sighting from the press days after the federal agents had met with the Keys in private outside of the park. Martin then went to McCarter, and when McCarter asked questions, he was told by the FBI agent that the distance was to great and the time to short to travel it. Putting the agents reasoning to the test, McCarter and Martin walked from where the boy disappeared to where the Key sighting had occurred with plenty of time to spare from what was allotted.
McCarter also remarked in his interview with Paulides about how strange the arrival on the scene of the Green Berets was. They were supposedly training in the area, but no one could confirm where, and no one in the Park Service admitted to knowing anything about their deployment in the search. They just showed up in choppers about a week into it, carrying their own equipment and their own communication systems.
They searched on their own and refused a supervising rangers request that they work with the other emergency service personnel. They stayed for four or five days searching but never coordinating their efforts with the rescue workers.
Under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) orders for military units can be requested. Paulides filed three such requests inquiring as to the Green Berets mission in the Martin search. He never got an answer not even a denial of request.(35 – 14:02 – 19:53)
When Paulides sent the park service a FOIA request for their files on the Martin case the package they sent him in compliance made no mention of the Key sighting. When Paulides sent a secondary request asking for the file they had on the Keys the park service replied that there was no such file.(36 – 10:08)
Paulides carefully restrained law enforcement demeanor cracks a bit when he describes the media, as exemplified in Knoxville Tennessee, as being absolutely “corrupt and worthless.” Shortly before the Missing 411 books were released Paulides group held a press conference on the Dennis martin case in Knoxville. It was attended by regional representatives of NBC, ABC, CBS and FOX.
Graphs and charts were produced and the presentation was lauded by all in attendance (37 – 1:47:20). Yet till this day the official story of what WBIR, Knoxville’s primary news channel, recently called the “biggest search in the history of the Great Smoky Mountains” has not changed one word since 1969.(38)
The corporate Medias obfuscation of the facts may just be the least disconcerting element of Paulides investigation. The Park rangers who originally tipped him off did so because they had seen a pattern of what appeared to be premeditated dereliction of duty with the National Park Service (NPS).
Both rangers had been rotated to several different parks during their careers and each of the parks they had served in had made much ado whenever someone disappeared. But as soon as the attention generated by the disappearance subsided it was treated as a non event with follow up investigations almost never done. Information, particularly about the frequency of disappearances and in many cases the strange circumstances they occurred in, was routinely withheld from the public.
The vanishings occur in clusters throughout eastern and western park systems and all around the Great Lakes. America’s central corridor is practically unscathed. Paulides initial investigation revealed that the highest number of incidents occurred in Yosemite.
People vanish with what can only be described as astonishing regularity in its sparsely forested boulder strewn landscape seemingly devoid of cover for anything larger than a rattlesnake. photograph of map by David Paulides removed at his request.  as for why he made such a request when this is only a photo of his map used well within “free use” guidelines is another story, what does he have to hide and who has gotten to him?
Toward that end, we will begin sending the ferrets out to look into Paulides proverbial “underwear drawer” for what is hidden there.
Missing 411 Map
Working in concert with four other retired law enforcement personnel, Paulides filed an FOIA request with the park service asking for a list of people that have gone missing in Yosemite. The park service replied that they kept no such lists. As ex law enforcement officers; Paulides and company immediately grasped the breathtaking level of negligence required for the park service not to keep such lists and the unlikelihood of such incompetence existing in a federal agency of the NPS’s stature.
They filed their FOIA again, rewording it in case it was a question of semantics. The chilling response of the NPS western regional director was a blanket denial of such a list existing at either the park level or the national level. Paulides quotes her as saying “we rely on the institutional memory of our employees to help us on missing people and to understand the magnitude of it at different parks.”
Paulides then sent her a letter stating that he was a published author that had requested an exemption. He was entitled by law to a list utilizing the resources she had just quoted. The park service responded that his books were not carried in enough libraries to get an author’s exemption and they would have to go into the archives and formulate a list and that would cost him thirty-four thousand dollars. That would be for a list of missing people in Yosemite. For the entire park system, Paulides was told he would have to pay 1.4 million dollars.(39 – 7:00 – 9:58)
There are rooms in coroners offices all across America filled with bodies and bones that cannot be identified. More than one in five physicians working in America’s busiest morgues is not even board certified in forensic pathology. In sixteen hundred rural counties where coroners are appointed or elected the only qualification necessary is a high school diploma.(40)
There is no centralized registry or database of persons who have gone missing in America’s national parks and forests or on land under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The NPS, the United States Park Police and the Department of the Interior will not put on their web sites any information about missing people other than for the first seven to ten days after their initial disappearance.
After that period those that have vanished usually fall into the category of Missing Presumed Dead. There is no recorded account of their disappearance. The situation virtually assures that those who go missing on land under the jurisdiction of the NPS or the BLM will never be identified if their remains are not found in the area they went missing in.(41 – 56:52 – 58:48)
_________________________________
Yosemite National Park
Stacy Anne Arras disappeared on July 17, 1981. She was fourteen years old and on the trip of her lifetime horseback riding into the back country of Yosemite with her father and his party of a half dozen. In front of witnesses, to get a better angle for a picture she was taking, she walked into a stand of trees by their Sunrise High Sierra Camp. She was never seen again. After an intensive two week search, only the lense cover from her camera was ever found, still in the stand of trees.
After the NPS denied Paulides first FOIA request for the Arras case, he appealed and was denied again. He then got a call from the NPS asking why he wanted the files. Paulides asked whether Arras was a missing person case or a criminal investigation, to which the NPS agent replied she was a missing person case. The agent then confirmed that there were no suspects, and no one has even looked at the case in twenty years. Nevertheless, he told Paulides that he will never see the case.(42 – 6:49 – 9:48)
The Park Service answered Paulides’ FOIA request in the same manner concerning the case of 30-year-old George Penca (43 – 33:20). Penca seemingly vanished into thin air on June 20, 2011 when, after tiring, he fell behind his church group as they were descending the Upper Yosemite Falls Trail.
The three and half mile long trail winds its way 2,500 feet up an almost vertical cliff ending at the tallest waterfall in North America. It may very well be Yosemite’s biggest tourist attraction. It is heavily-trafficked and is in full view of Yosemite village. Outside of plunging to one’s death on the rocks below, there is no way off it. A dozen helicopters, seventy-four ground teams and six search dogs failed to produce Penca’s body, or any other sign of him.(44)
________________________________
Jaryd Atadero and Bobby Bizup
Three year old Jaryd Atadero vanished from the Big South trail in Poudre Canyon, Colorado on October 2, 1999. He was hiking with a Christian singles group that was staying at his father’s lodge; a well known Christian retreat.
Somehow Jaryd got ahead of the party of twelve, and the last people to see him alive were two men fishing in the Cache la Poudre River. The fishermen claim he was still within sight of his group when he asked them if they had seen any bears in the area. They told him to get back with his group and kept fishing. Four teams of tracking dogs could find no trace of him, and during the search, an Air Force helicopter crashed, injuring its five occupants.
His remains wouldn’t be found until four years later and over five hundred feet above the trail he disappeared on, in a place only accessible by scrambling on all fours up a steep incline most adults couldn’t climb. It was tentatively blamed on a mountain lion, but multiple cougar experts brought in by the boy’s father said that wasn’t likely, based on the absence of damage to the sweater near the stomach and neck.
Strange scratches were found on the cranium. The forensic experts consulted by Paulides are unable to identify their source, but unanimously concur that they were not made by any animal (45 – 45:46 – 49:37). Many of the children who are found have been severely scratched on their skin.(46 – 1:14:47)
The search for little Jaryd was a media event right from the start. But according to Allyn Atadero, Jaryd’s father who wrote the book Missing which recounts it, it was badly, if not deliberately, botched. Jaryd had disappeared in forestland under the jurisdiction of the federal government. Inconsistent with past policy in the thousands of cases investigated by Paulides the FBI refused to get involved or even to send an observer.
During the search, the Atadero family was inexplicably threatened with arrest by the sheriff if they set foot on the Big South Trail. A sheriff’s official saw fit to tell the already distraught Allyn that his son’s body was beneath the freezing waters of the river and wouldn’t be found for four years.
When Allyn checked what the dog handlers were using as an example of Jaryd’s scent he found it was a pair of his own shorts. When he asked how they could mistake a grown mans shorts for a three year olds the man in charge of the search and rescue operation became annoyed and threatened to call it off right then and there. Throughout, the sheriff and rescue workers maintained that the Big South Trail was the only way in and out of the valley. Allyn would find out later that there were several other routes.
chets_039
Jaryd’s remains were found on June 4, 2003 by some hikers. They were lying out in the open. Allyn suspects they had been placed there to be found. The colors of the sneakers were still vibrant and his tooth was on top of a decaying log when it should have been submerged in humus accumulated in over four years in the wilderness. The sweat pants had been found inside out yet when the sheriff held his press conference they had been turned right side out for display to the media. When Allyn objected he was ignored and the sweat pants left that way.
The tooth could have been placed there by a rodent.
But there is no logical explanation for this sneaker appearing like this after being exposed to the elements nine thousand feet up in the Rockies for four years.
The tooth, cranium and clothes were sent to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI) for DNA analysis. No blood was found on the clothing and the CBI claimed the degraded cranium only allowed for an 85% return. Identification of the tooth was also inconclusive because testing showed the DNA was mixed with other DNA. A DNA expert from Ohio privately enlisted by Allyn later told him the tooth was contaminated with more than one person’s DNA. All items undergoing DNA tests are supposed to be routinely cleaned prior to testing to avoid just such contamination.
chets_040
Hair fibers that were found on the boy’s sweater were also analyzed, but no test results were ever released. All Allyn has ever been told was that the hairs were non-human, not a Mountain lion and that he shouldn’t worry about it.(47)
Many of Paulides’ readers have remarked that the phenomenon seems to target Christians (“religious” people) and military personnel.(48 – 1:12:18)
About twenty miles south of the Jaryd Atadero tragedy, a generation before it, and again in Rocky Mountain State Park, 10-year-old Bobby Bizup vanished on the evening of August 15, 1958. He was staying at Camp Saint Malo, a Roman Catholic boys retreat at the foot of Mount Meeker. He was the only son of master sergeant Joseph Bizup, who was stationed at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver at the time.
In spite of a massive search, including bloodhounds and airplanes, the only sign of Bobby found that year was his bait box about a mile from the creek where he was last seen by his counselor, fishing (49). The following year, some of his bones and his hearing aid were found three miles up Mount Meeker, all the way at the timber line.(50)
On Friday August 13, before his Sunday mass in Denver celebrating World Youth Day on August 15, 1993, Pope John Paul II visited the St. Malo Retreat Center (51). He was helicoptered in and spent two hours alone on the trail that Bobby Bizup disappeared on.(52 – 1:14:29)
Only on Long Island could a handful of well to do politically-connected dilettantes simply appropriate for themselves the choicest part of a legendarily scenic state park, mar it with McMansions that were certain to erode the ecological system of a bay vital to an entire nation’s food supply, then erect gates and use the state police to privatize their commandeered land.
I was there. I worked for Bob Matheson who owned the Oak Beach Inn (OBI) South when they forced him to shut it down because it was a “nuisance” having all those young people on the beach bordering “their property.”
To young people living on the west end of Long Island, the OBI South was the place to go on a Sunday afternoon or on any evening where you felt the need to see or be seen, while having a beer or sipping a pina colada by the seaside. Thousands would throng its expansive dock, tailgate on its cavernous parking lot and mill around the beach it was built on, just to watch the sunset over Fire Island Inlet.
______________________________________
The Mystery of Shannan Gilbert
chets_041
Long Island was different then, thirty years ago. Oak Beach was the personification of its seaside innocence and yearning for life. It wasn’t, in the words of Shannan Gilbert’s mother, “an evil dirty place.” Now, “It’s isolated. It’s desolate. It’s a rich community. You’ve got doctors and cops and very very wealthy people who live there. No one’s ever going to think that that’s a bad dangerous area. But it is.”(53 – 0:16)
Sometime around midnight of Walpurgis Eve 2010, Shannan Gilbert, a twenty-four year old call girl, left Manhattan and took the last ride of her life in Michael Pak’s SUV. They would have got off Ocean Parkway where the OBI south once stood and gone left about a half mile down the pitch black Oak Beach Road till they got to the gate and someone let them in. Pak, her regular driver to escort appointments, says it was Oak Beach resident Joseph Brewer and they followed his car to his house (54 – 2:32). Brewer admits to hiring her but says it was not for sex (55 – 27:28). Brewer and Pak’s stories collaborate and they both passed lie detector tests but sociopaths laugh at lie detector tests.
At 4:51AM Shannan made a terrified 911 call from her cell phone that for reasons that are unclear to this day was transferred to the state police who no longer have jurisdiction in Oak Beach (56 – 9:02). Although she was on the phone twenty-three minutes screaming “their trying to kill me” the 911 operator was unable to get her location. Two male voices that have been identified as Pak and Brewer can be heard in the background.
Shannan then showed up banging on the door of Oak Beach resident of over thirty years Gus Colletti. Colletti, perhaps not coincidentally, comes across as the only witness in the CBS 48 Hours news investigation who is not being disingenuous. According to Colletti he opened the door. “And I said to her … ‘What’s the matter?’ She wouldn’t answer me. She just kept staring at me and going, ‘Help me, help me, help me.’ I reached over and grabbed that phone, dialed 911. When I said to her, ‘I called the police. Sit down in that chair. They’re on their way.’ She just looked at me and she ran right out the door.”
When Colletti followed her outside he saw her cowering under his boat in the driveway. He says “I could see a car coming down the road very slowly … would stop and then go a little bit. Stop, go a little bit.” Colletti ran up to the car and confronted the driver; Michael Pak, asking him ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Pak replied that he was looking for Shannan and Colletti told him ‘Well, I called the police … they are on their way to bring her back,’ to which Pak replied ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’ Colletti answered ‘Well, I did.’ At this point Shannan bolted from under the boat and into the darkness. Pak drove off after her ignoring Colletti’s shouts for him to stop.(57 – 7:07)
Pak claims that they had been at Brewer’s house for about three hours when Brewer came out and got him. When he went in Shannon was “freaking out” and accused them both of trying to kill her. She then went behind the couch and crouched down. Pak says he followed her and asked her if she had seen the movie Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. She replied coherently and at that point he says he realized she wasn’t high.
It was then he heard the 911 operator on her phone and he thought Shannan might be trying to set him up. So he left. When he was outside he saw her run out of the house and tried to follow her. From there his story match’s Colletti’s. With him giving up and leaving when he couldn’t find her after pursuing her from Colletti’s house.(58 – 56:39)
The next 911 call came from Oak Beach resident Barbara Brennan, who says Shannan showed up banging at her door at 5:21. But neither Shannan nor Pak was anywhere to be found by the time the Suffolk County Police Department (SCPD) got there at 5:40. SCPD was unaware of Shannan’s initial panicked 911 call received by the state police and wouldn’t find out about it for at least a month. So when they didn’t see Shannan or Pak, SCPD assumed they had left together.
Two days later on Monday May 3 at 1:42 PM, Oak Beach resident Dr. Charles Peter Hackett made a phone call to Shannan’s mother Mari (59 – 31:34). Mari says that Dr. Hackett told her Shannan had been staying at his house in Oak Beach which doubled as a halfway home for wayward girls. Dr. Hackett told her that Shannan had been agitated, so he had sedated her and she had left with her driver.
Dr Hackett at first denied making the call but after 48 Hours dug up the phone records he wrote 48 Hours’ investigative journalist Erin Moriarty a series of letters claiming he hadn’t said he had seen Shannan nor did he say he ran a halfway house out of his home. He was just trying to help. According to him, he had become involved after meeting with her family and Pak and Shannan’s boyfriend Alec, when they came looking for her in the ensuing days.(60 – 30:36)
But Alec did not even realize Shannan was missing until Sunday night (61 – 6:06). Shannan’s family only came to Oak Beach to look for her eight days later (62 – 4:38) after SCPD refused to take the case seriously and made them file the missing persons report in New Jersey where Shannon lived.(63 – 8:25)
In August, under relentless pressure from Shannan’s family and their pit-bull of a lawyer, John Ray, SCPD finally got around to interviewing Gus Colletti (64 – 9:14). By December they began their search for her and on the eleventh a K9 team working its way down Ocean Pkwy, less than three miles from where Shannan had last been seen, turned up the first body. In the following days they found three more in the same area within five hundred feet of each other. All of them had been asphyxiated, wrapped in roll off burlap used by landscapers and dumped haphazardly a few feet from the road in marshland bordering one of the most crowded beaches in the world.(65 – 11:26)
All of the dead were call girls, petite, attractive and White, between the ages of twenty-two to twenty-seven, who had advertised their services on Craig’s List just like Shannon Gilbert. But none of them were Shannan Gilbert. The girls had all disappeared between 2007 and 2010.
In March of 2011 the remains of six more bodies were found by SCPD in the marsh’s bordering Ocean Pkwy between where the first four were found and Oak Beach where Shannan disappeared. Only one could be identified. She was a twenty year old escort who had gone missing back in 2003. One was a baby girl and another a slightly built Asian man dressed in woman’s clothes. The rest were woman. Again none of them were Shannan.(66 – 25:48)
It wouldn’t be until December that SCPD would finally find the first sign of Shannan. Her pocketbook, jeans and shoes were found just about in the driveway of a house on Hatch Way Street. A week later and about a quarter of mile from where they found her clothes, less than a hundred feet from Ocean Pkwy, Shannan’s rotted corpse was found face down in the marshes.(67 – 33:29)
Unlike the other four call girls, two of which were dead longer than Shannan, the Suffolk County coroner was unable to determine a cause of death for Shannan. Case closed for SCPD. Former Suffolk County Chief of Detectives Dominick Varrone says Shannan died of “fatigue and exhaustion” after becoming lost in the marsh grass a hundred feet from the well lit and heavily-trafficked Ocean Pkwy.
Varrone insists over and over again that her panicked flight was drug induced, and she shed her clothes because it is easier to run through razor sharp marsh grass naked. The fact that he found eleven dead bodies while searching the area she disappeared in, nine of girls exactly like Shannan, doesn’t sway his conclusions in the least.(68 – 34:11)
Varrone also says that Dr. Hackett is not a suspect. Although he admits that Dr. Hackett might have made that phone call Varrone feels that Dr. Hackett is just a busybody who is prone to exaggeration (69 – 32:10). When pressed by Erin Moriarty about the nature and timing of Dr Hackett’s call Varrone actually accuses the victim’s bereaved family of lying and then claims that SCPD did not know about the phone call till months later. The call and the details of it are contained in the New Jersey missing persons report made two days after Shannan disappeared.(70 – 37:08)
Shannan Gilbert was a resident of New Jersey. Her strange death is clearly the FBI’s case. She crossed state lines to commit an act of prostitution, which facilitated her death in circumstances that are more than a little suspicious. Perhaps they can start by arresting Varrone, if not for deliberately ignoring the best lead he had on the investigation of at least 11 homicides, then for criminal incompetence. All the evidence they need is right on the internet due to CBS’ crack piece of investigative journalism: “48 HOURS” UNCOVERS MISSING ESCORT SHANNAN GILBERT’S FINAL MINUTES.(71)
If that’s not enough; before the conclusion of this piece right before Christmas, Newsday miraculously managed to obtain a report on the autopsy. Shannan’s autopsy, just like a full transcript of her desperate 23-minute 911 call to the police, has been kept from the media at all costs by local law enforcement. Shannon Gilbert’s remains tested negative for drugs and parts of her fingers and toes had been eaten off. There was also a small piece of her neck bone missing.(72)
Back in September, renowned forensic pathologist Dr Michael Baden, at the request of Shannan’s Family and their attorney John Ray, asked the Suffolk County coroner for Shannan’s body. Apparently they had seen this report, or parts of it and Dr Baden wants to take a closer look at her hair and bones for drugs. He also wants to take a good look at her larynx and windpipe. Turns out the missing piece of her neck is the Hyoid bone. Coincidentally, a fractured Hyoid bone is the primary determinate for a coroner in detecting strangulation in skeletal remains.
Dr. Baden’s credentials include being the former Chief Medical Examiner of New York City and former chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police. While serving in these prestigious positions, he participated in the investigation of more than 3,000 homicides, suicides and drug deaths, including the deaths of President John F. Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. By law, the Suffolk County coroner must turn Shannan’s body over to Dr. Baden.(73)
The coroner’s office has now agreed to release Shannan’s remains to a Long Island funeral home that will turn them over to Dr. Baden for independent autopsy but not before someone coughs up sixteen thousand dollars. They say that will be the minimal amount for a funeral, headstone and burial plot.(74)
All over the world people simply ‘vanish into thin air.’ The saying itself is a platitude. There are geographic pockets where it happens with alarming regularity. Some like the Bermuda Triangle are part of human folklore. Others like Myrtle Beach in South Carolina and America’s national park system are popular tourist destinations. Even when the missing turn up, no explanations are ever forthcoming.
An evil stalks the human race, an evil with millennia of practice at remaining invisible. But if you know where to look you will see the footprints of evil.
______________________________________
Citations
1 – “Cullen Finnerty Autopsy Updated.” ESPN College Football. Associated Press, 8 Aug. 2013. Web. 30 Nov. 2014. <http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/9550462/cullen-finnerty-died-pneumonia-had-brain-disease>.
2 – Bishop, Greg. “Questions Linger About Death of Former Quarterback.” College Football. The New York Times, 8 June 2013. Web. 30 Nov. 2014. <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/sports/ncaafootball/questions-linger-about-death-of-former-quarterback-cullen-finnerty.html?pagewanted=all&_r=3&>.
3 – “Cullen Finnerty, Former Grand Valley QB, Had Brain Trauma, Died of Pneumonia.” WZZM 13 ONLINE. WZZM13abc, 8 Aug. 2013. Web. 3 Dec. 2014. <http://host-54.242.54.159.gannett.com/news/article/264127/242/Cullen-Finnerty-former-Grand-Valley-QB-had-brain-trauma-died-of-pneumonia>.
4 – “A NEW! Missing 411 W David Paulides 11/10/2014 Interview. (21:07).”YouTube. FritzCayoVids, 16 Nov. 2014. Web. 30 Nov. 2014. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEw7Fe2yAGM>.
5 – Bishop, Greg ” Questions Linger About Death of Former Quarterback.” College Football. The New York Times, 8 June 2013. Web. 21 Dec. 2014. <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/09/sports/ncaafootball/questions-linger-about-death-of-former-quarterback-cullen-finnerty.html?pagewanted=all&_r=3&>.
6 – “Missing 411 New Interview September 22, 2014 with Dave (32:40).” You Tube. FritzCayoVids, 26 Sept. 2014. Web. 21 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2v-jmzI4JHY>.
7 – Starr, Douglas. “What Your Cell Phone Can’t Tell the Police.” The New Yorker. 26 June 2014. Web. 21 Dec. 2013. <http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-your-cell-phone-cant-tell-the-police>.
8 – Jackson, Angie. “Amber Rose Smith Found Nearly 2 Miles from Home, Survived 45-degree Night in Woods.” MLive. MLive Media Group, 9 Oct. 2013. Web. 21 Dec. 2014. <http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2013/10/its_amazing_2-year-old_amber_r.html>.
9 – “David Paulides Missing 411 The Devil’s in the Details Sept 7 2014 (48:04).” Paranormal Central. 8 Sept. 2014. Web. 21 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2_6aDoiOQQ>.
10 – “3 Missing 411 Interviews in One, David Paulides at His Best! (57:46).” FritzCayoVids. YouTube, 14 Oct. 2014. Web. 21 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9yxOH_qMKo>.
11 – “Missing 411 New Interview September 22, 2014 with Dave (47:03).” FritzCayoVids. YouTube, 26 Sept. 2014. Web. 21 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2v-jmzI4JHY>.
12 – “The CanAm Missing Project.” 1 Jan. 2014. Web. 21 Dec. 2014. <http://www.canammissing.com/page/page/8396197.htm>.
13 – “Coast To Coast AM – May 18, 2014 More Missing People (24:46).” Conflict May. Coast To Coast AM, 18 May 2014. Web. 21 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYjHUB1gLbU&list=PLrw8WfAnqiCfUth93o_Mrkdm0f58sUPXJ&index=19>.
14 – Cockle, Richard. “Lost in Oregon: Hiker’s 2012 Disappearance Joins Hundreds of Unsolved Wilderness Cases.” OREGONLIVE. The Oregonian, 8 June 2013. Web. 21 Dec. 2014. <http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2013/06/lost_in_oregon_hiker_who_vanis.html>.
15 – “3 Missing 411 Interviews in One, David Paulides at His Best! (42:50).” FritzCayoVids. YouTube, 15 Oct. 2014. Web. 21 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9yxOH_qMKo>.
16 – “Lost Boy Found Asleep In Gully.” Spokane Daily Chronicle. Google News, 25 Sept. 1964. Web. 21 Dec. 2014. <http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1338&dat=19640925&id=P49YAAAAIBAJ&sjid=mPcDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5303,6491492>.
17 – “Body Found in Colorado Confirmed as Missing Local Doctor.” WSBT-TV Report. WSBT22, 3 Apr. 2014. Web. 21 Dec. 2014. <http://www.wsbt.com/news/local/missing-local-doctor-found-dead-in-colorado/25316572>.
18 – “David Paulides Missing 411 The Devil’s in the Details Sept 7 2014 (1:12:32).” Paranormal Central. 8 Sept. 2014. Web. 21 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2_6aDoiOQQ>.
19 – “3 Missing 411 Interviews in One, David Paulides at His Best! (21:04).” FritzCayoVids. YouTube, 14 Oct. 2014. Web. 21 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9yxOH_qMKo>.
20 – “A NEW! Missing 411 W David Paulides 11/10/2014 Interview. (24:18).” FritzCayoVids. YouTube, 16 Nov. 2014. Web. 21 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEw7Fe2yAGM>.
21 – “3 Missing 411 Interviews in One, David Paulides at His Best! (14:00).” FritzCayoVids. YouTube, 15 Oct. 2014. Web. 21 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9yxOH_qMKo>.
22 – “Coast To Coast AM – May 18, 2014 More Missing People (28:53).” Conflict May. YouTube, 26 Sept. 2014. Web. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYjHUB1gLbU&list=PLrw8WfAnqiCfUth93o_Mrkdm0f58sUPXJ&index=19>.
23 – “3 Missing 411 Interviews in One, David Paulides at His Best! (1:08:39).” FritzCayoVids. YouTube, 15 Oct. 2014. Web. 21 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9yxOH_qMKo>.
24 – Cosgrove, Jaclyn. “Lost Oklahoma Woman Found Alive in Arkansas Woods.” NewsOK. 27 Sept. 2012. Web. 21 Dec. 2014. <http://newsok.com/lost-oklahoma-woman-found-alive-in-arkansas-woods/article/3713653>.
25 – Russell, Linda. “Woman Lost in Woods for 5 Days Tells Her Story.” KY3. 28 Sept. 2012. Web. 21 Dec. 2014. <http://articles.ky3.com/2012-09-28/woods_34154093>.
26 – Wellman, Victoria. “Missing Woman Found in Woods Five Days after Brother Took Her There to Teach Her Survival Skills – and Then Lost Her.” Daily Mail. 28 Sept. 2012. Web. <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2209980/Missing-woman-woods-days-brother-took-teach-survival-skills–lost-her.html>.
27 – Russell, Linda. “Woman Lost in Woods for 5 Days Tells Her Story.” KY3. 28 Sept. 2012. Web. 21 Dec. 2014. <http://articles.ky3.com/2012-09-28/woods_34154093>.
28 – “Missing Kids of Missing 411 (new) Oct 29, 2014. (16:42).” FritzCayoVids. YouTube, 30 Oct. 2014. Web. 21 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqmpxd5P3Xg>.
29 – “Insists Bear Kidnapped Tot.” The Times-News. Google News, 5 July 1955. Web. 21 Dec. 2014. <http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1665&dat=19550705&id=0UEaAAAAIBAJ&sjid=hyMEAAAAIBAJ&pg=3756,161744>.
30 – “Where Did The Road Go David Paulides Missing 411 Interview 9 22 13 (54:27).” FritzCayoVids. YouTube, 2 Oct. 2014. Web. 21 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdjB-0zglmo>.
31 – Balloch, Jim. “Search in Smokies for Lost Boy, Dennis Martin, Produces Lessons for Future Searches.” Knoxville News Sentinel. 28 June 2009. Web. <http://www.knoxnews.com/news/local-news/missing-dennis-martin>.
32 – Ibid. (video 2:40).
33 – Ibid (video 3:53)
34 – “Where Did The Road Go David Paulides Missing 411 Interview 9 22 13 (1:44:17 – 1:47:09).” FritzCayoVids. YouTube, 2 Oct. 2014. Web. 22 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdjB-0zglmo>.
35- Ibid. (14:02 – 19:53)
36 – Ibid (10:08)
37 – Ibid. (1:47:20)
38 – Matheny, Jim. “Dennis Martin: Lost Boy a 45-year Smoky Mountain Mystery.” WBIR.COM. WBIR, 21 May 2014. Web. <http://www.wbir.com/longform/news/local/2014/05/22/dennis-martin-missing-45-years/9405607/>.
39 – “3 Missing 411 Interviews in One, David Paulides at His Best! (7:00 – 9:58).” FritzCayoVids. YouTube, 15 Oct. 2014. Web. 24 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9yxOH_qMKo>.
40 – Thompson, A.C., Mosi Secret, Lowell Bergman, and Sandra Bartlett. “The Real ‘CSI’: How America’s Patchwork System of Death Investigations Puts the Living at Risk.” Post Mortem Death Investigation in America. Pro Publica, 31 Jan. 2011. Web. 24 Dec. 2014. <http://www.propublica.org/article/the-real-csi-americas-patchwork-system-of-death-investigation>.
41 – “David Paulides Missing 411 The Devil’s in the Details Sept 7 2014 (56:52 – 58:48).” Paranormal Central. YouTube, 8 Sept. 2014. Web. 24 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2_6aDoiOQQ>.
42 – “Where Did The Road Go David Paulides Missing 411 Interview 9 22 13 (6:49 – 9:48).” FritzCayoVids. YouTube, 14 Oct. 2014. Web. 24 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdjB-0zglm>.
43 – “David Paulides Missing 411 The Devil’s in the Details Sept 7 2014 (33:20).” Paranormal Central. YouTube, 8 Sept. 2014. Web. 24 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2_6aDoiOQQ>.
44 – “Search Resumes in Yosemite for Lost Hawthorne Hiker.” L.A. NOW. Los Angeles Times, 20 June 2011. Web. 24 Dec. 2014. <http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/06/yosemite-missing-hiker.html>.
45 – “Coast To Coast AM – May 18, 2014 More Missing People (45:46 – 49:37).” Conflict May. YouTube, 26 Sept. 2014. Web. 24 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYjHUB1gLbU&list=PLrw8WfAnqiCfUth93o_Mrkdm0f58sUPXJ&index=19>.
46 – “3 Missing 411 Interviews in One, David Paulides at His Best! (1:14:47).” FritzCayoVids. YouTube, 15 Oct. 2014. Web. 24 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9yxOH_qMKo>.
47 – “Jaryd Atadero.” CANAM Missing PROJECT, 1 Jan. 2014. Web. 24 Dec. 2014. <http://www.canammissing.com/jaryd-atadero.html>.
48 – “Coast To Coast AM – May 18, 2014 More Missing People (1:12:18).” Conflict May. YouTube, 26 Sept. 2014. Web. 24 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYjHUB1gLbU&list=PLrw8WfAnqiCfUth93o_Mrkdm0f58sUPXJ&index=19>.
49 – “Bloodhounds Join Hunt For Missing Boy.” Earth Archives. Chicago Daily Tribune, 19 Aug. 1958. Web. 24 Dec. 2014. <http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1958/08/19/page/31/article/bloodhounds-join-hunt-for-missing-boy>.
50 – “Remains Of Lost Boy Are Located.” Sarasota Journal. Google News, 9 July 1959. Web. 24 Dec. 2014. <http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1798&dat=19590709&id=pfMeAAAAIBAJ&sjid=6YoEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6253,799664>.
51 – Aguilar, John. “St. Malo’s Future Uncertain 20 Years after Papal Visit.” Daily Camera Boulder County News. 13 Aug. 2013. Web. 24 Dec. 2014. <http://www.dailycamera.com/boulder-county-news/ci_23856747/st-malos-future-uncertain-20-years-after-famous>.
52 – “Coast To Coast AM – May 18, 2014 More Missing People (1:14:29).” Conflict May. YouTube, 26 Sept. 2014. Web. 24 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYjHUB1gLbU&list=PLrw8WfAnqiCfUth93o_Mrkdm0f58sUPXJ&index=19>.
53- “The Long Island Serial Killer – Uncaught Psychopath Terrorizing NY (Crime Documentary) (0:16).” Damoviez. YouTube, 7 May 2014. Web. 24 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zfeby2d-FY>.
54 – Ibid (2:32)
55 – “”48 Hours” Uncovers Missing Escort Shannan Gilbert’s Final Minutes (27:28).” Forty Eight Hours. CBS News. Web. <http://www.cbsnews.com/news/48-hours-uncovers-missing-escort-shannan-gilberts-final-minutes/>.
56 – Ibid (9:02)
57 – Ibid (7:07)
58 – “The Long Island Serial Killer – Uncaught Psychopath Terrorizing NY (Crime Documentary) (56:39).” Damoviez. YouTube, 7 May 2014. Web. 24 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zfeby2d-FY>.
59 – “”48 Hours” Uncovers Missing Escort Shannan Gilbert’s Final Minutes (31:34).” Forty Eight Hours. CBS News. Web. <http://www.cbsnews.com/news/48-hours-uncovers-missing-escort-shannan-gilberts-final-minutes/>.
60 – Ibid (30:36)
61 – “The Long Island Serial Killer – Uncaught Psychopath Terrorizing NY (Crime Documentary) (6:06).” Damoviez. YouTube, 7 May 2014. Web. 24 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zfeby2d-FY>.
62 – “”48 Hours” Uncovers Missing Escort Shannan Gilbert’s Final Minutes (4:38).” Forty Eight Hours. CBS News. Web. <http://www.cbsnews.com/news/48-hours-uncovers-missing-escort-shannan-gilberts-final-minutes/>.
63 – “The Long Island Serial Killer – Uncaught Psychopath Terrorizing NY (Crime Documentary) (8:25).” Damoviez. YouTube, 7 May 2014. Web. 24 Dec. 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zfeby2d-FY>.
64 – Ibid (9:14)
65 – Ibid (11:26)
66 – “”48 Hours” Uncovers Missing Escort Shannan Gilbert’s Final Minutes (25:48).” Forty Eight Hours. CBS News. Web. <http://www.cbsnews.com/news/48-hours-uncovers-missing-escort-shannan-gilberts-final-minutes/>.
67 – Ibid (33:29)
68 – Ibid (34:11)
69 – Ibid (32:10)
70 – Ibid (37:08)
71 – Ibid
72 – LOPEZ, TANIA. “Shannan Gilbert Autopsy Finds No Drugs in Her System, According to Report.” Newsday, 10 Dec. 2014. Web. 25 Dec. 2014. <http://www.newsday.com/long-island/shannan-gilbert-autopsy-finds-no-drugs-in-her-system-1.9702739>.
73 – Corbin, Cristina. “Famed Coroner Baden Seeks to Autopsy Remains of Craigslist Escort.” Crime & Courts. FOX News, 18 Sept. 2014. Web. 25 Dec. 2014. <http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/09/18/noted-coroner-michael-baden-to-request-independent-autopsy-on-remains-shannan/>.
74 – LOPEZ, TANIA. “Shannan Gilbert Family Seeks Donations to Pay for Her Burial.” Newsday, 18 Dec. 2014. Web. 25 Dec. 2014. <http://www.newsday.com/long-island/suffolk/shannan-gilbert-family-seeks-donations-to-pay-for-her-burial-1.9729218>.

Von Braun’s 50-Year-Old Secret: The US Explorer I Discovery that Could Have Saved the World ….


Von Braun’s 50-Year-Old Secret:
The US Explorer I Discovery that Could Have Saved

By Richard C. Hoagland
© 2008 The Enterprise Mission

A half-century ago, from a windswept Florida beach, the United States finally "got back in the game" -- after the shock of the Soviet Union's Sputnik just three months earlier -- and successfully launched its own satellite into an orbit of the Earth ... dubbed after launch, "Explorer I."
Unknown to anyone but a handful of civilian engineers and US Army personnel, intimately involved with the launch that night, this would became a true "history-defining moment" -- when the launch team, via Explorer I, immediately and serendipitously made America's MOST important and overarching discovery, of all nations that would someday ever venture off the Earth ... in the entire fifty-year history of "space"--

The secret of gravity and inertia themselves ... revealed as a true "anti-gravity effect" -- somehow operating on Explorer I ... radically affecting its very orbit!

A seminal discovery ... which -- at the stroke of a White House pen -- could have re-written not only the history of science … but, the destiny of the entire world ….
However, this was not to be.
This monumental, history-making breakthrough was immediately followed by the United States' most far-reaching political move of this same half-century -- a hurried decision, made apparently that same night, to keep this phenomenonal "anti-gravity" discovery a total secret ... not only from its own civilian scientists, its own "free press" ... its own citizens and taxpayers ... but, from everyone on Earth!
This is the story of the Enterprise Mission's painstaking, years-long investigation (given context in our recent New York Times bestseller -- Dark Mission: the Secret History of NASA): the "back-engineering," scientific and political analysis of this "world-changing, pre-NASA discovery" ... and the grave global consequences that have now evolved from the crucial decision, made by "someone" in a position of Authority that night--
To simply ... "bury it."
In subsequent pages, we will detail and document "who" exactly made this amazing breakthrough, precisely "how" it was achieved, and "what" the stunning, world-wide implications could have been ... if science had been allowed to take its natural course that night -- if this unique discovery had been freely presented, freely studied and freely discussed in the global scientific community in the ensuing years ... and then, implemented as a revolutionary, Earth-based "gravitational control technology."
But, most important--
We will detail how this paradigm-shattering breakthrough can now be duplicated -- by any student, in any decent high school physics laboratory ... literally, anywhere on Earth!
And what that now could mean for all Humanity.

* * *

Explorer I was launched at 10:48 PM EST, January 31, 1958 -- from Pad 26A, at Cape Canaveral.
The Jupiter-C rocket (C standing for "composite") that successfully launched this first US satellite into the Florida skies (below), was actually a converted "Redstone" military ICBM -- a rocket developed as a US Army advancement over their earlier "V-2s," by Wernher von Braun and his imported team of "Operation Paperclip" German Nazi rocket engineers to the United States, in the decade immediately following World War II.


This "Jupiter-C satellite launcher" was built around a main liquid-fueled rocket stage, composed of two separate tanks for housing liquid oxygen and the "Hydyne" hydrazine-based fuel, standing a total of 47 feet high and weighing, fully loaded, 62,700 pounds.
Atop this "main stage" were 15 individual, much smaller solid propellant rockets, arranged in three additional "stages" (weighing a total of 1380 pounds), consisting of 11, 3 -- and finally, 1 -- topped, at 71 feet above the ground, by the ~31-lb, bullet-shaped Explorer I satellite itself (below) -- literally bolted to the fnal "solid" stage beneath it.


Explorer I's best-known, unclassified contribution to space science was the discovery of the famed “Van Allen” radiation belts – named for the University of Iowa physicist, James van Allen, who first found (via his radiation detectors aboard Explorer I, confirmed by the two successor Explorer III and IV spacecraft) the high-energy “donuts” of charged particles circling the Earth, trapped by its "dipole" magnetic field (below).


Van Allen went on to win the equivalent of the “Nobel space physics prize” for this fundamental space discovery -- which was eventually found to be a basic feature of ALL planets in (and outside) the solar system exhibiting similar magnetic fields.
He even made it to the cover of TIME magazine.


By stark contrast, the ultimately far more significant (literally "physics-shattering" -- as you shall see) anomalous orbital dynamics exhibited by this same satellite, and, on its very first orbit that night--
That, Explorer I’s actual trajectory, unambiguously (and most disturbingly) seemed to violate two basic laws of 20th Century Physics, immediately after launch--
Have received NO scientific acknowledgements, prizes, or peer-reviewed discussions … even fifty years after their totally unexpected discovery ....
So, "who" made this remarkable discovery ... and then (as the evidence will prove ...) actively participated in its subsequent, deliberate, decades-long (and still on-going) cover-up?
Why -- none other than Wernher von Braun, himself ....


To fully understand the extraordinary technical and political significance of what "mystifyingly" occurred that January night in 1958, one has to go back to the events themselves, swirling around this "super-charged, US Army launch attempt by von Braun and his German team ..." -- a desperate effort for the US to "catch up" in a space race it was clearly still losing to the Soviets at that point -- and compare what was expected to happen with Explorer I's launch ... with what actually happened.

* * *

Because of the extremely primitive status of the "global satellite tracking network" in 1958, required to follow a satellite in orbit, the number of "stations" up and running the night Explorer I was finally launched was "few and far between"; the portion of this Mercator-projection map (below) NOT shaded, is the latitude coverage straddling the equator dictated by the planned inclination of the first US satellites -- Vanguard and Explorer -- designed for orbits between "latitudes 40 degrees north and south." As you can see, most of the existing ground stations were concentrated along a band running raggedly north and south, mostly in the Americas -- heavily favoring one side of the planet but leaving the rest of the world "dark" (the scattering of stations seen in other parts of the world -- such as the one in central Australia -- did not yet have the proper equipment to detect Explorer I's radio frequencies, having been originally planned to support the Navy's Vanguard Program).
Explorer I was launched by von Braun and his team with an orbital inclination of "33.3 degrees ...."


Thus, when the spacecraft disappeared over the South Atlantic horizon from Cape Canaveral that evening, after being launched "downrange" (the line extending southeast from Florida -- above), there was essentially no way for von Braun (or anyone else ...) to track it, to KNOW from "telemetry" (radioed information ...) if "his" satellite had been successfully placed in orbit by the Jupiter C ... or not--
But to impatiently just wait ....
Until Explorer I -- moving at ~18,000 miles per hour (5 miles per second ...) -- had almost completely circled the entire world ... and came back around ... within range of special radio receivers set up in the deserts just north of San Diego, California (a place called menacingly "Earthquake Valley" ...).
There, if the receivers picked up Explorer I's faint telemetry signals as it was coming over the Pacific Ocean for the first time -- after the spacecraft had almost circled the entire planet -- word was to be "flashed" (by "long-distance telephone" -- as it was quaintly called in those days ...) to Cape Canaveral (where von Braun's Army launch crew was nervously waiting ...), and, to the Pentagon in Washington DC -- where von Braun himself, Van Allen, and William Pickering (Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory -- JPL -- the West Coast facility which had constructed the actual satellite) -- were also watching "the clock tick down the seconds" ....
If the eventual word from Earthquake Valley was "go," the three scientists were then scheduled to begin a live press conference over at the National Academy of Sciences, and announce triumphantly to an equally waiting world--
"We did it!"
Only after all this "waiting and nail biting" ... a literally hours-long vigil, and an equally archaic mode of communicating "success" when it was finally learned (over a single telephone line -- stretching between California and Washington DC ...) -- would (or could!) anyone in the rest of the world that night really KNOW that Explorer I had successfully made it into orbit!
That key California signal -- for a carefully planned, Explorer I trajectory around the Earth of 220 by 1000 miles -- was expected at about 12:30 AM EST, February 1, 1958 (below).


Slightly over an hour and a half after Explorer's launch from Florida," the moment of truth" in this intensely anticipated "window" came ... and went--
And--
Nothing.
Then -- it was 12:31 ... then, 12:32 ... and more nothing.
Because of the "clockwork" nature of satellite orbits when, by 12:33, there was STILL no signal ... it became dreadfully apparent to von Braun's entire senior team -- General John B. Medaris, head of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) which had actually launched Explorer I for the US Army earlier that night (below)--


And ... William Pickering ... Director of the Cal Tech laboratory (JPL) under contract to ABMA for the actual design and construction of Explorer I (below)--


That, they were likely never going to hear that desperately hoped-for signal ... because, somehow ... "something" had gone radically wrong!
By 12:41 AM it was all but certain.
Instead of going into orbit and coming around the Earth on time, Explorer I had -- somehow -- been plunged back into the atmosphere far over the horizon from the Cape -- and, by now, had simply burned up ... literally, somewhere on the far side of the world ....
It was never going to "come around the Earth and over Earthquake Valley ..." -- because it no longer even existed!
A photograph of von Braun (below) -- snapped while he and everyone else at the Pentagon desperately awaited word ... any word -- captures perfectly what he was obviously fearing--


Von Braun would later directly write about his roller coaster emotions during that "interminable wait," in a piece entitled "The Story Behind the 'Explorers,'" appearing in the Des Moines Sunday Register, April 13, 1958:

“... the bird was due in California about 12:30 A.M., EST. We had four tracking stations there poised to pick up its signal, and Bill [Pickering] had them on the long-distance phone.
“Twelve-thirty came. There was no signal.
“A minute went by. And another. And another, without a beep from the satellite. Eight
minutes elapsed
and still they didn’t hear a thing.
“We were miserable. Obviously, we’d been mistaken. The Explorer had never really gone
into orbit [emphasis added] ...."

Then, at 12:42 AM--
There it was!


Within the next 30 seconds, all four Earthquake Valley stations picked up Explorer I's transmitted signals "loud and clear."
The United States was -- finally -- in orbit!
Explorer I had just been "late."
But ... why?
George Ludwig -- Van Allen's chief assistant, and designer of the ~18 pounds of batteries and custom-made radiation-monitoring equipment on-board Explorer I -- described his own automatic first reaction--

"... we all realized immediately that the rocket had provided a larger than expected thrust, resulting in a higher than planned orbit, and a longer orbital period. The orbit had been expected to have a perigee (lowest height above the Earth) of about 220 miles and an apogee (greatest height) of about 1000 miles. The perigee and apogee heights were actually 223 miles and, more significantly, 1592 miles, respectively, with an orbital period of 114.7 minutes rather than the 105 minutes that had been originally anticipated ...."

With the (belated!) acquisition of Explorer I by Earthquake Valley -- von Braun, Van Allen and Pickering were whisked from the Pentagon to the more "scientific" (and civilian ...) "National Academy of Sciences" -- for a packed "2:00 AM press briefing ...."
Amid all the adulation and congratulations, this iconic photograph (below) was taken, capturing the mood of "a new US technological and political renaissance" -- symbolized now by the resounding success of Explorer I -- in the face of the Soviet Union's "daunting early wins" in this new game ....


Lost in all the well-deserved self-congratulations ... was the nagging real reason for Explorer I's agonizing delay at Earthquake Valley: its "higher than planned" orbit.
And ... any serious questioning -- either from the assembled scientists that night, or from the press -- as to how something like that could even have been achieved ... powered only by von Braun's relatively primitive "Jupiter-C" rocket ....

* * *

Van Allen (below) -- when he wrote about his own emotional experience that memorable night -- also barely touched upon "the problem"--

 
" … the burning of all four stages [after launch] was monitored by down-range stations and judged to be nominal. The final burnout velocity of the fourth stage was somewhat higher than intended, and there was a significant uncertainty in the final direction of motion. Hence, the achievement of an orbit could not be established with confidence from the available data. The telemetry transmitter was operating properly, and the counting rate data from our radiation instrument corresponded to expectations… The reception of the telemetry signal after the lapse of [almost] one orbit was necessary before success could be confirmed ....
"... for about an hour following receipt of the [last] down-range station reports, there was an exasperating absence of information ... The clock ticked away, and we all drank coffee to allay our collective anxiety. After some ninety minutes, all conversation ceased, and an air of dazed disappointment settled over the room. Then, nearly two hours after launch, a telephone report of confirmed reception of the radio signal by two [sic] professional stations in Earthquake Valley, California, was received. The roomful of people exploded with exultation, and everyone was pounding each other on the back with mutual congratulations [emphsis added] ...."

Van Allen -- NOT being a true "rocket scientist" (he was, after all, primarily a physicist -- specializing in custom-designed instrument payloads for sounding rockets ... not the launch vehicles themselves) -- can be forgiven for not immediately appreciating the deeper implications of the problem presented by Explorer I's inexplicable, significantly higher-than-planned orbit that night; he could only assume (as, apparently George Ludwig did ... and everyone else) that the "higher orbit" was the by-product of a "slightly greater efficiency" -- somewhere in von Braun's pioneering, multi-staged Jupiter-C launch vehicle -- most likely, in the solid-fueled rockets, designed by JPL (in addition to the satellite), that comprised those critical last three upper stages ....
As we have detailed in "Dark Mission," in the chapter devoted to the remarkable history of one of JPL's key founders -- Jack Parsons, and his early solid-fuel rocket pioneering -- "solids" in this period were only slightly more predictable than "alchemy" ... or "magik"; depending on a variety of arcane chemical and physical variables -- the exact proportions of fuel to oxidizer mixed together; the physical size of the propellant grains of that resulting mix; the density of the final packing of those grains into the rocket's casing; even the temperature of the propellant -- any one of these parameters could affect the final product, which would result in a well-known "variable thrust and burn time" for all solid-fueled rockets of the period ....
Parson's singular claim to fame was, by exhaustive trial and error, over more than two decades (from the 1930's through the 1950's ...), to finally have hit upon a fuel/oxidizer mixture, and a loading process, which eliminated almost all these inherent solid-rocket variability’s ... almost.
For these well-known reasons (to those who "hung around the fledgling space program ..."), it was assumed by all the "non-rocket scientists" (and by the press ...) that one of these "normal variables" in the Jupiter-C's upper stages easily accounted for the rocket's additional performance ....
That "everyone assumed" this was the case, is obvious ... because, it is equally obvious that no one at the time (at least, anyone who will talk ...) actually sat down and carried out even the most basic of "rocket calculations" -- of just how "over efficient" von Braun's Jupiter-C had to have been ... to result in anything even approaching Explorer I's much higher-than-expected orbit!
Fifty years after the fact, we have done those calculations ... with some spectacular and very thought-provoking results.

* * *

OK, now comes the part where the "mathematically challenged" (or squeamish ...) might want to turn away. If you do, we promise we'll summarize the cool stuff -- in neat, plain English -- at the end ....
Because--
The foundation of all true "rocket science" is--

The “Rocket Equation!”

Wp = Wi * (1 - e**(-dV/g*ISP))

Where,

Wp = weight of propellant expended during the thrust arc
Wi = initial weight of the vehicle
V = delta velocity change
g = Earth's gravitational acceleration (32.174 ft/sec^2)
ISP = specific impulse of the engine (and fuel) in use

Solving for dV (the final rocket velocity), the equation becomes:

dV = -g*ISP*ln(1- Wp/Wi)


Back to English.
Broken down, the above equation is actually quite simple.
The key parameter is the number representing "ISP" -- a rocket's "specific impulse" (expressed as "seconds").
Specific impulse is somewhat like a "miles per gallon" reading for your car; the higher the specific impulse (ISP) for a given rocket system (engines plus fuel), the more efficient the total rocket system is ... in terms of "miles per gallon" usage of that fuel ....
And, the higher the final velocity you can achieve with a given amount (mass) of fuel.
And ... higher final velocities result in higher orbits!
So, high ISP numbers are good; lower ISP numbers are ... "less good" ....
In terms of determining if the JPL upper stages could have achieved the performance levels required to place Explorer I into its higher-than-expected orbit, we began by looking at the published parameters of the solid rockets JPL used in constructing those stages for von Braun's final "composite" rocket.
One major clue was in Van Allen's own report:

"... the final burnout velocity of the fourth stage was somewhat higher than intended [emphasis added] ....."

According to the Smithsonian's "National Air and Space Museum Data Sheet, Department of Astronautics" -- published on an official NASA website--
The fuel and oxidizer used in the JPL-designed "solid" upper stages for the Jupiter-C was "... polysulfide-aluminum and ammonium perchlorate." This was pretty standard stuff, even if its ISP was fairly poor, compared to almost any liquid chemical rocket fuels in use today; the ISP varied from about "220 seconds" in the atmosphere, to about "235 seconds" in a good vacuum (because, contrary to common misperception, rocket engines actually work best in a pure vacuum -- when the thrust exhaust isn't slowed down by the surrounding air!).
The Smithsonian data sheet also neatly listed the "fueled" and "empty weight" of each Jupiter-C stage (below).

Plugging these numbers into the Rocket Equation, and averaging the atmospheric and vacuum ISP efficiencies of the upper stages together (as the Jupiter-C rose out of the atmosphere that night, and the later stage ignitions became more efficient ...), gave us the maximum theoretical "by the book" velocity those three upper stages could have imparted to Explorer I at "orbit injection."

dV = -32.2 X 228 X (662lb/1380lb) = 3520 feet per sec

But--
We already knew that this velocity, added to the maximum velocity imparted by the liquid-fueled first stage (at "staging"), was the "nominal satellite injection velocity" -- what was required to place Explorer I into its planned orbit of about "220 by 1000 miles" (red line, below).
Since the actual orbital parameters (according to George Ludwig's figures) were "223 by 1592 ..." -- almost 600 miles higher at apogee than "nominal" (the blue line, below) -- what we really needed was a measure of how much additional velocity that approximately 600-mile increase in apogee represented, to put Explorer I into an orbit that much higher (and more elliptical) than originally targeted ....

There's a well-known "rule of thumb" in rocket science -- that, for "every additional foot per second of injection velocity" at perigee (the low point of the orbit), a spacecraft gains "about a mile of additional altitude at apogee" (the highest orbital point).
Using this approximation, Explorer I had gained something like "an additional ~600 feet per second" ....
Was this covered by the normal variations for solid rocket performance of that generation?
Inverting our Rocket Equation -- and solving for the additional ISP required of those solids, to match that now known additional performance -- produced the following result:

Additional required velocity = ~ 600 feet per second
3520 + 600 = 4120 total feet per second for Explorer I
Increase in Explorer I injection performance = 4120/3520 = 1.17

Equivalent “improvement” in 2nd, 3rd and 4th stage propellant ISPs =
1.17 X 228 = ~ 267 secs!

This amounted to almost a twenty percent performance increase -- in ALL the upper stage solid ISPs -- over the same solid-fueled rockets' measured performance in previous JPL applications!
The idea that one of the 15 solids in those upper stages might exhibit this degree of major variation, was barely plausible; that ALL of them TOGETHER (required to produce the total delta velocity increase) had done so that night, was simply impossible ... by any known chemistry and physics.
"Normal physics" also says you "can't get something for nothing." Yet, somehow, by this simple calculation, Explorer I DID exactly that--
Acquiring six hundred extra miles of "something" ... from absolutely nothing.
Just how the hell did JPL and von Braun manage to accomplish that!?


* * *

It would have been at this point -- for anyone who actually DID this simple set of calculations, in 1958 -- that they HAD to have realized they had a major discovery on their hands ... and ... a major problem.
The problem was:
No "small variations" -- a few percent, at best -- of the Jupiter-C's individual solid rockets in the vehicle's upper stages -- from "grain size, packing density, mixture variations, etc., etc." -- could possibly account for a ~20% INCREASE in overall delta V at burnout ... resulting in almost 600 additional feet per second ... and 600 additional vertical miles ... of "super performance" for America's first satellite!
So, what was left ...?
That, serendipitously, Explorer I had made--

A profound and fundamental scientific breakthrough ... regarding how objects really gravitationally orbit one another!

And that, as a result, almost 300 years of Newton's long-accepted "Law of Universal Gravitation" was, somehow, wrong ... as might be his equally unquestioned "Three Laws of Motion" ... and potentially (shudder ...), even Einstein's "General Theory of Relativity" ....
Whatever the ultimate cause -- this was NOT going to be any "small" Scientific Revolution.
And, that was precisely “the Problem” ….
And the solution to "the Problem" -- as we can now demonstrate -- was a political decision, made by "someone" that night, to instigate an immediate cover-up of this entire, stunning US space discovery ... which obviously, if openly verified, would have been--
Tthe most important result of the entire space program!
A cover-up which (according to the evidence)--
Is still on-going.
For, while Ludwig and Van Allen -- both eminent physicists, both intimately familiar with the Explorer Program (because they were designing all its intricate on-orbit measuring instruments!) -- freely published the intended orbital parameters of Explorer I we've just cited, and even compared them to the higher, enlarged orbit ... neither of them seemed to realize (and Ludwig STILL doesn't ...) just what those numbers had to represent (unless, of course, they were ultimately "persuaded" to remain "ignorant" ...).
If either physicist, for a moment, had sat down and actually gone through the "rocket calculations" we just have, both would have instantly realized that to expect that type of "anomalous super performance" -- from EVERY one of the 15 solid-fueled JPL rockets atop von Braun's modified Redstone--
Was impossible.
Yet, neither of these key physicists (nor, any other physicists, astronomers, rocket engineers, members of the scientific press, etc., etc.) -- over these last fifty years -- has apparently EVER done this simple calculation ... or stopped to consider (if they have), even for a moment, the extraordinary alternative to the inevitable assumption "it must have been the rockets ...."
That, it might have been, instead--
The Physics!

* * *

One blatantly obvious initial reason that Van Allen and Ludwig DIDN'T do this calculation that same night, HAD to have been "Wernher von Braun."
After all, this was "Wernher's baby!"; if HE didn't know what made his rocket tick ... what might account for its "dazzling increased delta V" ... who would?!
That von Braun was immediately prepared to be 'less than candid" about this remarkable Jupiter-C "over performance" (initially, by simply not discussing it ...) -- to, in every way, downplay the ultimate significance of what had really happened to Explorer I that night -- is apparent in his immediate actions at the National Academy press conference that morning--
With the entire world press corps gathered, and hanging on his every word ... he said nothing!
And, he continued to say nothing ... to his death.
However, giving him the benefit of the doubt ... for "great uncertainties" in the numbers that first roller coaster morning, when "the cold light of day dawned …" von Braun had to have found time to do those crucial calculations. And he HAD to have realized then that nothing involving the JPL solid upper stages could have resulted in that amount of "extraordinary, additional performance" ....
Yet, three months later -- writing in that same Des Moines Sunday Register article, in April 1958 -- von Braun would simply say:


"… there’d been just a slight error in our quick estimate of the satellite’s initial speed and period of revolution [emphasis added] …."

"Slight error" ....
Six hundred additional feet per second (that's just over "four hundred miles per hour ..."); and ... six hundred miles higher as a direct result, at apogee ....
Yet, all from ... NOWHERE.
Where were the "triumphant official ABMA press releases" ... the proud "White House announcements" (at the height of the Cold War and this sudden "space race" with the Soviets) ... and then, the ultimate "solemn ceremony" in Stockholm ... celebrating such an extraordinary scientific breakthrough in "Newton Laws" by the United States -- the first ... in almost three centuries!?
The proof that von Braun knew that this wasn't just "the result of his own rocket" -- that, in fact, this was something BIG ... something potentially "extraordinary" -- comes from von Braun himself:
Immediately following the baffling events surrounding the launch of Explorer I, von Braun began quietly writing and sending out a series of clandestine letters all over the world -- to a very select group of "extraordinary physicists" ... but deliberately, NOT to any associated with the Explorer program (like Van Allen!). In this correspondence, he is clearly, unquestionably, looking for “an alternative physics” -- that could eventually explain what really happened to Explorer I.
Not exactly the actions of "just a rocket guy" -- complacently satisfied with his own vehicle's performance!
One fascinating von Braun exchange involved fellow German countryman, theorist Burkhard Heim (below).
Another -- if anything, even more indicative of von Braun's real thinking, in his persistent secret efforts to understand the apparent “new gravitational physics” that (he obviously now believed ...) had, somehow, radically altered Explorer I's orbit after launch -- involved the even more remarkable, anomalous gravitational discoveries of a future Noble Laureate, Dr. Maurice Allais.
But first -- to Heim's theoretical relevance to von Braun's "problem" ....


Heim (who had worked at the world-famous "Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics," in Goettingen, Germany, after the War), had rocked the physics and space communities just a few years earlier, by presenting at the 1952 and 1954 sessions of the "International Astronautical Federation (IAF) Congress" historic scientific papers, outlining the first theoretical proposal for "fuel-less field propulsion technology“ -- a means of sending true space vehicles to other planets, without the profound "limitations of rockets" ....
Because his radical proposal was backed by some extremely innovative (if highly complex) "unified field equations," created by a bona fide physicist attached to such a prestigious German scientific institution, Heim immediately became something of an international celebrity. Here was a "scientific somebody" in the 20th century, directly suggesting that Newton's long-inviolate Third Law of Motion "... for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction" -- which lies at the heart of every rocket-based propulsion system -- might, in fact, be completely circumvented by a new 20th Century "space-time field technology"--
Which could itself move through space -- yet, expel NO "reaction mass" ... by electromagnetically "hooking into the very fabric of 'space-time'" itself!
Heim worked on his theories in close collaboration with quantum theory physicist and pioneer Pascual Jordan (himself a close associate of Nobel Laureates, Max Born and Werner Heisenberg. Jordan also is known as the developer of "the non-associative Jordan Algebras"). Significantly, Heim was seeking in this collaboration to carry out key physical experiments with Jordan ... in gravitation -- because, even before the War, the latter had turned his attention from "quantum mechanics" to "cosmology" ... the origin and evolution of the largest structures in the Universe ... where gravity reigns supreme ....
But the joint projects Heim proposed, to test his own far-reaching "gravitational theories," never materialized -- as the necessary government funding in post-War West Germany in the 1950's (except for a small grant from the aerospace firm, Messerschmitt-Belkow-Blohm) was apparently "not available."
The title of one of Heim's later papers (1976) -- "Basic Thoughts on a Unified Field Theory of Matter and Gravity" -- specifically reveals his fundamental and continuing interest in alternative gravity research, some 20 years after he first burst upon the world stage ... and the obvious reason for von Braun's provocative (and well-documented) "sudden interest in Heim" in 1958 ... right after Explorer I!
For, according to the "Research Group -- Heim Theory" -- a collection of international scientists currently collaborating on publishing and discussing Heim's "unified field" work, in English (following Heim's death, in 2001) -- Wernher von Braun's telling interest -- remember, a "rocket guy" -- centered specifically on Heim's radical ideas re "... spacecraft field propulsion and orbital dynamics."
According to the Research Group:

"... in a letter to Heim, Wernher von Braun enquired about progress in the [German] development of such a field propulsion system since otherwise he could not accept responsibility for the enormous cost of the [Apollo] moon-landing project. Heim [because of the lack of West German government funding to develop the technology] answered in the negative [emphasis added] ...."

From this documented correspondence, it should be blatantly apparent that Wernher von Braun -- thought by the press and public to be merely a "steely-eyed missile man" -- was actually probing far beyond ... searching avidly for an "alternate gravitational solution" to his major Explorer I problem, one which did NOT involve "trivial rocket explanations."
Obviously, at some point after that memorable January night, von Braun had carried out the same calculations we just did ... and had come to the same conclusion:
Namely, that-
"Something" was radically wrong with all existing gravitational theories ... used (quite unsuccessfully, it turned out ...) to attempt to predict the orbit of Explorer I.
In other words, Von Braun -- contrary to his public "caviler dismissals" of Explorer I's anomalous behavior (the statements in the Sunday Register ...) -- privately, was clearly ... secretly ... bent on finding "a serious, workable alternative to Newton and Einstein ...!"
As his independently confirmed private correspondence with Burkhard Heim, now unquestionably confirms.
Von Braun's letters to and from Maurice Allais (below) are even more revealing -- in terms of the alternative gravitational ideas von Braun (backed by personal experience, remember ...) was obviously willing to entertain.


Allais, a French economist by training (he would go on to win the Noble Prize for Economics, in 1988) was also an accomplished physicist -- publishing copious experiments through the French Academy of Sciences [and winning fourteen physics prizes -- including, the Gold Medal of the National Center for Scientific Research (C.N.R.S.), the most distinguished honour in French Science, from the 1930's through the 1980's].
The work that obviously brought Allais to von Braun's attention was the French physicist's startling observation of "... highly anomalous pendulum motions, made during a solar eclipse over Paris in 1954 ...." (and repeated, during another solar eclipse, also over France, in 1959).
Allais noted that the normal, progressive "Foucault motion" (due to the rotation of the Earth) of his laboratory's uniquely-designed "paraconical pendulum," during the eclipse, suddenly reversed ... and literally "ran backwards" (with the Earth's rotation!) ... until mid-eclipse, when the pendulum motion reversed again ... rapidly resuming its normal rate and direction of angular rotation (below) ....
This set of completely inexplicable (under any current theory ...) solar eclipse observations has since been termed "the Allais Effect."



Here (below) is a trace of Allais' actual, remarkable 1954 pendulum observations -- made during the eclipse.
The graph shows (red line) the normal, progressive angular trend (the downward slope) of the pendulum's apparent rotation, mirroring the Earth's actual opposite motion.
This trend is suddenly interrupted by an upward deflection in the graph -- at the precise beginning of the eclipse (left green line) -- representative of the complete reversal (backwards rotation) of the pendulum's (normal) forward angular motion!
This hour-long "pendulum anomaly" is then followed (near mid-eclipse -- center green line) by a rapid resumption of the normal downward trend ... once again, the normal "mirrored reflection" of the Earth's inertial spin ....


Needless to say (but, we'll say it anyway ...), this astonishing behavior was completely unpredicted ("unmodeled" is the term ...) by either Newton or Einstein -- in terms of the "normal" inertial motions of a pendulum freely swinging under gravity ....
Or, to quote Allais directly:

"... indeed, the effects of the eclipse are spectacular and cannot be explained in the framework of currently accepted [gravitational or inertial] theories ...
"Over many centuries, no phenomenon had ever before been exhibited, whose observed values were from twenty to a hundred million times greater than the values obtained by [prior theoretical] calculation [emphasis in the original] ...."

In a very real sense, Allais' stunning eclipse observations were a remarkable "ground-based version" of von Braun's equally aberrant Explorer I behavior in space; in von Braun's growing perception, the two phenomenon could only be caused by the same gravitational anomaly -- ergo, his obvious interest in Allais' continuing experiments.
Documentation of this fascinating von Braun/Allais correspondence comes from two independent sources: Professor Allais himself ... and the current, official website of the NASA-Marshall Spaceflight Center -- whose first Director was ... Wernher von Braun.
Allais, writing in 1999, in "a memoir for NASA" -- flatly stated:

"... with regard to the validity of my experiments, it seems best to reproduce here the testimony of General Paul Bergeron, ex-president of the Committee for Scientific Activities for National Defense, in his letter of May 1959 to Werner von Braun [emphasis added] ...."

In that same year -- 1999 -- a summary of Allais's provocative experiments was posted on the NASA-Marshall website, in anticipation of a possible repetition of Allais' original observations -- to be carried out during an August, 1999 total solar eclipse about to sweep over Europe in a geometry very similar to Allais' 1954 event.
Remarkably, the NASA-Marshall website also cited von Braun's "interest" in professor Allais' experiments ... and even made mention (though, quite obliquely ...) of "why" he took some interest ....

"... rocket pioneer, Wernher von Braun, NASA/Marshall's first director, first became interested in Allais' experiments in 1958, when early investigations began to look at predicting satellite trajectories in orbital mechanics [emphasis added] ...."

The total understatement of "the Problem" by NASA, in 1999, and the equally apparent "downplaying" of von Braun's much deeper personal involvement with Allais (as you shall see ...) -- even after half a century -- is telling ....
For, the evidence of how just how seriously von Braun took Allais' work is amply revealed by what the rocket expert publicly did next:
In 1959, following the May letter from General Bergeron (cited by Allais, above) -- von Braun apparently personally arranged for the French physicist to publish a lengthy, three-part series on his revolutionary pendulum experiments in a leading US aerospace journal (and, for the first time in English -- as Allias' published experiments had previously been available only in French ...):
The journal was "Aero/Space Engineering" (below).


Allais' series did not "beat around the bush," but directly confronted the startling possibility that his lengthy series of meticulous pendulum observations, consisting of literally thousands of hours of detailed repetitions -- which included the extraordinary, totally unexpected 2 hours and 34 minutes of the amazing events during the '54 eclipse -- revealed fatal flaws in the previously "sacrosanct" laws of Newton and Einstein ....
The same "fatal flaws" first experienced by von Braun, in space ... in the bizarre orbital behavior of Explorer I, the night of January 31, 1958.
In hindsight, von Braun seems to have hoped that, by sponsoring open US publication of Allais' revolutionary data in a major US space engineering publication, the resulting "discussion and debate" might spur a timely "innovative engineering solution" ... one that he himself could ultimately then use to quietly solve "the secret Explorer problem"
For, there was still no open acknowledgment of the existence of the "Explorer anomaly" itself ... either, within the aerospace community, or to the public. Von Braun's idea may have been that, by exposing other rocket engineers and scientists to Allais' astonishing, compelling experimental contradictions to existing gravitational theory ... someone in that community "might just hit on a solution" ....
At least, that's the best I can come up with at the moment, to explain -- from a remove of over 50 years -- von Braun's clearly contradictory efforts in this time period -- his continuing decision (agreement?) to hide the "ultimate space discovery" from the rest of the world ... but, simultaneously, to sponsor open publication and discussion of the potentially revolutionary physics that seemed to lie at the root of "the Explorer problem!"
For ... "the Problem" was only getting worse.
In the slightly more than a year and a half that had elapsed -- between the first appearance of the "Explorer anomaly," January 31, 1958, and the US publication of the first section of Allais' unique, three-part experimental examination of the real nature of gravity, in September, 1959 -- von Braun had successfully orbited two additional Explorer satellites ... and the US Navy had orbited three (of its planned eleven ...) Vanguards.
And, all of them ... exhibited the same type of "baffling orbital anomalies" as Explorer I!

* * *

Von Braun's "worst fears" -- that Explorer I was NOT a fluke -- were totally confirmed less than two months later ... with the successful orbiting of Explorer III.
Launched March 26, 1958, the satellite was planned for a trajectory essentially identical to Explorer I's original intended orbit: 220 by 1000 miles. However, to the chagrin of von Braun and his launch team, the new spacecraft also wound up in a close repeat of Explorer I's peculiarly extended flight path!
And, again, no one (except von Braun ...) seemed to have a clue as to what was really going on ....


Explorer III 's final orbital parameters were -- "125 miles by 1750 miles ... with a period of 115.7 minutes" -- an orbit more elliptical (and even higher) than Explorer I's ... but of almost exactly the same duration!
There was NO WAY this could be dismissed as simply another "over performance" by the Jupiter-C (and yet, of course, according to the "experts," that's all it could be ...)!
With the launch of Explorer IV four months after that -- July 26, 1958 -- "the anomaly" was solid:
Explorer IV's final orbit was "163 miles by 1373 miles ..." compared to the, again, intended "220 by 1000." At first glance, this does NOT look like any kind of confirmation ... until the fact that Explorer IV was carrying twice the payload of scientific instruments, compared to the previous spacecraft, was factored in ....
Then, the "peculiar physics" matched once again -- perfectly.
As previously noted, in this same time frame -- March 17, 1958 to September 12, 1959 -- the US Navy (finally) succeeded in placing three Vanguard satellites of its own in space.
All of them ... also reached "higher and more elliptical orbits" than originally planned -- so high and so elliptical, that they now represent the three oldest man-made objects still orbiting the Earth ... half a century after they were sent aloft; each still with a remaining life span (before they someday, finally, dip low enough to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere ...)--
Of "several hundred years" ....
And yet, despite all this ... "the secret" held.
No one in the press, writing about any of these historic early launches, even seemed to suspect that "something was seriously wrong" (or, if they did, they certainly didn't write about it ...). They didn't seem to even notice that all these early orbits were "significantly higher" than originally planned, at altitudes (as anyone can calculate ...) the rockets themselves weren't even capable of reaching!
But, since von Braun -- the hero of the hour -- was saying nothing ... it had to be "the rockets," right? They were simply "more efficient" than originally designed (rah ... rah for "good ol' American technology." Take that, you commies ...).
After all, who wanted to argue with "the man?!"


Von Braun's cover-up -- and simultaneously quiet (if not quietly desperate) quest ... for an "alternative physics" to ultimately fix the problem ... was working--
Certainly, "the cover-up" part .....

* * *

At this point, if there are still skeptics remaining out there (there always are ...) -- who simply don't (or won't) believe us -- look carefully at von Braun!
Clearly, von Braun's aggressive world-wide search for a workable physics "work around" to this major (if carefully hidden ...) overarching problem, was not something he was doing "just out of idle curiosity"; he, of all people, obviously realized that if this apparent "breakdown" of Newtonian mechanics in satellite dynamics was not ultimately understood -- and then somehow controlled -- the impossibility of placing future satellites in any kind of planned orbits would rapidly spell "the End" to the entire space program!
If spacecraft couldn't be launched on precisely predictable trajectories, then, scientific missions based on known satellite orbits (and thus, calculable Earth geometries), couldn't be successfully carried out; carefully designed military reconnaissance fly-overs of intended targets (like, suspected missile bases in the Soviet Union ...) couldn't be pre-planned (a Cold War concept that the Pentagon was secretly counting on, even then ...); and missions -- unmanned or manned -- to the Moon ... or to the other planets (such as Mars -- von Braun's personal favorite ...)--
Forget it!


So, it was imperative that someone -- von Braun! -- truly "figure it out" ... and soon.
For mission planners, on both sides of the Iron Curtain (after the successful launch of Explorer I), had decided to raise the stakes ... and set their eyes on the Moon as the next prize in this new geopolitical game.
William Pickering, Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) -- which, you might remember, had designed both Explorer I and its three solid-fueled upper rocket stages -- was at the forefront of those planners on the US side who now had their sights set on places "far beyond low-Earth orbit ...”; Pickering, in the immediate aftermath of Sputnik, had strenuously argued for a major US effort to “… send an American spacecraft to the Moon at the earliest possible opportunity ...."
In the Pentagon, just one month after Explorer I was launched, ARPA (the "Advanced Research Projects Agency") was hurriedly formed by President Eisenhower, as a means of coordinating the various military services response to the new Soviet space challenge (two years later, the new civilian space agency, NASA -- also formed by Eisenhower in the summer of '58 -- would assume control of all of ARPA's "non-military" space missions).
Within a month of this "military R&D agency's" formation, taking its lead directly from Pickering's earlier proposal ARPA dramatically announced -- on March 27, 1958 (just one day after von Braun successfully orbited Explorer III) -- that it was looking to "shoot the Moon," with a "quick and dirty" program called "Pioneer" ... as a way of finally upstaging the Russians and taking back "some of the political momentum" in the "space race."
That was the obvious politial intent.
In the actual DOD statement, the more diplomatic language read "... to determine our capability of exploring space in the vicinity of the moon and to obtain useful data concerning the moon."
Unfortunately, from August 1958 through December of that year, there were four straight failures in this hurriedly- put-together, first US "Lunar Program."
And then, one day after New Year's Day, January 1959 ... came another Soviet surprise:
"The First Soviet Cosmic Rocket" (later renamed Luna-I ...) was launched by the Soviets toward the Moon , on an upgraded "R-7 intercontinental rocket" -- placing an ~800-pound unmanned Russian probe on an impact trajectory designed, for the first time, to contact the surface of another world ....
Given the size of the Soviet "Block-E" upper stage atop its R-7 launcher (below - top), compared to the tiny American Pioneer lunar spacecraft (below - bottom), and Block E's sheer mass (which provided ample ability to carry both the required guidance system and the fuel for several mid-course corrections en route to the Moon ...), Luna I should have easily impacted "within 60 to 120 miles of its intended aiming point ...."


Instead--
Thirty four hours after launch, the Soviet's first unmanned lunar probe successfully crossed the Moon's orbit ... but, ahead of the Moon ... by some "3700 miles ..." (below), before eventually moving into a ~ year-long, recurring solar orbit: the first manmade object of the "space age" to totally escape from Earth ... renamed "Mechta" -- Dream.

Major question: why, with all that mass and technology going for them ... did the Russians miss!
Von Braun, looking at their mission from the outside (since, it was damn certain the Soviet's weren't calling him with daily updates!), could only logically conclude one thing:
That, whatever "non-Newtonian" forces were acting on his (and the Navy's Vanguard) spacecraft in Earth orbit, seemed now also to be acting on the Soviets as well! This was the first independent confirmation of this possibility, as in Earth orbit the Soviets could claim (and had) that any orbit they achieved was the one that "they'd intended" ....
Missing the Moon ... by more than its own diameter (2160 miles) ... and, with the Soviet's sophisticated space navigation technology, was pretty dramatic evidence that the mysterious "Force" (non-Newtonian gravity) demonstrably operating on von Braun's spacecraft ... had also been operating on the Soviet's, all along!
And ... that it extended into space at least to the distance of the Moon ....
What was also obvious was the fact that, they too, seemed totally incapable of doing anything about it!
Unfortunately, this crucial insight still didn't provide von Braun with any practical assistance in compensating for these maddening "non-Newtonian" celestial mechanics in his own program ....
For, two months later, when it came von Braun's turn to try again -- with another US Moon-bound mission (like Explorer I, built by JPL), "Pioneer 4" -- the JPL/von Braun spacecraft missed the Moon by 37,000 miles (below)--
Ten times the Russian's error!

Pioneer 4 Trajectory


And still, the US press suspected nothing.
"Space travel" in these early, heady days, was still so new, so filled with all sorts of "known unknowns" (to borrow a notorious line from later Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld ...) that the press covering these early missions was essentially "just reading press releases." They were certainly NOT doing any original, substantative reporting on ... let alone real, in-depth, original investigations of, "government space institutions" ....
If the US Army, the Navy, ARPA ... eventually, NASA itself ... were all excusing these early mission failures and anomalies as just typical "equipment problems," or, "unexpected thrust," or, "guidance difficulties," etc., etc. -- who in the press corps, in those early years, knew enough about this totally new profession -- literally, "rocket science!" -- to effectively argue with a "giant" like von Braun?!
And -- who would want to try!?
So, the cover-up rolled on ....
Ten months later, Von Braun had to have experienced another major shock when, on September 12, 1959, the Soviets launched their second unmanned "Cosmic Rocket" to the Moon ....


And this time ... they didn't miss.
What had the Soviets learned in those "intervening months," that von Braun was still attempting to figure out -- regarding the "non-Newtonian" forces now demonstrably acting on all spacecraft -- whether they were in low Earth orbit ... or, headed for the Moon!?
And, how had they been able to "figure it out" -- allowing their second lunar attempt to successfully crash land on the lunar surface (complete with Soviet flag and Communist Party pennants) ... once again, ahead of the Americans?
Inquiring minds ....

* * *

And yet, just nine years later ... on December 24, 1968 ... three American Apollo astronauts -- with almost surgical precision -- would be successfully inserted into lunar orbit via Earth-based, computer-driven orbital calculations ... carried out "in Houston." They would make ten historic circuits of the Moon that Christmas Eve ... returning live television from their lunar orbit to an awe-inspired world ... complete with an eerie and unique reading of Genesis ... before "returning safely to the Earth" -- exactly as John Kennedy envisioned ....


How did NASA do it?!
How -- in the face of the baffling "non-Newtonian gravitational anomaly" discovered by von Braun only ten years earlier, which had made it impossible for the US to not only predict future orbits of Earth satellites, but also to successfully aim any spacecraft at the Moon ... and certainly, to successfully place one in lunar orbit -- did the United States actually carry out ... just nine years after the Russians hit the Moon with Luna 2--
Apollo 8?!
More inquiring minds really want to know ....
Just eight years earlier ... in 1960 ... von Braun was made head of NASA's massive rocket development program, to ultimately design the monster "moon rocket" -- the 363-foot tall, 3300-ton Saturn 5 (above and below) -- that would one day send Americans triumphantly to the surface of the Moon ....


In addition--
Von Braun was one of the key NASA personnel -- as first Director of NASA's "Marshall Space Flight Center" -- tasked with finding the best way to use this massive vehicle he was designing "to carry out the mission" ... even before Kennedy's historic commitment to "Apollo," in 1961.
Yet, back in 1960, von Braun secretly also knew he couldn't really "complete that mission" ... because of the continuing "non-Newtonian dynamics" problem!
The immediate task at hand for the rest of NASA (which didn't know they had a problem ...) was determining exactly "how" such a massive launch vehicle could best be utilized in the envisioned "Apollo Program" -- in support of a "direct ascent" mode (go from Earth, land directly on the Moon, then return); in an "Earth orbit rendezvous" mode (rendezvous various elements of the Apollo Expedition in Earth orbit first, before heading for the Moon and then returning); or, in a "lunar orbit rendezvous" mode (send two Apollo craft -- on one rocket -- to the Moon ... splitting them apart in lunar orbit for a separate landing by one of them, before rendezvousing back in lunar orbit with the first ... and then returning safely to the Earth - below).


The last concept was nicknamed "LOR" ... vigorously championed by a young engineer from NASA-Langley, John Houbolt . But, despite LOR's clear engineering and economic advantages in making it feasible to reach the Moon before the President's 10-year deadline (by NOT attempting to build and land a spacecraft on the Moon weighing close to a hundred tons, and standing almost 70 feet high - below!), Houbolt kept running into "... mysterious brick walls" -- in his years-long, virtually "one man crusade" to convince NASA senior management that this was the ONLY way that Apollo could succeed.


Houbolt found, to his puzzlement and increasing professional frustration that, despite making "eminent engineering sense to more and more NASA managers and engineers ..." (when he got a chance to brief them on the full details in person ...), LOR stubbornly remained "for some reason" (that no one would ever come right out and tell him ...) the least favored of all of these early lunar landing ideas ... across the Agency.
Based on what we have documented here, at least one man in NASA knew that "reason"....
Von Braun, obviously (because of the still-concealed "non-Newtonian dynamics" situation ...) was adamant that the only hope of achieving any Apollo Landing was "direct ascent."
That meant that your intended "rendezvous target" was the entire Moon ... as opposed to (in LOR) "an infinitesimal, artificial spacecraft ... floating somewhere in the dark ... in lunar orbit." This conviction was, undoubtedly, based on von Braun's assessment that, if the Russians had (somehow!) made it to the lunar surface with a direct ascent trajectory for their unmanned Luna-2 ... he could too!
With "direct ascent," with "a big enough rocket and enough fuel ..." you could employ a "brute force technique" to get to the surface of the Moon -- overwhelming the unpredictable orbital dynamics of whatever gravitational anomalies were interfering with the spacecraft trajectories enroute ... by using repeated rocket burns (and a lot of fuel ...) to constantly correct your course ... until you safely landed on the Moon!
But that required a truly massive rocket ... much bigger even than the Saturn 5 ....
This, in our opinion, is why von Braun was so fixated on "direct ascent" from the beginning: a single, ultra-massive rocket (that he eventually, fittingly called Nova - see below) -- designed to send an equally massive lunar landing craft directly to the lunar surface from the Earth ... carrying sufficient fuel to ultimately counteract any "non-Newtonian uncertainties" that it encountered on the way there ... and ... in returning home.


It was the only Apollo strategy -- based on what von Braun knew about the real orbital dynamics of cis-lunar space in 1960 -- which had even a slim chance of actually working!
Later, because of the sheer size of the Nova fuel margins, von Braun reluctantly expanded his "direct ascent" lunar mission concept to include "Earth Orbit Rendezvous" (EOR); the "brute force" method would also work in Earth orbit -- ultimately allowing two (or more) spacecraft to come together -- rendezvous -- and thus, a greater mission flexibility in assembling the right spacecraft components for Apollo ... before heading for the Moon.
And, if anything went wrong -- if rendezvous was NOT achievable (because of the continuing "non-Newtionian dynamics problem ...") -- the astronauts, with EOR, were still "only a couple hundred miles above the Earth" ... where, within hours, they could easily come home ....
NOT possible with LOR--
Where the astronauts could become literally "stranded" ... in a spacecraft not capable of carrying enough fuel to overcome the even more uncertain "non-Newtonian forces" -- operating 240,000 miles from Earth ... in lunar orbit.
This, from our analysis, was von Braun's real (though never stated ...) reason for totally rejecting LOR ... until, that is, the summer of 1962 ....
Then -- to the amazement of the entire aerospace community, including (especially!) his own Marshall engineering team (who were definitely NOT for LOR) -- von Braun abruptly reversed his previous position on "how best to accomplish Kennedy's grand vision," and announced at a major June, 1962 NASA meeting, that he had "changed his mind," and was now "backing lunar orbit rendezvous unconditionally ...."
This was von Braun's public explanation:

"... we at the Marshall Space Flight Center readily admit that when first exposed to the proposal of the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous Mode we were a bit skeptical—particularly of the aspect of having the astronauts execute a complicated rendezvous maneuver at a distance of 240,000 miles from the earth where any rescue possibility appeared remote. In the meantime, however, we have spent a great deal of time and effort studying the four modes [Earth-orbit rendezvous, LOR, and two Direct Ascent modes, one involving the Nova and the other a Saturn C—5], and we have come to the conclusion that this particular disadvantage [low probability of successful astronaut rescue in lunar orbit] is far outweighed by [LOR's] advantages [emphasis added] ...."

Von Braun's sudden, simply inexplicable (to most NASA veterans ...) high profile "LOR reversal" ... could only mean one thing:
That -- in this crucial time frame -- "something" suddenly had changed ... in the whole (still classified) "non-Newtonian dynamics" situation!
Curiously, just over a month before this major NASA meeting, on April 26, 1962 -- out of all the previous failed attempts -- a US unmanned spacecraft, Ranger 4, finally, successfully, impacted the surface of the Moon!
Was von Braun's sudden, dramatic "turn around decision" regarding LOR because, the "non-Newtonian dynamics problem" -- still standing firmly in the way of all reliable space rendezvous -- had finally, quietly, been solved?; had Ranger 4 been merely the final, visible demonstration of this in-space celestial-mechanics resolution (with the publicly-presented aspects of the mission merely a convenient “cover”)?!
The more I thought about it (and my own recollections from the early 60's, of the extremely troubled history of the entire "Ranger Program" from this period -- where, successive spacecraft in the series "just kept failing," and there were even eruptions in Congress over "gross NASA mismanagement" of the laboratory in charge, coming after two equally-scathing "high-level" NASA Headquarters reviews of JPL's Ranger management performance) -- the more I began to wonder ....
Could the entire Ranger Program have been just a "cover," all along ... a test-bed (complete with "scientific instruments" and even "principal investigators" from various universities ...), but for the real purpose of flying -- in space -- various deep space mission profiles ... in repeated empirical attempts to understand, and then ultimately fix, "the Problem?"
Was this the real objective of Ranger from its inception: to develop practical "non-Newtonian, celestial-mechanics equations" ... that could successfully correct for the "non-Newtonian anomaly" ... in future NASA missions?!
Was this how NASA learned -- literally by "trial and error" (LOTS of error ...) -- how to so precisely navigate spacecraft in Earth orbit and deep space ... despite the continuing "non-Newtonian Problem?!"


Like a flash bulb going off, I suddenly realized that this specific NASA laboratory, once even under Congressional investigation for all the "gross irregularities" discovered in the Ranger Program, which had designed ... and built ... and launched Ranger 4 -- the first unmanned NASA spacecraft to finally, navigationally, make it to the surface of another planet -- was none other than the same laboratory (even before it was in NASA ...) whose engineers had also designed and built ... Explorer I--
Bill Pickering's ... Jet Propulsion Laboratory!
And suddenly, it all fit ....
There was even a statement in an official NASA history of the Ranger Program that correlated exactly with our own assessment:

“… as the [Ranger] project got underway, the [supposedly scientific] priorities established at JPL revealed the essential purpose of all five Ranger flights to be the development of 'basic elements of spacecraft technology required for lunar and planetary missions' [emphasis added] ...."

Which would have definitely included “… develop viable interplanetary navigation techniques ….”
JPL had to have known about the "Explorer I anomaly" – and, from the beginning!; it had to have been aggressively working on its own solution (with von Braun?) ... since that January night, in 1958!
Who would have had better motivation to figure out and solve this overwhelming celestial navigation problem -- than the one laboratory whose director was intending from the beginning (according to Bill Pickering's official NASA biography ...) "to turn JPL into NASA's most important interplanetary laboratory ..."?


Which (by solving this "insolvable problem?" -- and learning to control a Physics which makes completely obsolete both Newton and Einstein!) ... it ultimately became!?
Suddenly, the much broader policy implications of NASA's consistent "kid gloves treatment" of JPL -- even during the Ranger fiasco -- especially, in terms of the "inexplicable influence" JPL has seemed (somehow) to exert over NASA's other programs (out of all proportion to its inherent size and actual institutional role ...) took on entirely new meanings ....
In this scenario ... without JPL, and its (obviously top-secret) successfully-developed (via Ranger ...?) interplanetary space navigation computer programs, no one else in NASA was going anywhere … unless JPL agreed.
And that could explain almost everything … regarding NASA’s 50-year-old history ... and actions.


In terms of Apollo, the crucial "last-minute switch" by von Braun -- from opposing to supporting LOR -- was clearly the single, key decision that ultimately allowed the entire Apollo Lunar Program to succeed.
Because, with NASA's official selection of LOR a few weeks later, as the means of actually landing on the Moon -- a separate, smaller spacecraft to take the astronauts down from lunar orbit to the surface ... and back up again -- the entire Apollo Program suddenly became "manageable": the individual Apollo components became far "lighter" (less massive ...); thus, they now required (comparatively speaking) a much smaller moon rocket to carry them ["only" the Saturn 5 -- as opposed to von Braun's vastly more robust (and far more expensive!) twelve million pound thrust Nova rocket].
Ultimately, because of all of this, the Apollo Program itself was carried out on a much shorter developmental time-frame than it would have followed otherwise -- which, in the end, was what enabled NASA not only to beat President Kennedy's visionary deadline ... but, to "beat the Russians to the Moon" while doing it!
Did Wernher von Braun -- with "a little help from his friends at JPL" -- make all this happen, by finally "figuring out" Explorer I's extraordinary, still-classified, "non-Newtonian discovery ... and problem" ... and, in 1962?
And, if so, how did they do it ... and in so doing, potentially give Humanity the keys to unlocking not only the entire solar system to future human exploration ....
But--
The secret of building real "anti-gravity spaceships" -- with which to ultimately colonize that solar system!
Finally.
A full half century after Explorer I ... is "someone" now doing exactly what we've just described:
Carrying out a real, "top-secret" Space Program ... perhaps, by now, far beyond this solar system ... and, with a fleet of "gravity-controlling spacecraft"--
All based on JPL's "secretly-derived New Physics"--
While the NASA that we see on television ... still pretends "it only plays with rockets?!"
And, no one in the American press corps is still suspecting ... anything!?
Stay tuned ....


-0-