#research stuff is so much. i’m the lead author on this massive project

[housecow]

Do you like have a job?

HAHA no, not really 😗 i’m doing research tho and have a stipend for that. im in the process of/have been applying to grad schools as well. also keeping busy and actively looking for jobs atm even though it sucks and i hate it 🤷‍♀️

i got a job offer that ended up not working out for silly reasons, but… one reason i’m working on curvage stuff is because i would LOVE to be a full time fatty… we’ll see though, i’m still moving forward in life regardless :))

[kmalexander]

My Reading List for 2020

It’s no secret 2020 has been a challenging year. While upon reflection, I found it to be surprisingly full, like many of us, I still spent the majority of my time at home. One benefit of our new socially-distant stay-at-home culture was the amount of reading I managed to accomplish. Just like previous years, I’ve compiled a list of the books I’ve read over the last three hundred and sixty-six days, and as always, I want to share them with everyone.

This year was hit-or-miss for me reading-wise. There were books I loved and many books I ended up loathing. I found books I know I will re-read and proselytize, but they were often mirrored by other books I hate-read. I also found myself reading a few histories for pleasure, not something I normally do, and I dipped into science fiction much more than in previous years. Audiobooks (

) used to be the mainstay of my daily commute, and this year they became the soundtrack to housework. Not a bad tradeoff. Oh, and as always, I beta-read a couple of great books, and I’m excited to see where those go in the future.

This list correlates with my Goodreads 2020 Reading Challenge, but it always includes a few extra since Goodreads doesn’t let me count beta reading, and I don’t list comics or short stories or poetry (new this year!) over there. Remember, this is all strictly reading for pleasure—I typically forgo listing any research/history books I’ve read for a project as I read those differently than I do fiction. This list is always enormous, so l skip reviews except for my favorites in each category. However, I’d invite you to follow me on Goodreads, where I occasionally leave other reviews.

New for this year: with a few exceptions, most links now go to IndieBound instead of Amazon—2020 has been rough on small businesses, and now more than ever, be sure to support your local bookstore. When possible, I am now linking to each author’s personal website—if you��re on the list and I didn’t find your website, please let me know about it. (I won’t link to social media, sorry.)

Novels & Novellas

Trail of Lightning (The Sixth World #1) by Rebecca Roanhorse

Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb #1) by Tamsyn Muir

City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments #1) by Cassandra Clare

Prosper’s Demon by K.J. Parker

The Crimson Campaign (The Powder Mage Trilogy #2)

by Brian McClellan

Jade War (Green Bone Saga #2) by Fonda Lee

Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries #2) by Martha Wells

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

by Patrick Radden Keefe

The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War

by Joanne B. Freeman

They Mostly Come Out at Night (Yarnsworld, #1) (Link goes to Amazon) by Benedict Patrick

Frank on a Gun-Boat by Harry Castlemon

A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay

On Basilisk Station (Honor Harrington, #1) by David Weber

The Reign of the Kingfisher

by T.J. Martinson

RADIO by J. Rushing

Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1) by William Gibson

The Fireman

by Joe Hill

The Cipher by Kathe Koja

The Mist by Stephen King

Control Point (Shadow Ops #1) by Myke Cole

Blood Standard (Isaiah Coleridge #1) by Laird Barron

City of Miracles (The Divine Cities #3) by Robert Jackson Bennett

The Iron Ship (The Gates of the World #1) by K.M. McKinley

Vita Nostra (Metamorphosis Cycle #1)

by Sergey & Marina Dyachenko

Thieftaker (The Thieftaker Chronicles #1) by D. B. Jackson

BETA READING (Literature) by REDACTED

Circe by Madeline Miller

Terrier (The Legend of Beka Cooper #1) by Tamora Pierce

Red Storm Rising 

…. again. by Tom Clancy

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

Clutter: An Untidy History by Jennifer Howard

The Half Killed by Quenby Olson

The Toll by Cherie Priest

Jurassic Park …again. by Michael Crichton

Seveneves  

by Neil Stephenson

Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones

In the Valley of the Sun by Andy Davidson

Foundation (Foundation #1) by Issac Asimov

Consider Phlebas (Culture #1)

by Iain M. Banks

BETA READING (Historical Horror) by REDACTED

The Worm and His Kings by Hailey Piper

Wake of Vultures by Lila Bowen

Metro 2033

by Dmitry Glukhovsky

Favorite Novel of 2020

In the Valley of the Sun

by Andy Davidson

This sun-baked vampire horror set in Texas unexpectedly became a new favorite. A surprisingly tense, character-focused narrative. Brutal. Anguished. Tormented. Bloody. Lyrical in ways that remind me of Cormac McCarthy without the weight. It’s not shy of confronting the cracked ugliness of humanity and finding the beauty between the fissures. Davidson is an incredible writer, and I immediately purchased his more recent novel after finishing In the Valley of the Sun. We need more horror like this.

Favorite Novel Runners-up of 2020

RADIO

by J. Rushing

A jazz-infused, opium-soaked, historical fantasy that explodes from the opening chapter and never relents until its final pages. A thoroughly fresh debut that’s unlike anything I’ve read before. Rushing brings his unique, well-researched world of 1920s Paris to life with a captivating voice. Don’t expect a saccharine overly-romantic version of Paris; this is a stained, broken, and bloody place—a welcome addition to modern fantasy literature. Jim’s a friend of mine, so be sure to read my interview with him.

City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

In recent years, the Divine Cities have become one of my favorite urban fantasy series, mostly for its fresh approach to the genre, atypical characters, and serious exploration of themes oft-ignored within mainstream fantasy. With City of Miracles, Bennett wrapped up the trilogy with a heartbreaking yet thoroughly satisfying ending. This story is a bit tighter and more focused than the previous two while wrapping up various loose ends rather nicely. It’s rare to find a final book in a series that resonates with me as much as City of Miracles did—it’s easily my favorite book in the trilogy.

 Honorable Mentions of 2020

I started doing Honorable Mentions in 2018 so I could highlight some of the other standout novels from my year of reading. Below you’ll find many more excellent books, I’ve listed them in order of reading.

Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse A unique southwestern approach to post-apocalyptic urban fantasy.

Prosper’s Demon by K. J. Parker A subversive fantasy with a fresh voice and plenty of twists. Nice quick read.

The Crimson Campaign by Brian McClellan An excellent sequel, one of the best examples of massive and complex military operations in fantasy.

The Field of Blood by Joanne B. Freeman Phenomenal nonfiction detailing the history of violence in Congress leading up to the U.S. Civil War.

The Cipher by Kathe Koja Deeply unsettling transgressive horror that felt far too familiar. Visceral and enthralling.

Blood Standard by Laird Barron A dark crime/P.I. novel with a heart and a sense of humor. I will be reading more in this series.

The Iron Ship by K.M. McKinley Thoroughly fresh fantasy—huge world, great characters, interesting plot, unique setting. Nearly made my runner up list.

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones Disturbing modern horror built around the experiences of first-nation people and the rural poor.

Clutter: An Untidy History by Jennifer Howard The history of stuff told from an all-too-relatable personal experience. Ended up buying a few copies for my family.

Seveneves by Neil Stephenson The moon is destroyed, and humanity only has a short amount of time to survive.

The Worm and His Kings by Hailey Piper Unique cosmic horror that explores gender identity, relationships, and poverty with a fresh perspective.

Short Stories

An Inhabitant of Carcosa …again. by Ambrose Bierce

And Now His Lordship is Laughing by Shiv Ramdas

How the Trick is Done by A.C. Wise

The Yellow Sign …again. by Robert W. Chambers

Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island by Nibedita Sen

Give the Family My Love by A. T. Greenblatt

The Dead, In Their Uncontrollable Power by Karen Osborne

The Masque of the Red Death …again. by Edgar Allen Poe

The Repairer of Reputations …again. by Robert W. Chambers

Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu

Seasons of Glass and Iron by Amal El-Mohtar

Tideline by Elizabeth Bear

Favorite Short Stories of 2020

The Dead, In Their Uncontrollable Power

by Karen Osborne

Generation ship! Class struggle! Religious ritual! Rebellion! Murder! Control! The complexity told within this genre-mashup was astounding. Such a rich world crafted in a way that feels effortless while maintaining a rich narrative was impressive. It’s no secret I’m drawn to stories that are hard to pigeon-hole into a specific genre, and that is fully represented here. Well worth a read.

 Favorite Short Story Runners-up

Paper Menagerie

by Ken Liu

This heartbreaking story about magical origami, cultural identity, and family was the first piece of fiction to win a Hugo, a Nebula, and a World Fantasy Award. And after reading it, it was easy to see why. Touching and reflective. A masterwork of speculative short fiction.

 Graphic Novels

Preacher: Book One by Garth Ennis (Author) & Steve Dillon (Artist)

Saga, Vol. 8 by Brian K. Vaughan (Author) & Fiona Staples (Artist)

Preacher: Book Two by Garth Ennis (Author) & Steve Dillon (Artist)

Once & Future, Vol. 1 by Kieron Gillen (Author), Tamra Bonvillain (Artist), & Dan Mora (Artist)

American Vampire, Vol. 2 by Scott Snyder (Author) & Rafael Albuquerque (Artist)

Paper Girls, Vol. 2 by Brian K. Vaughan (Author), Cliff Chiang (Artist)

Preacher: Book Three by Garth Ennis (Author) & Steve Dillon (Artist)

Die, Vol. 2 by Kieron Gillen (Author) & Stephanie Hans (Artist)

 Favorite Graphic Novel of 2020:

Preacher: Book One

by Garth Ennis (Author) & Steve Dillon (Artist)

I didn’t expect to like Preacher. I bounced off the series hard when I was younger, writing off Ennis as a “blasphemous shock jock” and nothing more. But revisiting it as a middle-aged adult revealed a different sort of comic. The offensive transgressive material is still there, but beneath it is something much more—a book with more heart and humanity than one would be able to judge by its surface and laced with merciless satire that still rings relevant twenty-five years later.

 Favorite Graphic Novel Runner-up of 2020:

Paper Girls, Volume 2

by Brian K. Vaughan (Author), Cliff Chiang (Artist)

Volume 1 nearly made my runner-up list last year. On the surface, it’s a time-jumping story about a group of friends caught in the middle of a future war. But beneath those sci-fi trappings, there is so much more here. It’s a book about being a kid and the expectations therein, complications with friendship, and the complexities of growing up. The characters are fantastic, and the story moves along at a clip, making it impossible to put the trade down. I’m ready for volume 3.

 Poems

So this year, I’m including some of the poems I read in 2020. I hinted at doing this last year. But this is really a trial run. In reality, I read more poems than listed below, but I didn’t do an outstanding job keeping track of them. Because this is the first time for poetry on this list, I’m going to skip picking a favorite. Hopefully, I’ll be back on track next year.

Small Kindnesses by Danusha Laméris

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendel Berry

Beneath the Sweater and the Skin by Jeannette Encinias

The Woods by Melanie Batista

I Confess by Alison Luterman

The Waste Land …again. by T. S. Eliot

Near a Raven by Mike Keith

Insha’Allah by Danusha Laméris

We Lived Happily During the War …again. by Ilya Kaminsky

Christmas Greetings to Felis …again by H. P. Lovecraft …again.

Passing Solstice by Ken Hada

Winter Solstice by Hilda Morley

Childhood Memory from the Old Victorian House on Warner by Beth Cato

Raw With Love by Charles Bukowski

So that’s my reading list for 2020. It’s been an interesting year in reading for me. As promised, we now have a poetry section, and I hope to expand that in the future. There are some great poems there, so be sure to explore them further. Despite my ups and downs, I’m overall quite happy with the books, stories, graphic novels, and poetry I read over the last twelve months. They were excellent distractions from the chaos of the year, and it was refreshing to lose myself in other worlds. 2020 will be behind us soon, and I am looking forward to the worlds I’ll discover in 2021.

How about you? What were the standout books, graphic novels, short stories, or poems you read this year? I’d love to hear about it. Leave a comment and let me know!

Are you looking for a good book? Want to see my reading lists from previous years? Check any of the links below and see what I was reading in the bygone days of old.

• 2013 • 2014 • 2015 • 2016 • 2017 • 2018 • 2019 •

Next year, why not join me? Goodreads does a reading challenge every year, and I am an active participant. First, follow me on Goodreads (leave me a review while you’re there), and once the New Year arrives, participate in the Goodreads Reading Challenge for 2020.

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[eponymous-rose]

(I’d rather this not be reblogged, just in case!)

I’ve had a funny conversation a couple of times this week, once with my cousin and once with my physical therapist, so I thought it might be fun to go over this: when I mentioned I wasn’t teaching this quarter, they both stared at me in shock and said, “And you’re still getting paid?” To be fair, I absolutely would’ve asked the same question before I started. This job is so weird I never would’ve guessed what all falls under it! 

So here’s a little glimpse into what goes on in this particular professorship:

So, hey, there are different ranks of professor. I’m an “assistant professor”, which is about as junior as it’s possible to get, but I won the dang lottery and somehow finagled my way into getting the words “tenure-track” tacked on before that. This means that over the next six years, everything I do will be scrutinized (culminating in a "summary” of several thousand pages reporting on every single aspect of my job performance), and at the end of it, after about nine months of progressively higher-ranked people in the university voting and deliberating, I have a chance to be granted tenure, which comes with a promotion to associate professor rank and Extreme Job Security. The criteria here are basically being able to prove that I’m one of the foremost experts in my field in the country and hitting research/service/teaching goals, and I’ll talk a bit about that in a second here. Promotion (often many years later) to full professor requires proof of being one of the foremost experts in the field on the planet.

Also, if you don’t get tenure, you get fired after that six-year period. Some universities are dicks and hire three or four assistant professors for every tenured position they want to fill and just fire the spares after getting six years of work out of them. My university has an extremely high tenure rate (mainly because anyone who seems unlikely to make tenure will either have some sort of intervention on their behalf, be granted an extra year to make up the difference, or will be asked to quietly resign before deliberations start), and my department hasn’t denied anyone tenure in decades.

So! What the hell do I do? Well, universities in the U.S. that are particularly research-heavy are referred to as “R1 universities”, which is the situation I’m in here. This means that the majority (often the vast majority) of my time is not spent teaching: it’s all about doing research, to the point where I will not be teaching more than one class simultaneously. In my field, that research can look like a lot of different things:

There are indeed people who work with beakers and range hoods and snazzy lab coats: these researchers in my field might be doing stuff like growing snowflakes in the lab and using that information to figure out the conditions under which different kinds of snow can form. Also there’s chemistry? I don’t know this side of it too well. Professors’ roles here, apart from the science, include ordering the right equipment (which includes getting quotes from various suppliers) and hiring lab technicians and folks to keep the equipment up and running.

Some folks do intense numerical modeling: if you’re studying the atmosphere, you can’t just try your experiment on one Earth and compare how it’s different on another Earth, since we only have the one, so what we do instead is use the most powerful supercomputers on the planet to create simulations. These can be as detailed as looking at the flow of dust in the millimeters above the ground, or as broad as simulating the whole atmosphere of the entire planet (or other planets!). On top of the science, these professors often have to negotiate for supercomputer time (a precious commodity), purchase massive computational resources (e.g., a server room hosted locally), and sometimes hire dedicated I.T. support just for their research.

I work a lot with large datasets: if we have information about the conditions under which tornadoes happened over the past 15 years, what patterns can we pick up that forecasters might be able to use? What is physically, fundamentally different about tornadoes that happen in different places? This kind of stuff really just needs a decently specced desktop machine and some know-how, and a lot of research in our field involves sitting and thinking. Also in this category is the pure math and physics work in the field, where people bury themselves in impossible-to-solve equations to try to figure the best way to wrench them into things we can solve. This is probably the closest to what most people think of when they hear “research”.

Fieldwork. Think Twister. Coordinating large numbers of people, who may be on the ground, driving, in the air, in the ocean. Also, coordinating instruments that might be stationary or might be buoys or drones or something else. We’re a public university; we don’t have the cash to buy our own airplanes, so profs in this scenario have to rent time on research aircraft owned by organizations like NASA or NOAA, or rent time on boats, or hire folks to develop and build new instruments. Massive amounts of organization goes into this, and all stages from inception to execution are generally overseen and organized by the professor.

When any or all of these approaches come up with groundbreaking results (you’re expected to have that kind of result happen a couple times a year), it’s time to write a paper and get it published in a prestigious academic journal. That process can take between four months and a year, depending on a bunch of different factors, so often a professor is juggling a few different projects in different states of done-ness.

What you’ll notice in all this is that professors generally have to come up with the money to do this stuff. New profs generally get a starting budget to get them off the ground, but most of that winds up wrapped up in personnel and start-up costs (e.g., buying computing resources or space for a lab). For the rest of it? Grants.

Grants in my field right now are a bit of a mess: it takes months to put a proposal together, it’s chaotic and complicated as hell, and there’s only about a 10-15% success rate, so you can do the math on that one. In my field, grants range from “small” ones supporting a few years of the pure-science stuff (typically a few hundred thousand dollars that mainly goes toward paying several people’s salaries over several years, but also covers things like journal publication fees - it costs several thousand dollars to publish one paper in an academic journal) to much larger ones supporting field campaigns or long-term projects (rarely, several tens of millions of dollars if you’re talking projects with multiple aircraft and such). I get paid for nine months of the year, and have to come up with the remaining three months’ salary on my own. 

The other thing, though, that grants pay for is graduate student salaries! My department pays students quite well (more than enough to afford the rent on an apartment here, which is saying a lot), and also provides full benefits and a complete tuition waiver. Grad students in my field are essentially in an apprenticeship situation: they pick an advisor and work with that person for typically about seven years. During that time, they have to hit certain milestones (nine months of classes, plus a few courses sprinkled throughout the remaining six years, giving presentations, passing exams, doing a defense, writing a dissertation---essentially a book of their research results), and if you’re thinking this is putting a horrifying amount of power in the advisor’s hands, you’re absolutely correct. The imperfect but step-in-the-right-direction solution my department’s adopted has been to give each student a committee of professors, where one leads the research but the others are always available for new ideas or to resolve problems or speak up on behalf of the student. Students are also strongly encouraged to take a year or two off from their main research project to work with another professor, either here or elsewhere, and explore new research ideas.

Professors are responsible for teaching their students what they need to succeed, and our department has famously exceptional graduate students and graduate student mentorship: profs teach students how to do research (often guiding them through a Master’s project, then letting them take the reins and backing off to an advisory role for the remaining years of the PhD), which includes having them publish their results as the lead authors of their own scientific journal articles. Profs also pay to send students to conferences to showcase their research and introduce them to the people who’ll help them in their future career (one of the reasons I traveled a bunch this quarter was to meet some folks who might be good contacts for students who don’t want to just shoot for a job in the US). Some students will get to go on field campaigns, flying on research aircraft or, I dunno, driving tanks into tornadoes. Some will be more interested in non-academia pursuits and might spend some time shadowing insurance analysts or taking extra entrepreneurial classes in the business school or working hands-on with forecasters during the height of severe weather season. It’s our jobs as professors to know the job market, to know the right people, and to know our students well enough to help them get where they’re going. This department takes this Very Seriously, to the point where it eclipses research as our Top Priority, and the general understanding is that getting a grad student position here sets you up for life.

So! Part of my job this time of year is recruiting graduate students based on my budget. For some folks, that means actively advertising wherever possible and getting super involved in the visiting student weekends (we fly prospective grad students out here to visit before they make their decision, and there’s always a fair number of students who haven’t settled on an advisor yet). Some folks are absurdly lucky and study fields that are considered particularly cool and interesting, and the top students actively seek them out and will cold-call or send e-mails or introduce themselves at conferences (look, turns out it’s hilariously easy to sell someone on “come study tornadoes!” and even a newbie like me has to choose between several particularly strong candidates). Either way, the graduate student hiring process involves a lot of internal debate---we’re not a huge department, so we typically can only send offers to a little under 10% of the folks who apply each year---that mainly centers around making sure each student has a supportive research “home” waiting for them here, based on funding and how much time each faculty member might have. Professors need to coordinate grant budgets (or startup funds, or stopgap funds in the increasingly common situation where no grant money could be secured for a given year) to make sure students have any equipment they might need (cool stuff like supercomputer time, servers, equipment to take to the field, accessibility aids, but also mundane stuff like office space and desks). We also have to coordinate with the university to make sure international students can get here and stay here under the correct visa status.

Right now, I only have one graduate student, and he’s currently undergoing the barrage of first-year coursework, but we meet weekly and he’s started playing around with some data analysis and reading some of the big papers in the field (he’s coming in from mechanical engineering, so the math is familiar but the vocabulary is funky). I’ve developed short- and long-term learning goals for him, culminating in putting together a proposal for his master’s research in June, then converting his early results to a scientific journal article to help him hit the ground running, because he’s brilliant and he’d be able to pull it off without breaking a sweat. 

I’m also on the committees of two second-year Master’s students, so my responsibilities there include reviewing their proposals and, in one case, helping her put together an application for a major fellowship that would put $100,000 toward her education, which means she wouldn’t be beholden to any given research grant and could study any topic she liked. I’m also co-advising a postdoctoral researcher---his primary advisor is a specialist on snow, which is his area of interest, but I’m a specialist on some of the methods he uses to study snow, so I’m consulting with him on that side of things. I’m also working with a couple of particularly motivated final-year PhD students who want to run a multi-day Python and machine learning workshop for the department. Heck yeah.

Apart from research and advising, another facet of being a professor is the nebulous category often just referred to as “service”. Volunteer work, essentially. Right now, I’m reviewing scientific journal articles, typically 2-4 at a time (down to one right now, although I anticipate a flood right before the holidays). This is all done as volunteer work, but it’s honestly the easiest way for me to keep up with the latest literature, because yeah, you can’t just sit in a room and think if you don’t know what everyone else is thinking about. And when even a small field has a dozen or so major academic journals putting out a couple dozen articles each a month that you have to stay on top of... reviewing can be a great way to get the highlights. Sometimes I also get to review other people’s grant proposals, which is really helpful! Still, I wish journals would pay us for this work---someone did a poll on Twitter and found that folks in our field spend on average about 6 hours per review. That adds up!

I also tend to help out with conferences, either doing logistical stuff like deciding what the major topics are, and who gets to speak when (and who probably shouldn’t be given a microphone...) or coordinating the judging of awards for student presentations. That sometimes involves weird event planning stuff like trying to find a venue and speakers and transportation for a formal dinner, or hiring caterers and dealing with competing hotel quotes for room blocks, or cold-calling reasonably famous people and asking them to volunteer their time (or offering them an honorarium) to Skype in to a room full of people.

I’m also on a few national committees that are working to define the priorities of some of the big professional organizations: mainly I work in my particular subdiscipline, but also with diversity/equity/inclusion and early-career support. Some of that is as simple as running social media accounts or helping to design surveys. I’ve recently been assigned to help audit a major organization’s commitment to diversity, which could be pretty interesting. It all sounds like a lot, and a lot of it’s coming to a head lately just because of conference timing, but it usually slows down to one or two hours a week of work in the off-season. I like this kind of stuff because it’s a relatively low-effort way to meet scientists all over the world that I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise.

We’re also hiring a new faculty member right now, which is... hilariously complex. Every aspect is basically done by committee and the entire department has to agree on who to interview and, eventually, who to hire, because hiring someone for this position is potentially choosing your coworker for the next 30+ years. Interviews are two-day endurance training for the poor candidates, who get face-to-face meetings with every member of the faculty, on top of more specialized interviews. We’ve had about 120 competitive applications thus far. It’s... a lot.

And just because I’m not teaching actively right now doesn’t mean teaching isn’t eating a lot of time: there’s some fun logistical set-up to do! For instance, the class I’m co-teaching starting in January features a lab where we take all the students over to the engineering buildings to set up some instruments in a wind tunnel. Gotta make sure we’ve timed it right so they can actually give us the wind tunnel! We’re also coordinating the timing and the schedule so that both instructors are actually around for the parts of the class they’re teaching. For three of the five weeks I’ll be teaching, I have the previous instructor’s materials to work with, but the other two weeks are all new material (and a lot of ad-lib based on how students do with the first chunk of the class). I also haven’t done anything related to this class since I took a comparable class over a decade ago, so, uh. Better study up.

In the spring, I’ll be teaching an entirely new class that’s never been offered by the department before. That involves building a syllabus, figuring out what each lecture will be about, coming up with contingencies in case some lectures get cancelled, writing exams and assignments and lectures and (since it’s a programming class) making sure everyone has access to the necessary hardware and software and data for the big final project. And, because I’m me, I’ll also be coordinating the whole thing with a special office in the university that does long-term testing of teaching effectiveness---they’ll send someone over to spend a few minutes chatting with the students midway through the quarter, then work with me on recommendations and improvement. I figure it’s a new class being offered for the first time, so we might as well get in on the ground floor of longitudinal pedagogical study. Also, I don’t actually know this programming language yet. Little more studying to do, there.

So... yeah. This job is absurd. It’s a million different jobs, the vast majority of which I’ve had no training for. And I adore it. Nobody cares where I am or what I’m doing at any given time, as long as I get results and as long as my students are succeeding. As someone who loves nothing more than bland, repetitive tasks repeated over and over again, it’s not exactly in my wheelhouse... but I love how hard it makes me think, and I adore being pushed this far out of my comfort zone and knowing I actually have the resources and the know-how to succeed. Every single day is something completely new and exciting and bizarre. Hell, every hour. It’s pretty fantastic, and utterly terrifying.

[starsailorstories]

Historical Overview of the Seven Suns systems

Ok I’m still planning to do a more fun illustrated/narrative version of this and plot-essential stuff is in the exposition of the books BUT if you’re a nerd (and I know I am!) here is Everything that led up to the Hyperian dynasty, directly or indirectly, starting from the first astraeas to live in this area

First Permanent Migrations

Cosmonist legend holds that the first astraeas to leave the vacuum and settle on the surfaces of planets did so on the six Holy Worlds that have been populated the longest: Tarega, Sitheria, Thass, Vesta A (the Basilean name for the world of Ami Ge), Esmrrrder and Hirimar. This is arguably true, although making a distinction that doesn’t really matter--worlds in the antedome and the Elorica quadrant were being settled around the same time. There’s more archaeological evidence to support another legend--that a flotilla of debris rafts that had drifted with gravity for generations, carrying the ancient proto-astraeas who had lived on them for generations, counselled in the outer orbits of the Basilean binary. Some continued on to the Sol Minerva system and settled on the Sitherian surface almost immediately upon their arrival. Another group set their course for the inner Sol Atya system, and would live on their rafts in the upper atmosphere of Tarega, gradually evolving as the chemistry of their lights changed from generation to generation in response to its composition, for another several million years. Because astraea genetics are as much a result of environment as they are of heritage, it’s difficult to tell where these proto-Sitherians and Basillans came from originally. What matters is that they came together and were in heavy communication even prior to written history.

The Miragari of the Sol Vesta system have likely lived on their own world even longer than the Sitherians have lived on theirs, but they seem to have migrated from the opposite side of the dome, reaching Basilea’s second-closest unincorporated star via the Carina Alta arm. Like the Basillans, ancient debris in the orbit of their world suggests that they lived in the upper atmosphere for anywhere from thirty to fifty thousand of their planet’s years before beginning to build their civilization on solid ground.

Other species seem to have arrived later in other mass migrations, having already developed inheritable biological features in other atmosphere environments (the fact that the Esmrrrderians and Hirimarians are more physically similar to each other, for example, than they are to the Basillans, Sitherians, Thassians or Miragari would suggest that they were once members of the same clan or group of clans). There is some theorizing that the Thassians may have originally come from Sol Vesta, but if so, their traits diverged from those of the Miragari long ago. They lack the archaeological evidence a “lander culture” that is common to other established species in the area, so their origins remain mysterious.

Development of Planetary Civilizations & First Atya System Explorers

Pre-contact Miragari cultures were sophisticated but tenuous, with populations in some parts of the planet dwindling after rapid agricultural development brought about significant changes to the local atmosphere. Although they developed their own forms of powered spaceflight and traveled widely, organized exploration was sparse--their system’s dense asteroid belt made exit in a large ship of the period difficult, and most of their resources were focused towards on-planet innovation. In this they advanced far beyond their counterparts in other systems, building massive and efficient cities with elaborate codes of law and traversing their abundant seas in ultra-fast and luxurious submarines.

The Basillan colonies that had landed on the surface of Tarega spent some generations growing apart from their Sitherian cohorts, but eventually began communicating, trading, and cooperating. The centralization of the Sitherian settlement in the megametropolis of Ovaiakon, which had by this point grown to cover 20% of the planet’s largest landmass, made travel and trade convenient for Basillan sailors. This partnership gave rise to mergers of cultural institutions all over both worlds--the most significant of which were the adoption of the Sitherian Syfrae logography/syllabography across the Sol Atya system and the compilation of the Writings of the Holy Poets, the document that solidified and spread the Cosmonist religion. With these uniting cultural threads, leaders on Tarega were able to ally with one another and pool resources to begin formal, recorded exploration missions to other planets--leading to the first settlements on Glasmiri, who appointed the first of the area’s planetary High Queen in order to unite politically and win a war of independence against their mother tribe--and to other systems.

Soon after the Glasmirian push for sovereignty, the Sitherian archpraeceptorate was established, and immediately developed a relationship with the planetary royal court, urging the High Queen and her scionettes to enter into honor-bound contract with the goddesses. This began to set the precedent of the perceived relationship between the Basillan planetary nations and the pantheon their people believed in.

Invasion of Sol Vesta System & Planetary Conflicts

Among these was one to Ami Ge (Vesta A), which in the next few centuries the Ixavol clan of Tarega and their wide-reaching allies, seeking conquest of the system of the nearest Holy Sun outside the immediate binary, would invade at multiple surface points--leading to a long and treacherous war, known widely as the Sol Vesta War, which would last for over twenty cycles and whose repercussions are still felt. After a complex series of concessions were negotiated on the planet’s surface, Basillan outposts remained in her orbit, basically maintaining a presence to keep the territory in their sights.

Over the effectively generational time passage that occurred during the war, the political motivations for fighting it shifted. While the original invasion had political and religious impetus, by the time of the final withdrawals the Taregan climate was changing, and holding land in the Sol Vesta system (including the uninhabited Kori Ge) became vital to the importation of particularly water and building materials. For a period of about 6,000 years following the concession talks scarcity on both Ami Ge and Tarega led to infighting among the regional populations of both worlds. Populations were significantly affected, but eventually technological advancement began to resolve things: Sitherian engineers--most notably the priestess and researcher Eiona Vang, who took eldership over the project--were brought to the royal courts of Saivega and Solreg to design large-scale atmosphere regulation systems that allowed for the creation of settlements above the clouds of Altamai, where the Taregan aristocracy fled practically in full in a span of just decades (with a few notable exceptions). Soon after, there was a mass migration of common colonies, who converted industrial spacecraft, hitched rides, or built their own ships in the desert and flew out by night without the behest of any authority.

Settlement of Altamai & Shali

Once on Altamai, Basillan culture changed and flourished. The international council of leadership that had existed on Tarega, after some centuries of trying, finally managed to appoint a high queen, Athaema Seflioma of Avès, who oversaw the building of ten experimental cities. In order to survive above the cloudline, the citizens of the new cities needed a steady supply of artificial atmosphere. With the same technology that allowed their mountaintop superatmospheric buildings, ships were constructed that could sustain a large crew for a long period of time. After several exploration missions, a fleet of ships were sent to the orbit of Shali, where, expanding upon the models for orbiting settlements that had been used to blockade the Sol Vesta system, they were gradually developed into a permanent orbiting settlement--effectively a company town for the atmosphere harvesters. This building model would later be used in the Fila Fenaeta and Fuscus swarms and, most grandly, in the Rings of Basilea.

In this period the planetary royal court developed rapidly, ennobling hundreds of notable residents from the settlements and making them both distributors of the wealth and enforcers of the royal will. Meanwhile tensions grew between post-war enclaves established on Ami Ge, specifically those that still maintained a relationship with the Taregan-Altamaian aristocracy and those that did not. Although extremely primitive by the standards of the system at the time of the story, this was the first conflict in which the Basillan ruling classes provided arms to their allies, making the conflict much more uneven than it would have been and placing the unallied Maeg people, whose ancestral mountains bisected the zone of the turf war, at an economic and political disadvantage that would take centuries of struggle to overcome.

Trade between the Jenya, Atya and Minerva systems, meanwhile, was busier than ever, with thousands of solar-powered ships passing between the populated worlds every few planetary centuries (most voyages at that time took 4-5 of those, which in the context of an astraea lifespan is sort of like 1-2 years). It’s in this era that the spacefaring subculture--its specific routines, songs, legends, superstitions, and roles which still hold at the time of the story--really began to take root. Basillan, Sitherian, and Miragari voyages to the Ante-dome and the disk also took place in this period, laying the groundwork for sociopolitical situations in the centuries to come.

As the difficult construction of the permanent settlements on Shali was finally completed, the current ruler of the Seflioma dynasty died suddenly on the brink of producing an heir. Astraea Mothers experience a period of basically hibernation before childbirth and health complications are relatively common, but given their honored role in society preventative care is also generally excellent, and a childbearing-related death, particularly of a noble or royal, is almost unheard of, so this was a cause of much anger and suspicion--even at the time of the story, it’s still widely believed that she was poisoned. Her “consort colony”--that of her wife--had recently had a new Mother born, and the court agreed to allow her coronation when she came of age. For the next several hundred cycles, the planet was effectively in the hands of her aunt, a Faellran dowager submaxima who worked tirelessly to set up global interests for her ward. When the Olaean dynasty finally dawned, it was into unprecedented power, and within the first few years of her reign Queen Daemarima commissioned the research and creation of a global language based on the planet’s three most common tongues. The teaching and speaking of Standard Altamaian was theoretically enforced by law all over the planet, although this proved logistically difficult, and all three of the local languages it was meant to replace survive to this day. The Standard, however, did grow in popularity, and became the lingua franca of court life and politics, as well as developing as the common language between new workers on Shali.

The Turn of the Intergalactic Age

On the less permanently-settled worlds of the Sol Garna and Sol Amphira systems, isolated cultures were beginning to make contact with the rest of their own planets as their populations grew. The Esmrrrderians in particular began to connect the peoples of their world through vast networks of trade and communication, which brought about an unprecedented era of global exchange and peace. At several points in the past, Esmrrrderians had intercepted Basillan and Miragari ships attempting to avoid the Sol Vesta blockades, or rescued the survivors of wrecks, and these aliens integrated into their colonies fairly seamlessly. But at this point, they still had no official contact with the Jenya-Atya system or with any other.

On Altamai, Daemarima’s great-great-granddaughter said fuck everything, married her lady-in-waiting, and abdicated to her younger sister, who married acceptably but then promptly died in a duel defending her older sister’s choices. Possibly because everyone was fed up with their nonsense, the throne passed peacefully from the Olaeans to the Fortefemens.

Meanwhile in the orbit of Sol Minerva, Ovaiakon was rocked by a series of earthquakes over a period of about three centuries, their intensity increasing over time. Finally--just days before the all-important Avi-fora (festival of the end of the liturgical calendar)--the great city cracked down the middle.

In the coming years residents of this intellectual and religious capital of the binary watched as the two sides of their city rapidly drifted apart and the sea rushed into the fault. The geological schism fueled several political and religious ones, with various sects interpreting the catastrophe as divine retribution for some act they disagreed with. For a few solar years there was absolute chaos. Priestesses and literators were executed by their own followers; still others fled to the wildernesses of the Glasmirian equator or the uncharted solitude of the Sol Amphira system (whose watery worlds and moons are largely absent from this history because their island-dwelling natives are so far-flung they don’t interact much with the outside world or each other). Order returned slowly, but Ovaiakon would now become two cities on two continents under one name, gradually drifting apart; and for many whose religious fervor outweighed their political loyalty, faith in its authority was forever shaken.

Several centuries after, another galaxy-changing event befell the system: a joint coalition involving scholars and politicians from multiple Basillan worlds sent a series of exploration missions to the neighboring Maculata galaxy, which we know as the Milky Way. After several landings on uninhabited worlds (they were looking first for planets that could support their own type of life, not the type they actually found) they finally ran across a Cadrian outpost on a moon of their homeworld.

Initially, the landing party were mistaken for invaders from one of the planets of Alpha Centauri, and might have unintentionally reignited an interstellar war (millennia before they INTENTIONALLY reignited it) if they hadn’t immediately engaged, giving the Cadrians a good look at them to confirm they weren’t Centaurian as well as earning their respect in battle (not every [sub]culture on the Cadrian homeworld would’ve reacted like that, but for better or for worse these did). After spending years as honored, if slightly uncomfortable, diplomatic guests, they returned, introducing Cadrian delegates--and the business interests they represented--to their respective leaders.

The aristocrats, noting the similar life spans and political structures but slightly appalled by what they perceived as a lack of reciprocity in Cadrian culture, jumped to form military alliances and yet weren’t at all interested in doing business. The delegates, however, wanted to get their hands on some of those super-fast, intergalactically-durable spaceships, and they weren’t going to wait around to earn the trust of nobles. The commoners who had gone on the mission had had time to understand the bizarre system of investments and currencies, and fidelity in the most Andromedan sense was all it took to get them building away--they felt they owed the Cadrians for their hospitality, and their colonies and professional networks provided labor out of simple loyalty. When simple loyalty in the labor force wavered, the new common shipyard moguls appealed to their Cadrian backers for resources and began to provide an “arrangement” for their workers--land off the local noble’s estate--that still allowed them a high profit margin. This was the beginning of the astraea-specific version of industrial capitalism, and notably also kicked off the massive Elorica quadrant asteroid-mining industry as foundries struggled to produce enough vitruvol to meet the demand. The descendants of these original shipyard owners remain the wealthiest and most powerful commoners in the Seven Suns at the time of the story.

Eventually, Andromedan spaceships began to be exported to the Maculata in such numbers that some inevitably fell into the wrong hands, and Maculatan pirates--as well as Andromedan pirates, but the nobles didn’t talk about those as much for ~some reason--got pretty bold with it, attacking planetary estates without warning. Between this and the (fallacious, but spoken about) idea that working for one of the common shipyard moguls provided Options, the popularity and clout of nobles began to be much more dependent on their ability to protect their resources and provide for their peasants. In response--and without explicit royal permission--they formed a legislative body which was to become the High Parliament and which actually streamlined (for better AND for worse) the process of enacting international law considerably. In retaliation, the Queen ordered them to hear official delegation from the Union of Commons, a political party of wealthy and powerful non-nobles who effectively bought their way into court (this still exists and has a reputation for being socially liberal and advocating legal reform, though it’s a joke on all surrounding sides of their political spectrum that this has to do with the fact that the Basillan nouvelle riche are so very very commonly in legal trouble).

Around the same time, international councils on Esmrrrder and Hiramar made a joint decision to open their system to trade with the rest of the galaxy. The two worlds had industrialized and begun to advance technologically practically overnight (especially by astraea standards) and with industrialization had come economic disparity between urban and rural communities. The leadership claimed--and perhaps some of them really did intend--that the economic boost would allow local governments to provide necessities like water and medicine for small villages affected by environmental destruction and other modern problems. But the new Basillan and Cadrian capitalists poured their resources into wringing productivity from the cities, worsening conditions for workers there and for the rural villagers alike.

The people of the Sol Garna system were not about to take that shit lying down.

While they couldn’t fight the exoplanetary power completely, labor unions and parties rose to prominence after centuries of a bloody power struggle that made their system infamous among the elite of the Seven Suns for the tenacity of its populace. Traditional Basillan morality taught loyalty to the beneficience of authority, but traditional morality as taught by the Garnaxe lawspeakers taught loyalty to the planet, the self, and the community, and the people returned to it in force. Although not without flaws--the same principles had been used to justify isolationism, and many of the labor activists harbored prejudices understandably towards the Basillans and Cadrians but less rationally towards all outsiders--the movement led to a system of defenses against economic exploitation that served as a model for other worlds taking up their own causes against the Basillan worlds, and later the aula.

Tensions on the Basillan Motherworlds

As trade--and conflict--with the Cadrians and manufacturing in the Sol Garna system settled into steady rhythms of give and take, the ancient aristocracies of Altamai and Glasmiri were restless. One step beneath them, moneyed commoners threatened to lure away the peasantry that had historically supported their lifestyle (many of them sorted this out by marrying daughters into new-money families or going into business themselves). One step above them, the planetary High Queens--legitimized by the praeceptorate and venerated by the people--could still limit the power they held in the courts and the legislature almost with impunity. Noble houses favored by the Queens defended them almost fanatically--most had formal and legal Fidelities and honor bindings to uphold, and some Particular Favorites had even more personal stakes. At the height of the divisions in high society on both worlds, the High Queens of Glasmiri and Altamai announced, together, that their eldest daughters were betrothed. The loyal subjects celebrated; the courtiers drew swords on each other in their castle gardens.

The alliance sealed, the next few heirs to the throne continued to operate over the loud aristocratic paranoia that they would become unassailable tyrants. The mutual economy boomed, with Altamaian interests establishing the free-drifting macroengineered Fila Fenaeta settlement in a resource-rich nebula in the Naulia quadrant and Glasmirian ones building the similar Fuscus Swarm structure in an enclave of the Milky Way sold to them by the government of one of the Cadrian national superpowers. With these outposts driving down the cost of chemical resources for space travel, the age of exploration and imperialism that had begun with the first voyages to the Maculata kicked into a higher gear, laying ground for the occupations later undertaken by the Hyperians in the Ante-dome and in the outer-disk Djickhasa and Sokhash systems.

It also sparked the dream of the Rings--the largest building project Basillan civilization had ever undertaken. It would ease strain on the overcrowded Altamaian cities and fragile Glasmirian wetlands. It would create farmland to grow the raw materials for textiles, which had become a main export to the Cadrian home system. And it would all be directed by one trusted royal advisor: maximata Siderina Hyperia.

Siderina was a leading figure in the aristocracy’s political corner. Coming from a high-ranking family, she styled herself as a Defender of the Old Ways and gained mass support from her peers and from the bootlickers segment of the traditional peasantry who believed that increased autonomy for their Sworn Ladies would lead to prosperity for their own families. As I detailed in this post, she betrayed the Queen and established her building project as the capital of a new empire. Attempts to hold her legally accountable for her breach of a royal Fidelity--normally a capital crime--fell through on the favors of nobles and politicians who owed her for something or other and felt compelled to stay silent. Siderina treated betrayals among her own ranks with infamous volatility, and nobody wanted to be on her bad side, at least not until they knew how this was going to play out.

Siderina’s daughter became the first Empress. A new calendar, based on the rotation of the rings, was begun. Within its first three generations of monarchs, the new government--which subsumed the still-existing High Queendoms by virtue of legally binding vows of familial loyalty--invaded dozens of unaffiliated worlds, including Caesura, Aeverell, and Ashtiva; spearheaded the modern LGA with the help of the Cadrians and started recruiting people to fight all kinds of random wars for them; and developed the cloning technology that would create the labor force for their runaway expansion. 

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Whenever we write, it’s something we do together. We may not always actually talk, but we both contribute more or less equally (whether or not Terra actually notices it and doesn’t chalk it up to eir own thoughts ahaha) Anyway, thought we should make a list. Or rather, two lists. Fics in progress, and fics we haven’t started but want to.

In progress, in order of current motivation to finish (kind of)– *“"sequel”“ to fake dating au. Just need to add some stuff (maybe up to 1k? We can’t shut up about these two and their healthy communication I mean talk about goals, right) and tweak the characterization to fit the established au. Motivated by time, mostly. Hope to get it up by Valentine’s Day. *gym au where it’s gay and such a pity Javert’s has prosopagnosia and always distracted by Valjean’s arms, and how Valjean’s never seen Javert out of uniform and doesn’t recognize him in workout clothes and is ever so distracted by his runners calves. Absolutely tragic. *dw doctor/TARDIS fic. I think I’m into that a lot because of that symbiotic relationship. I’m always about symbiotic relationships, probably given my own nature, haha *dæmon au, because that’s always important. Won’t be finished anytime soon. *magic au, because it’s almost done and why not? *leverage ot3 fic, since we don’t expect that to be too long, and also I mean it’s leverage so that’s always good. *phone call perceived unrequited perfectworldshipping fic, since we still think that’s really good and just the right amount of angst that is satisfying as hell. At least for us to read. That bittersweet kind of thing, where they’re just a hair’s breadth too late, they miss each other by just a second, if they had only reached out sooner but it was never the right time. Both of us love that shit so much. Kind of wary of posting two 5+1 fics so close together though. *Vampire!Javert, even though we’re undecided what direction to take that one right now. We have up to the bridge, but we can take it to the potentially nsfw direction or somewhere else that’s sfw. *self indulgent fic, since it’s self indulgent. Also at a standstill since we lost so much of it. Might not ever post because it’s fairly personal with the amount we project our own struggles with depression onto Javert. *sad fic, because that seems short. It’s hard to write. Haven’t been struck with that inspiration where the words come with that yet. Terra wants to write that more than I do, out of some kind of desperation to prove we can do something other than sickening fluff we can hardly bare to edit lol. There’s no rush. We have two modes: sickening fluff that apparently makes people scream and/or laugh out loud (which is? Unexpected? That funny stuff is fun to write but we never expected it to be as much fun to read), or angst fic that will break you. Absolutely no in between. *the other sad fic, which is also really personal, but it’s also half informative so somehow the part of us who loved to educate overtakes the anxious part of us hahaha. That fic requires an actual map so we can get things in order, and more research than we’re willing to put in at the moment. So, standstill. We know exactly where we want to go with it though. Probably the fic we actually use words to talk to each other about the most. Usually it’s just feelings, melding together in that writing zone to where we are really one with each other and not separated at all. That can be fun too, but I like talking. *the one where Javert is a ghost. We have the beginning, but Terra’s more interested in how Javert works and functions as a ghost rather than actual plot and I’m stuck on what to do so it’s at a standstill. *wolves fic, because that’s such a good quote we can’t not use it. Don’t know where we’re quite going with it exactly. Have a vague idea but nothing solid. *Vegas au, requires casefic which means a case and we aren’t quite sure how to handle that yet. Of course, because it revolves around casefic, we can’t do much with it yet but we have the first scene written out that probably will need redoing at a later date but whatever. It’s Vegas. *butter for lube. I hate Terra for this. So much. *touchfic, requires massive reworking. It’s 25k. Like half of that is going to have to be rewritten entirely or cut and that’s going to take so much time and effort. Totally know where we’re going, it’s just how to get there that’s the issue. *3rd person POV fic. Know what we’re doing, just not sure how to make it into a good fic. Also we keep getting distracted by OCs, so large sections of that are going to have to be cut or at least severely minimized. Those are just the things we have actual parts written, not just outlined.

To write, in no particular order– *REVERSE GROUNDHOG. We’ve been wanting to write this for literally years. And we have about 80% of it planned to a T in our brain. We just. Need to write it. And figure out that last 20%. *werewolf Valjean, for obvious reasons. There’s never enough supernatural (not the show, although the influence is most definitely there) AUs nor creature!aus *superhero AU, fight us okay *coffeeshop au #3, where jvj is a crime novel author and lowkey uses the cases Javert mutters about in his books that Javert’s a closet fan of. Idea half stolen from Paper Monsters, a cherik fic. *olive garden au aka coffee shop au #1, which Terra promised Stephanie like four years ago *Coffeeshop au #2, which is so similar to the Australian au that we might scrap it, or just write it for our own enjoyment and never post. *the one we call Mercy, with swensonvert and raminjean, which is decidedly nsfw and will go to the Shame Account. *buddy cop AU inspired by… oh what’s that movie. With the two lady leads. It’s kind of recent and super good. *leverage au with the Les Mis faves, of course. I wish we had more straight up Leverage ideas, because that’s such a good show. We yell at each other about it so much. *ink on skin soulmate au because we love soulmate AUs. *dw dæmon au where humans are the only species who have dæmons and the Doctor is absolutely fascinated by this. Thought of this yesterday, so it’s pretty new. *the one where the main pairing is Javert/Seine with lots of suicidal ideation. *Toulon nsfw fic. We don’t know how to introduce the nsfw aspect, honestly. And our Jean le cric isn’t canon characterized and it bothers me. Terra says run with it, "because fuck it it’s fanfiction,” but it bugs me. Technically, it’s partly written, but it bugs me so much I’m not counting that. *TiMER soulmate au. That one’s interesting because it plays off the idea of people evolving and growing, how the person that’s “perfectly comparable with you” may meet you earlier on (and at that point, you are good with them) but their timer doesn’t stop then. Javert’s timer resets and resets to the point where he thinks it’s faulty and Valjean’s remains constant, only skipping around near the barricades because Javert himself is fluctuating then too. Anyway that’s a lot of fun but requires a lot of looking things up in the brick and referencing the Les Mis timeline often. *music au, because we love those too, and although we collaborated with Star on the one we did for the Big Bang, we’re still not satisfied because it doesn’t /exactly/ match up with the one we constructed in our head. It’s good and we enjoy it immensely, but it doesn’t scratch the itch. If we end up rewriting it with the same plot points and stuff, we won’t post it. Might change it up, making Valjean a solo piano or luthier, but always secret composer Madeleine and always concert master Javert. *coffeeshop au #4, where they keep meeting on accident during rush and leave post its on each other’s coffee and only know each other by their coffee names. Occasionally they talk in line but it’s just a meet-cute honestly. We don’t expect this to be long, just a cute little idea. Javert always freaks out with the reveal and makes things longer and harder though, even when we expect that of him. *possibly doctor/surgeon!Javert and Valjean always coming to the ER because of shit he gets himself into by performing mostly selfish actions. Javert has beef with him for some reason. Maybe mugged him when he was a student of important things that held him back, or otherwise heavily inconvenienced him and he pressed charges, of course. *lowkey artist Valjean, who is really good but doesn’t think he is. Don’t know if this should be modern or canon era. Inspired by a friend who has Valjean hair we met at fiddle camp. He’s very good and does both realistic and caricatures that really capture people and that’s such a Valjean thing. *white collar inspired fic, half planned out. Valjean as an art thief and Javert as his pursuer. When Javert puts him away the first time, Valjean’s just gotten in with bad people. He changes when he gets out. His motives change to be more Leverage-like, and it becomes almost a game of cat and mouse. In his forgeries he starts writing stuff to leave Javert, little post it notes on the wall where a painting used to be, etc. Javert is confused but honestly missed chasing Valjean. Then after one incident where Valjean handcuffs Javert to something and leaves him there after banter/lowkey flirting, he leaves these files proving how corrupt the people he’s robbing are, as well as proof that the paintings get returned to a good place or the money from the sale goes to a good cause with only a little bit missing to pay for Valjean’s own humble life. Javert starts doubting. Valjean sees him on the bridge, paints him, then breaks into Javert’s house to hang it (and also buys him food because Jesus your fridge is barren, must feed you). It’s even signed with his real name and painted in his own style. Javert is kind of touched, even if he’s pissed off that Valjean could break into his apartment so easily (he changes his locks and only gets halfway through the milk before it goes bad. There’s a reason he doesn’t keep much food. It’s because he’s never home to eat it). Then, when Cosette is in danger, Valjean panics and doesn’t know who to go too except Javert. Javert comes home one day to Valjean pacing in his front room (and is annoyed he broke in /again/, why can’t he ring the doorbell like a normal– he doesn’t know why he could even thing of Valjean as normal and then thinks he should be more angry a know criminal is in his home and somehow looks like he belongs there). And then minor casefic- Javert helps him in exchange for his freedom. After, Javert manages to get Valjean as a consultant with an ankle bracelet thing a la white collar because damn it, he’s definitely gone for him. The first time Javert visits Valjean’s house he’s annoyed because Valjean has an original Monet hanging in Cosette’s room, which means the one they think is real is actually a forgery. That’s been developing in our brain for a long time too. We should just write it already. *TWEWY au, where Valjean ends up dying the same week as Javert. It’s a normal Game, of course. Unsure if we should have Reaper!Javert or not. Still working out the logistics of that. Who should be Conductor, Game Master, other reapers. Composer, even. *modern au where Javert’s a cop and keeps pulling over former criminal Valjean who’s now a successful and well know businessman. They end up making out against the side of Javert’s cruiser after many cop-based innuendos. Valjean’s license plate has 24601 in it, obviously. *original!weird friends AU. Featuring Grantaire/Javert friendship that neither will admit is friendship, born of over a year of arresting Grantaire for being drunk in public and various other minor crimes and watching him in the drunktank. They talk about being mentally ill, so bipolar lithro Grantaire and prosopagnosia lowkey depressed Javert. They talk about Grantaire’s unrequited crush that’s both ideal and hell for him, and teases Javert relentlessly about his not so lowkey crush on Valjean. Probably Grantaire POV. Grantaire crashes his car/motorcycle through Valjean’s shopfront window, and Grantaire just has him call Javert, totally unknowing that this is the guy Javert’s crushing hard on and has to deal with that awkward mess while very drunk and very manic. Possibly recognizes Valjean as Cosette’s dad, idk. Arranges for them to meet up very sneakily, because they’re not friends and this is just to make Javert shut up about this guy, yes totally, not to make him happy or anything. Shut up. They’re not friends. (Wow that was almost entirely Terra there. It’s late. We’re tired and not used to separation.) *AU!weird friends au where everything is the same as the above au except Grantaire has a vine account (Vine will be mourned). Obviously set when Vine was still alive and well. Consists mainly of Grantaire filming Javert while mentioning Valjean and watching as Javert attempts to be chill but is totally /not/. May involve him dropping massive amounts of paperwork, or spilling boiling hot coffee on himself. Definitely features him threatening Grantaire with arrest, not like that phases Grantaire anymore. Cosette sees his vines, mostly the one where Javert actually sees Valjean and walks straight into a street sign or trips over a parked car or something, and recognizes “oh my god that’s my dad”. They gleefully try to get them together and Grantaire’s vines consist of them actually meeting and Javert crushing harder than a 12 year old girl and Valjean’s being absolutely smitten with him. Probably told strictly through social media and video descriptions? It would be fun to try that since the texting was so fun in fake dating. Grantaire’s name is drunktank420 and you can’t stop me. *Canon era transman Javert. Can’t stop us. It’s ideal. …there’s more, because there’s always more. We are always thinking of fic. Anything cute or neat that happens in real life you can bet one of us latches onto it and an AU is born right there. It’s 5am we should sleep. Fic is too much fun for the both of us, which is why I completely endorse it. I would love to explore Valjean’s PTSD and anxiety more and having Javert learn how to calm him down or see the signs to remove him from his stressors. Also, obviously, Javert’s depression, suicidal ideation, and recovering from his suicide attempt. And his prosopagnosia, ADHD-ness, and his dyslexia in more detail. I put bits of it in almost everything but we want to examine it more.

[lodelss]

Leah Sottile | Longreads | July 2019 | 25 minutes (6,186 words)

Part 2 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB. 

  I.

Bill Keebler dumps a sugar packet into his coffee and calmly explains that the government is after him. They’re always watching him — constantly surveilling his every move, he says. He’s even at risk here, inside a Denny’s attached to a Flying J truck stop, about a half hour outside Salt Lake City.

He’s also pretty sure that Bundyville producer Ryan Haas and I are federal agents, posing as journalists. “I’m gonna be honest with you, it wouldn’t surprise me if both of you pulled out a badge,” he says. 

Just after 4 p.m. on a frigid February day, Keebler, 60, shuffles toward the back corner table we’d staked out for the interview.  He’s about a half hour late, uttering his deepest apologies for getting the time wrong. He’s never late, he says. 

Keebler is a raspy-voiced Southerner with skin that looks brittle from working in the sun all his life as a horse wrangler, ranch hand, hunting outfitter, and construction worker. At Denny’s he’s wearing a sandstone-colored canvas work jacket, and his hair sprouts from underneath a khaki Oath Keepers hat, which covers a shiny bald spot on the top of his head. He smokes a lot. Drinks a lot of coffee.

On the phone a few days before, I told him that I’d read the court documents for his case and was surprised by what I saw. I wanted to hear his version of what happened in June 2016 on the day three years before when Keebler believed he was detonating a bomb at a building owned by the Bureau of Land Management, only to find that the bomb was a fake given to him by undercover FBI agents embedded in his militia group.

The bombing itself was shocking. But the part that surprised me at the time was that, despite having pleaded guilty, serving 25 months in jail, and being released on probation, most of his case was still under federal protective order. Keebler’s attorney told me he’s not allowed to say why. I’m at the Denny’s hoping Keebler might be willing to tell me anyway.

In reading about what happened that day in the desert with the bomb, I learned — through the few court documents available — that Keebler was close friends with LaVoy Finicum. He’s the rancher who was a leader at the Malheur occupation, in Oregon, and was shot and killed by authorities after fleeing from a traffic stop.

But before we can talk about that, we’ve got to calm him down. He nudges his head in the direction of a young waiter, walking in a loop around by our table. Under his breath, Keebler says, “We’re being watched.” 

“Right now?” I ask. 

“Yeah.” 

“By who?” 

“A fed or an informant,” Keebler says. 

Haas asks if he means the Denny’s server, who’s walking by to see if we need any refills on coffee. That’s the guy, Keebler says.

If there’s so much at risk, why meet us? Why tell your story?

“Because if I don’t it’s going to die with me,” he says. “I’ve been on borrowed time for years.” He says he survived cancer, a massive heart attack, and “four heart procedures, looking at a fifth.” That’s not to mention the other stuff — things much harder to believe but that Keebler swears up and down are real, like the federally organized hits on him by the gang MS-13 while he was behind bars.

So I assure him: I’m not a fed. Google me. And I tell him he’s in control of what he says. If I ask something he doesn’t want to answer, something he thinks might get him in trouble, he doesn’t need to respond. He agrees, and for three hours, Bill Keebler gives his side of what happened leading up to that day in the desert with the bomb — a version of the story in which he is the hero, the government is the enemy, and where America is so rapidly nearing its demise, he can almost taste it. 

***

In the three years since the Bundys mobilized a force to take over the Malheur National Wildlife refuge in Oregon, the world has morphed in ways I couldn’t have imagined. For one thing, Donald Trump became the president of the United States. He has increased his attacks on media, stepping up from calling the very newspapers I write for “fake news,” to neglecting to hold the Saudi Arabian government accountable for putting into motion the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

In June 2019, Trump — in a meeting at the G20 Summit — laughed with Russian president Vladimir Putin about journalists. “Get rid of them,” he said. “Fake news is a great term, isn’t it? You don’t have this problem in Russia. We have that problem.” And Putin responded: “Yes, yes. We have it, too. It’s the same.” They both laughed. 

Oft-cited research collected by the Southern Poverty Law Center has shown that since 1996, anti-government activity surged when Democratic presidents were in office. Militia groups that claimed to see proof of tyranny thrived in the 1990s — specifically when Vicki Weaver and her teenage son were killed during a standoff with federal agents at Ruby Ridge in 1992, and when the feds stormed into the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993. 

In President Obama, the anti-government movement saw the embodiment of tyranny: someone upon whom they could project their worst fears. They called him a socialist globalist Muslim who, after ascending to the highest seat of power, would bring Sharia law upon the people. There was no proof or evidence to support this. But that didn’t matter to them.

Under Trump, suddenly, anti-government groups are pro-government. Nearly everything about Trump’s rhetoric — from questioning Obama’s nationality, to draining the swamp of elites, to building a border wall, to pushing for anti-Muslim legislation, to zealous nationalism — is lifted from the anti-government handbook.

“It blows my mind. The Patriot militia movement, anti-government movement — however you want to refer to them — under Obama was so concerned about tyranny and executive power … and yet they’ve been some of the most vocal advocates for Trump unilaterally grabbing and exerting executive branch power,” said Sam Jackson, an assistant professor in the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity at the University at Albany-SUNY. Jackson researches the militia movement — he wrote his dissertation on the Oath Keepers. 

“If Obama had talked about declaring a national emergency … they would have been up in arms in a heartbeat,” he said.

So what gives? How do the anti-government go pro-government? 

“It makes it really hard to take them at their word,” Jackson told me. “It really makes it seem like all of that was just rhetoric that they deployed in pursuit of other goals that perhaps they perceived would be less popular amongst the American public — whether that’s Islamophobia or anti-immigration or whatever else they’re really interested in. It seems like perhaps now they’re willing to talk about these other things more blatantly than they were in the past.” 

***

Bill Keebler tells us he was born in Mississippi and grew up in Georgia the descendant of a long line of military veterans. During the Cold War in the early 1980s, Keebler says he enlisted in the Army and served in Aschaffenburg, Germany. There, he says, he was on the frontlines of the fight against communism. And it was also during this time — he claims — that he placed third in the 1984 World Championships in Kung Fu.

It’s clear that he’s not the guy he used to be — or at least that the person I’m seeing before me at Denny’s isn’t the fighter he is in his head. Keebler claims that, after winning that championship, he created his own style of martial arts, called “Jung Shin Wu Kung Fu” before a “board of masters,” but the Bundyville team wasn’t able to confirm this.

After years of working on farms and ranches, Keebler found himself in Utah — far, far from home — where he worked as a hunting outfitter, trained horses, and says he became a member of the Utah Oath Keepers. Around Tooele County, Utah, he was so well-known as an ardent prepper and varmint hunter that the Salt Lake Tribune ran a story on his coyote hunting skills. In one scene in the story, Keebler crouches in underbrush and wears camouflage that’s been drenched coyote-urine scent. 

In 2011, he was running a hunting outfitting business called Critter Gitter Outfitters and often posted photos on social media of his excursions into the wild. In one, a muscled, tanned Keebler poses with a baby deer he’d rescued. 

Keebler spends a lot of time on the internet — has for years. Online, Keebler makes lots of dad jokes and even more jokes where a woman’s demise is the punchline. In one video he shared on his Facebook page, a blond woman in a white robe pleads with her husband until he hands her the keys of a black SUV with an oversize bow on the hood. When she starts the car, it explodes, the man smiles, and the words Merry Christmas, Bitch fill the screen. 

By 2013, Facebook had become a place for Keebler to vent about Obama — “I call him O-bummer,” he told me during one phone call — where he openly shared his belief in an encyclopedic number of conspiracy theories. “FEMA camps are everywhere, Muslims and illegals are taking over, Obama is the biggest Traitor this country has ever known, No Jobs, 16 trillion in [debt] and no relief in sight,” he wrote one February morning. “Anyone protesting Obama is assassinated and turned into a monster by our own media.”

None of this is true — his sources are websites that are notorious for generating fake content. His words dipped in and out of coherence, in and out of overt racism. “Our jobs have all gone over seas to other country’s as they get Fat off our money and we send them aid, weapons and anything else they desire for free. Jets, food what ever they want because we OWE it to them somehow,” he wrote in one such post. “I have been patient, tolerant and offended too much for any more. I am an American, have lived as I will die as my ancestors did, As A FREE MAN. I speak fucking English and you can press 1 and kiss my ass ya muslim, communist Jackasses! If this offends you then I have succeeded in my intentions.” 

He signed off on another post: “Stay safe, armed to the teeth, prepared and with God. Bill Keebler.”

Later that month, he wrote that “Someday SOON chit is gonna happen and this country will l;iterally EXPLODE, and when it does it will be a very messy situation… soon BOOM, we will explode. Hope you are prepared.”

Keebler hunting coyotes in 2011. (AP Photo/Al Hartmann – The Salt Lake Tribune)

By spring 2014, Keebler seemed to have a new personality altogether. He wrote near-constantly about what to do when SHTF (prepper-speak for “shit hits the fan”). He signed his posts “th3hunt3r.” He breathed in false information about the Bureau of Land Management killing endangered species and exhaled posts about the hypocrisy of not letting Cliven Bundy graze his cattle. 

Much has been written about the algorithms employed by sites like YouTube, which keeps users on the site — generating more and more advertising dollars — by directing them toward more extreme content. Reporters and analysts often reflect on how this affects young people. But the algorithmic drive toward extreme content has taken hold with a much older generation, too, with guys like Keebler. Online, they can fantasize about who they’ll be when the end finally comes. They water their ignorance and hatred at an online trough with others who think just like them.

In April 2014, Keebler sprung into action after seeing a video on Facebook of a confrontation between Bureau of Land Management agents and protesters who’d assembled at the Bundys’ side — that video I mentioned way back at the beginning of this story, of Ammon Bundy being tased in the midst of a chaotic confrontation. Keebler loaded up his camper and drove several hours south to Bunkerville, Nevada, where he says he set up a mess hall and provided supplies.

“Well, I made it to the ranch, all is well, getting settled in, been intersting so far, and I aint shot no one, YET! lol” he wrote on his Facebook page on April 10 after he arrived. 

Once there, Keebler solicited money online to help pay for supplies. He claims he kept hot tempers under control. 

“I stopped some people wanted to shoot people,” he says to me at the truck stop. “One of them got mad about it and put a gun in my face. He wanted to start the war. … He said, ‘I’m gonna fire a shot just to get it started.’ … Things were that close. Volatile.”

Keebler also takes credit for ejecting Jerad and Amanda Miller — who would go on to murder two police officers in Las Vegas and die in the midst of a shoot-out with officers inside a Walmart. He claims that if it wasn’t for him, Bundy Ranch would have been a bloodbath. Less than a year later — according to Keebler’s defense attorney’s presentencing memo — an undercover FBI agent was embedded in Keebler’s own militia and then began to regularly talk about stepping into action, about blowing up federal agents and federal properties, and scouting a mosque as a potential target alongside Keebler. 

And yet, Keebler never kicked that guy out. 

  II.

After the militias assisted in preventing the BLM from seizing the Bundy family’s cattle, Keebler left feeling excited about the movement. He lived on Bundy Ranch for about two weeks. “To me it was one of the biggest events in this country … short of the Boston Tea Party,” he says. “It was a wake-up call.”

“After the standoff and everything, we had momentum,” he says, offering his mug to the waiter for a refill. “It started because Cliven Bundy, but we started a movement that had the potential to be tenfold what it was.”

When he came back home to Utah, he quit the Oath Keepers. He proudly recounts a story about trading heated words at Bunkerville with the group’s founder, Stewart Rhodes. Keebler claims he asked whether Rhodes would accept “radical Islamic Muslims” into the group; Rhodes said the Oath Keepers doesn’t discriminate. Back at home, he started his own militia: Patriots Defense Force (PDF). 

At the height of its membership, PDF had just seven members including Keebler. They held “field training exercises” where they’d shoot targets. They’d talk about raising “backyard meat rabbits” and chickens, and living off-grid. Mostly, they were a bunch of preppers. 

But before PDF was even formed — even had a name — the FBI began to monitor him, according to court documents submitted by Keebler’s defense team. They began immediately upon his return home from Bundy Ranch. The Bureau eventually embedded three confidential informants in his militia and three undercover agents, including two men who went by the names Brad Miller and Jake Davis. Miller and Davis  — people Keebler believed to be other God-loving Patriots — were sworn into PDF in May 2015. Excluding Keebler, the FBI agents, and informants, there were — at most — three members of PDF. 

According to the defense, one informant was paid $60,000 for his undercover work inside the militia. The stories the FBI agents gave to Keebler must have seemed like he found a gold mine: Davis told stories of his expertise in hand-to-hand combat; Miller positioned himself as an expert in mining and explosives. Another FBI agent played the part of a successful business guy interested in funding a militia.

Unlike all the other times Keebler imagined the government conspiring to snoop on him, this time they actually were — but he was so focused on the “deep state” that he didn’t seem to notice what was happening right in front of his face. 

As the FBI surveilled Keebler, he frequently spoke about martial law. “Under marshal [sic] law, Mr. Keebler expected the federal government to turn against the people…” His attorney wrote in his sentencing memo, “He envisioned house-to-house gun confiscations and the government putting ‘undesirable’ and ‘unsalvageable’ people in FEMA camps.”

By fall 2015, Keebler was meeting with LaVoy Finicum. Finicum, too, had been excited by what he had encountered at Bundy Ranch: a group of citizens who believed in Cliven Bundy’s conspiracy theories about the federal government coming to get him. 

Finicum, after seeing Cliven Bundy successfully get away with shirking his grazing costs,  had recently violated the terms of his own BLM grazing permit — accruing fines for grazing his cattle out of season. Finicum spoke to Keebler about fortifying his property in case of a situation like Bundy Ranch — or maybe even Ruby Ridge or Waco.

“At the Bundy’s we got there after the fact. If we knew it was coming, we could be there prepared,” Keebler says. Finicum was expecting the same. He’d stopped paying his grazing fees after going to Bundy Ranch and assumed the BLM would come get him, too. “We were going to stop them from taking the cattle,” he says. “Now I don’t mean ambush assault and kill and shoot. None of that crap.” 

Keebler walks Haas and I through the plan: When the BLM came in, apparently the group planned to dig out the road the agents came in on with a backhoe — making it impossible for them to leave. Miller pushed for the group to instead explode the road, he says. Keebler said that was crazy, and the two traded words over it. 

The group, without Finicum, drove toward Mt. Trumbull, where the government says Keebler got his first view of a building owned by the BLM — the remote property that, months later, he aimed to destroy with a bomb. 

Over the course of our interview, Keebler mentioned several arguments with Miller. But he always let him stay. 

If he was so extreme, such a loose cannon, I had to wonder, why keep him?

Because Miller, Keebler says, paid for gas to go to Arizona to meet with Finicum, and Keebler alleges, even to Washington State for a secret ceremony in which he was inducted into a Coalition of Western States militia by Washington state representative Matt Shea.

According to Keeber and his attorneys, federal agents were basically bankrolling his militia. And the way Keebler sees it, those same federal agents forced him to blow up a government building. 

“The FBI covered Mr. Keebler’s expenses on many similar trips. The FBI also made repeated and timely donations to … keep it (and Mr. Keebler) afloat,” defense attorneys wrote. “In the end, Mr. Keebler did exactly what he was induced to do: he picked a target and ‘went on the offense.’”

“They were hell-bent determined to do something, and I guess I kind of let it get in my head,” Keebler says. “Maybe if we did something to kind of let them know that it’s kind of like a warning signal.”

***

Central to the Patriot movement are many, many theories about people its members believe are involved in a vast conspiracy against the American people. In my reporting, the most common names that came up in Patriot conspiracies (aside from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama) were BLM agent Dan Love, who led the Bunkerville round-up at Bundy Ranch in 2014, and Greg Bretzing, who was the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Oregon office during the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. 

After the events at Malheur, Bretzing retired from the FBI, and he now works in security, safety, and corporate affairs for a private company that builds barges and railroad cars. “So, are you plotting a conspiracy with Dan Love against the Patriot movement?” I ask him one morning last winter, sitting in his office.

Bretzing laughs. “No, no. I do know Dan Love.” 

Bretzing worked for the FBI for 22 years, for much of that time on terrorism cases, both international and domestic. I want to know how the FBI views and defines international extremist groups differently than domestic ones. The biggest difference, according to Bretzing, is the law.

“There’s clear statutes against violent acts for political purposes or to overthrow a government,” he tells me. The FBI has squads devoted to domestic terrorism — but Bretzing said membership in any group isn’t what will get the feds on your trail. 

“Anybody’s political beliefs, religious beliefs, First Amendment rights — none of that is an issue,” he says. “You can be a member of any group you want to be, and it can be a pro anything or an anti anything group. That’s fine. It’s when those groups then take steps to commit violent acts or to break the law or to defraud — that is when the FBI or other law enforcement starts to look at them.”

Someone has to break the law — or look like they’re going to break the law — to get the attention of the FBI. Bretzing is clear: The FBI does not go on fishing expeditions of people it doesn’t like. 

I tell Bretzing about the Keebler case; it didn’t ring a bell. But when I tell him more about it, he says it reminds him of a notorious 2010 case in Portland involving the would-be “Christmas tree bomber.” In that case, a young man named Mohamed Mohamud believed he was detonating a bomb that would have caused large-scale fatalities of civilians attending the city’s annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony in the center of the city. 

When Mohamud attempted, twice, to ignite the bomb — which was provided by an undercover agent — it didn’t go off. He was arrested immediately. Mohamud’s attorney argued his client was entrapped. Prosecutors argued the violent religious extremist ideology was already in place; they were preventing him from acting on it. He was convicted in 2013 for attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and sent to prison for 30 years.

“Having undercover agents inside is important to both effectively gather the evidence and to ensure that nothing violent actually does take place,” Bretzing tells me. “If you look at the tapes on Mohamed Mohamud, many, many, many times the undercover agents say, ‘We don’t have to do this. This is not something that has to be done, we can put it off … Are you sure you want to do this?’ Constantly ensuring that this is something that the individual is pushing, not the government. But the reason it’s important to have an agent inside is if an agent wasn’t there with this individual, then [they would] be taking these steps on their own.

“The public would rightfully be unhappy if then a violent act occurs and we didn’t do all we could do to stop it,” he says. 

But, how can law enforcement agencies be so sure people will go on to commit acts of violence? And what’s the right way to go after domestic terrorists? 

I ask Karen Greenberg, the director of Fordham Law School’s Center on National Security these questions. For years, she’s been examining cases that show an intersection of national security, policy, human rights, and civil liberties issues. 

Greenberg is extremely cautious of creating overarching laws that target domestic terrorists. “Washington is looking for is a domestic terrorism statute — that will be a federal one, which we don’t have. We have one for international terrorism, and it’s quite broad in its application,” she tells me. “Part of the reason is they want to be able to have greater surveillance powers.”

To apply that to domestic terrorism cases, she feels, is “a very dangerous road.” 

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I call up Michael German to get his perspective. He’s a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice now, but in the 1990s, he was an undercover FBI agent inside militia groups in Southern California and the Pacific Northwest. I want to get a sense from someone who’s been undercover why the feds might home in on a guy like Keebler. 

German says that in the years after 9/11, successive attorneys general amended guidelines that gave the feds greater flexibility. They were allowed to open investigations into people they might not have bothered with in previous years. They might look into a guy like Keebler even if they weren’t sure he was committing any crimes. That sounds like the opposite of what Bretzing told me, I say. 

“It sounds like from what you’re telling me after 2002 and after 2008 it became maybe a little bit more permissive to go on fishing expeditions of people that you don’t ideologically agree with,” I say to him.

“Right,” he says. FBI agents want to believe they don’t do that, “but clearly evidence shows the opposite.” German rattles off a list of cases and explains to me, “There was a case in Southern California where an FBI informant eventually got sideways with the FBI and came forward acknowledging that he had been directed to probably target Muslim communities in Southern California.” The agent “used listening devices to record people’s conversation when there was no suggestion they were actually involved in any kind of criminal activity,” he says. “So the difference is now that’s allowed.” 

German says the FBI doesn’t need an indicator of criminal activity anymore in order to watch a person. All they had to show was that an individual needed to be watched because they fit into the parameters of an established FBI’s mission to stop terrorism. That is, maybe they could commit a terroristic act someday in the future. 

“They have continued using that tactic and initially it was mostly used against Muslims but has broadened out because it’s a successful tactic as far as the FBI is concerned,” he says. “My concern with that is you’re targeting the lowest-hanging fruit.”

“I know from my own investigations that there are actually people out there plotting serious attacks who have obtained weapons, who have recruited people who have violent pasts, who are willing to commit violent crimes,” German adds. “Why we’re focusing on people who were so incapable and using the resources of the government to improve their capability of doing harm, rather than focusing on people who are engaging in violence, it’s hard for me to understand that that’s a legitimate use of government resources.”

For years, Greenberg has kept a close eye on international terror cases unfolding in U.S. courts, often with elements that feel similar to Keebler’s: A person believed to be associated with al-Qaeda is surrounded by informants and undercover agents, and the person of interest is given a bomb to ignite in the name of an international terror group. 

“So the FBI’s defense on this, and it’s worth thinking about, is ‘Look, I could have been al-Qaeda. I could have been an al-Qaeda operative trained and on-message. … If I could get him to do it, don’t you think an al-Qaeda guy could have gotten him to do it?’ And it works with a jury. It works. Because they say to the jury, ‘Would you have said yes to this guy?’”

  III.

In February 2016, one month after Finicum was shot by authorities after fleeing the traffic stop in Oregon, the members of Patriots Defense Force met at a Carl’s Jr. near Keebler’s home. One way this meeting had been viewed was as a planning session for the group’s next steps — ones that could have potentially led to violence.

Put another way, entirely: Keebler’s defense attorney framed this as a meeting at a fast food restaurant with two FBI agents — one of whom taunted him as a coward and pushed him toward action — and a government informant.

According to court documents, at that meeting Miller mocked Keebler, saying that the Patriots and PDF were just a group of “Facebook fuckin’ Nazis” who have a lot to say on the internet, but never take action in real life. 

Keebler, in response, suggested the group do some reconnaissance of potential targets in Salt Lake City. Miller — who, don’t forget, was there as an undercover FBI agent — suggested targeting Muslims. According to his attorney, Keebler told Miller he didn’t how to find any. Miller then offered to google a mosque, and the group drove there in two cars. 

Keebler says that once outside the mosque, agents asked him why he wouldn’t bomb it. Keebler claims he pointed to the buildings around it. “I said, ‘I’ll tell you why you can’t. You see that big-ass building behind you over your left shoulder?’” he recalls. “I said, ‘That’s one reason you can’t. You’re never getting out of this place. Second: Look at the terrain.’ 

“People were walking around coming in and outside, and started playing basketball. And I said, ‘You see that? Those are kids. There’s women and children playing basketball and shit.’ Like, y’all have lost it.” 

So, the group moved on. The caravan drove past an FBI building and a Bureau of Land Management office. Miller suggested that they send a mail bomb to it, or use a truck bomb to blow it up. Keebler, again, resisted — and the recon mission ended.

Around this point, even Davis, the other undercover agent, was unsure about the tactics he and Miller were using with Keebler. In text messages presented in court by Keebler’s defense, Davis wrote to his handler, Steve Daniels: “So I was thinking on the drive home. I hope we didn’t open Pandora’s box in a way by taking [Keebler] to a mosque he might not have found on his own. With the case winding down on our end I am worried about our liability if he happens to go back sometime on his own.” 

In another message, Davis wrote to Daniels: “I’m all for pushing him, but we can’t sound more radical to him.” Davis expressed concern that it seemed like he and Miller would leading the recon mission: “To me, that’s what it sounds like we are doing,” he texted. 

In another text, Davis noted that pushing Keebler was “grinding” on him. “I wanted to push [Keebler] outside his comfort zone to take his temperature, not lead him to something,” he wrote. “I am not down with giving him all the ideas like when [Miller] told him that we would have to mail a bomb to the BLM office … or drive a car bomb up to it. We can’t be putting crazy ideas into a crazy guy’s head.”

Daniels said he’d listen to the recordings. “I haven’t got the mail bomb stuff. (Yikes),” he wrote. 

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

If it sounds like Bill Keebler was pushed to an act of domestic terrorism by the government itself, that’s certainly what defense intimated during court proceedings. And I tried to get the government’s side of this — filing a FOIA request for the full context of these text messages. But after half a year of waiting for those documents, I still haven’t gotten a response. So I’m stuck with what Keebler tells me, sipping his coffee as he worries our waiter is watching him.

After 26 months of surveilling Keebler, he was handed an improvised explosive device by one of those undercover officers — the same one who said he had an explosives background — and a detonator. Together with the agents, they made the long drive from Keebler’s Utah home, several hours south in the rough desert of Northern Arizona, to an empty BLM building. 

Arguably, along the way, Keebler had plenty of opportunities to say stop, turn around, let’s not do this, I can’t. But he didn’t. And when the bomb was placed at the building near Mt. Trumbull by the undercover agent — near where the Bundy’s ancestors once tried to make a home — Keebler’s finger was the only one on the button. 

Court documents show differing views on what Keebler was willing to do if people were inside the building. In sworn testimony, Daniels told the court that Keebler and Miller discussed what to do if BLM officers were inside, and Keebler “made a comment of: ‘fuck ‘em.’”

He hit the button three times. An explosion went off, but Keebler was too far away to see that his “bomb” was actually a fake, and the sound he heard was a concussion grenade deployed by the FBI. His lawyer called his intent to destroy the place a “serious property crime.” The government called it a bombing. 

***

I ask Keebler what the federal government, ideally, would look like to him. After Bundy Ranch, what did he decide he’d like to see change? 

He says not only does he want the federal government to stay out of the business of individual states, he wants it to be purged of the people he believes are ruining the country. The “deep state,” he says. 

“Everybody knows they’ve outlawed prayer in school,” he says. “You can’t do the Pledge of Allegiance in our schools, but now we got Muslims praying in the hallways in our schools and in our classrooms, and teachers are now making kids dress up like Muslims. And —”

“Where is this happening?” I stop him.

“A number of places. Yeah. They have taken over whole cities. 

“They want to stop prayer, they want to stop all the American stuff. The Boy Scouts and everything. Make it Islam. They’re out there on the streets right now with hundreds of them bowing, they’ve shut down whole roads, and the cops are standing over them making sure nobody interrupts them. Are you serious? It’s what Bradley tanks are for. You get about 50 rednecks with four-wheel-drive pickups and we’ll end that problem.” 

Keebler is advocating for something that sounds like intimidation at best, and slaughtering Muslims in the streets of America at the worst. And it’s all informed by his conspiratorial worldview. Maybe this is the kind of talk that brought the FBI to him.

“They have their own cops now,” he says. They’re arresting Christians, he says, and I’m shaking my head at him. It’s on the internet, he says. “You need to do your homework.”

“Do you think the federal government is involved in that?” Haas, my producer, asks. 

None of this is based in fact, but that doesn’t matter to Keebler. “I know damn well they are,” he says defiantly.

It should be no shock at this point to tell you that Keebler is an ardent Donald Trump supporter. He loves him. 

“Obama’s not even a black. He’s not African American, he’s Muslim — Kenya or some shit,” Keebler says. “The agreement that they put him in as the president is that he would make way for more Muslims to be up again in the United States. That’s what’s actually come out recently.”

“But who says that?” I press him.

“One of the news — some reporter somewhere,” he says. 

“Soros is financing a lot of it,” Keebler says, calmly, like this is a normal thing to believe and I’m thinking, again, about how people can pick ideas like these up from Trump now. 

It seems like this is what happens when conspiracies become the language the powerful use to communicate to disenfranchised people aching for a target — an explanation and a reason — for their discontent.

“A lot of this is about the New World Order. Look at the pedophilia going on right now. …  It’s all over the internet.” Keebler looks from Haas to me and back again, shocked at our ignorance. 

“I can’t believe y’all don’t know none of this stuff,” he says.

But what would be the point of “knowing” something that isn’t real? 

****

Before we leave Keebler, I ask him about the bylaws of Patriots Defense Force — which were presented as evidence against him in his case. 

I was particularly drawn to the “alert levels” that spell out how members should react in various stages of emergencies. In the worst-case scenario — a level 5 or “black” situation — the bylaws tell militia members to prepare for the absolute worst: “Get gear, family and haul ass to pre-arranged rendezvous point, or bunker down,” it reads. “THE BALLOON HAS GONE UP!”

“What is the shit hits the fan scenario?” I ask.

“During the Obama administration,” he says, “if he calls martial law I’m not gonna wait till he comes to my town. It’s too late. That would have been a shit hit the fan.” 

“So what’s the difference now?”

“I think if Trump declares martial law, it would be in a more controlled manner. He’s not coming after Patriots. He’s not coming after militia,” he says. 

“Do you mean he’s not coming after white people?” I ask.

“No. No, see there you go pushing the racist bullshit,” he says, despite the fact that, for two hours, he’s been talking about Muslims in the most hateful terms I’ve ever heard in an in-person conversation.

“What do you think happens if the Democrats impeach Trump or some kind of charges are brought?” he asks us. “What do you think happens? It’s over. All bets are off,” says Keebler.

“What does that mean?” Haas asks him. 

“All bets are off,” he smiles. “Take that for what it’s worth. People are wanting retaliation. They want revenge, they want payback for a lot of things. This abortion crap. What happened to LaVoy. What is happening to our children. What has happened to our streets. What is happening in our schools. People want retribution.”

***

Bill Keebler says he’s never even heard of Panaca, Nevada. Never heard of a Jones, or a Cluff or another bomb in the desert the summer he tried to bomb the BLM building. I’ve learned tons about the Patriots from talking to him, but nothing more about Panaca.  

We spend the next week driving through the mountains, through deserts, through towns built by polygamists and pioneers. I see the appeal of life out here. Of disappearing into the wild and forgetting about the rest of the world.  

But no matter how many times I use my job as an excuse to disappear into parts of the West I wouldn’t otherwise go to, I always end up feeling a sense of relief when I’m back, sitting in traffic in a city again. 

I’m thinking of Keebler the next day, at the TSA checkpoint inside McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas. Where people say goodbye to their family members and start to weave through a long, snaking line, there’s a man who looks as rumpled as Keebler — but isn’t white — seated with three police officers standing around him. 

It’s a busy Sunday, there are people and kids waiting in line, watching this scene. Things seem calm, albeit weird. And then the man raises his voice. I’m close enough to hear him yell something about the Constitution, about liberty. And the officers stand him up and restrain his wrists behind his back, then lead him away. The line slithers on.

But something’s different. At the front of the line a TSA agent barks orders: Stand side by side. Walk slowly. As we progress two by two, a thick black dog led by a Homeland Security agent sniffs everyone in a circle. I hear the guy being led away shout something about “We, the People.”

The orders continue. Show your ID. Put it away. Shoes off? No, shoes on. Take out your laptops. Use two bins for all your stuff. Stop. Walk. Wait. 

It’s a language we all seem to speak in a dialect that’s always changing, for reasons we don’t know — but what we understand is that this language doesn’t include the words that guy was saying. Or, what he is now likely still saying somewhere else in this airport, in a secret place or room we also know, but don’t really.

I think about Keebler, how I could see him in that same situation here, and how he’s been called a terrorist, and yet still, there’s all these things we don’t know about the government’s role in his story. His case is sealed tight. Why are they keeping it so opaque?

I’m still not convinced a guy like Keebler really could carry out an elaborate bomb plot without ample help. But even so, there’s one thing in court documents that I kept coming back to: that in the hours after Keebler believed he detonated a bomb, as he drove back to Utah, amped up on what he’d just done, he offered a declaration. According to the government, Keebler said after the bombing, “This isn’t about LaVoy, it’s what he stood for.” 

In Panaca, police reports said Jones mentioned LaVoy Finicum in the same breath as his bomb. And now here, with Keebler, there he is again. 

All these years later, the ghost of LaVoy Finicum continues to push the Patriot movement forward. And yet all this time I’ve been reporting on this movement, I know so little about him. He was the guy who was killed by police, who no one heard hide nor hair of before Bundy Ranch. But what did he actually believe and why is it so persuasive? 

I can understand how people who have questions, who never get answers, form their own explanations. How out here in the West, so far from where the decisions are made about how this society works, people can’t figure out how to access the information they need. Everything about Keebler’s case feels Orwellian. He’s a racist, and it’s easy to write him off. But I see now how writing him off means patrolling what he thinks, and that policing certain thoughts — no matter how gross — means a denial of certain rights. 

At the airport, I don’t ask questions about which of my liberties are being violated when I go through the security line. I don’t scream and shout about the Constitution when I’m loading my laptop into the bin. Or when I take off my shoes. Or when I put my hands above my head in a machine that seems to suggest it can see through me for things maybe even I don’t know are there.

***

Leah Sottile is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in theWashington Post, Playboy, California Sunday Magazine, Outside, The Atlantic and Vice.

Editors: Mike Dang and Kelly Stout Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk Fact checker: Matt Giles Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Special thanks to everyone at Oregon Public Broadcasting.

[zipgrowth]

New Book Looks for 'Timeless' Approach to Rethinking Schools

The key to reforming schools is imagination—and bringing the spirit of shows like The Jetsons or Star Trek to school design. That means throwing out all preconceptions and revisioning how school could be designed for today’s needs.

That’s the argument made in a new book, “Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools.”

EdSurge recently sat down with two of the book’s co-authors, Pam Moran, and Ira Socol, to better understand their argument, and ask what practical advice they have for teachers and administrators looking to transform schools. Moran is a former superintendent of the Albemarle School district, in Virginia, and Socol is a former school chief technology officer in Virginia. Between the two of them, they've probably seen more schools, more kids and more teachers than most people ever do in a lifetime.

Listen to highlights of the discussion on this week’s EdSurge On Air podcast. You can follow the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you listen. The transcript below has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

EdSurge: Your book is about thinking practically about how children learn, and about what we've learned about children’s learning. How has that changed over the years for you?

Ira Socol: We're both observers of children. That's one of the things that brought us together. We come from very different backgrounds, and very different sort of educational experiences, but we spent a lot of time watching.

I was a former New York City police officer. I also have trained in art and architecture, and I think one of the things that I learned early in my education career was that while those three previous careers of mine involved a lot of learning how to see. Education has not included that real study of how you observe the world, and one of the things we started right at the beginning of our work was walking classrooms together and looking at how we saw children learning both inside and outside schools.

Pam, you actually studied as a field biologist. How did looking from the point of view of a field biologist change the way you look at a classroom?

Pam Moran: When I became an educator, and started to really process the way that education works, I realized that education is an ecosystem. We're a web. We are connected, and what one person does in one room, even though it may be very isolated from other people, it can have ripples all the way through the system.

I really believe that observation is key to what we need to learn to do well, that observation is what people do to study in the ecosystem. We certainly collect data, but it also has a qualitative side to it. If you're looking at a classroom of children, and you are focusing on that scientific model, which is about checklists of what makes this classroom efficient and effective, you may actually miss some of the nuances of the system.

You say this is timeless learning, and it's how imagination changes the way we think about schooling. Where does the imagination come in?

Socol: One of the things that's really important in transforming schools is to say we don't have to use research-based practices in everything because if they're research based practices, it means they're old. They've been [around] long enough to have been studied, and that's informative, but it doesn't describe where we need to go.

We're at this time of massive transition in our society and in our economies. The last transition this dramatic happened in the 1840s when the telegraph, the steamship, railroads and penny newspapers all changed the communication structure of society completely. That's when our schools were built, that's when our schools were created.

Now we're at a time where for the first time in human history, we've really achieved a very low cost of information, and students have access to all sorts of resources people never had before. And we have to imagine a future. You know, I'm old enough to have grown up in the ‘60s when, as funny as it seems, we were promised flying cars, and living under the sea. These were massively imaginative views of what was possible.

So many things have been completely transformed since then because of the imagination. The education system is the one thing that's truly lagged behind in that. I think we just need a much higher level of dreaming.

No need for research-based practices? That's an interestingly controversial comment these days. You don't want them?

Socol: I want research. I don't want to be ruled by the kinds of research that have dominated the last 50 years. One of the problems I have is the standards of research-based practices, and how you try to isolate a single element. I don't believe that an environment ever operates along single elements of change. What's funny is if you start to unpack these greatest research studies, the only significant thing you can pull out of all the research in the last 40 years that really affects student achievement is letting kids eat all day. Food and drink makes kids happier, and they work better.

But, surely we must have learned something else.

Socol: What we know about the human brain now is 100 times what we knew just 20 years ago. I think that's really important.

You mentioned imagination, and the ‘60s when we had shows like The Jetsons. When we look at some of the movies, fiction movies are often a way that we express our cultural imagination. We see two things right now. We see superhero movies, and we see highly dystopian movies. What does that say about our vision of the future?

Moran: For too long, we had a mass standardization of everything, and that comes from evidence-based practices. This is how you need to kind of lock step your work, and in the worst case scenarios in our schools, it looks like cookie cutter, or a curriculum where everybody's on the same page doing the same thing at the same time. We're on the same screen today. In the best case scenario, you know teachers have a little bit more freedom to experiment, but what we don't do is to recognize that teachers have been some of the most amazing imagineers, and do it yourself exemplifying sort of the do it yourself culture, because of the fact that when you have so many constraints on resources, teachers can imagine how to use things very differently than when you don't have those constraints.

If we really want to get to a place where we truly have equity of opportunity, equity of access, and equity of a rich learning world for all students, then we have to really look at the structures we have, and imagine what would it look like if those structures didn't exist. That leads to the other theme of our book, Observation, Imagination, and Zero-Based Thinking.

What is zero-based thinking, exactly?

Socol: Zero-based thinking is pulled from the corporate world, but it's based in the idea that in order to truly imagine a future that's different, to imagine something that's different, you have to erase from your mind that belief in everything that you know now.

Moran: I've seen this play out in a couple of ways. I walked into a classroom at the beginning of a school year a couple of years ago, and everything in the classroom was in the middle of the floor. All of the stuff that was on shelves, everything, books, everything was piled. It looked like it was going to be a bonfire, and I looked at the teacher, and I said, “Steve, what's going on here?”

And, he said, “Every year I have kids come to me and say, ‘Where's this? Where's this, where's this?’” And, he said, “I decided to start the year by putting everything in a pile, and saying to the class, Organize the room the way you think it will work for you."

Did it work?

Moran: His kids took all that stuff, they organized it, put it in the places, and I think continued to maybe evolve it over the course of the year. I was back a couple months later, and I said to him, I said, “So, how did it go?” He said, “I'm the one now that's asking the question, where do I find the ...” He said, “But the kids know where everything is.”

A bigger example is that when we started talking about building a new high school, we brought in a firm, and said, “We want you to do a really deep dive look at the work that we're doing, and at the needs that we have in terms of capacity, and come back with a solution for anew high school.” They came back with an idea that we didn't need a new high school because we said we want you to do zero-based thinking.

What they came back with was the idea of finding the potential for community-based centers, and maybe what you don't need is a comprehensive high school. Maybe you need a series of spaces where kids can move as they go through their high school experience out into the community, and that gave birth to Albemarle Tech, a 45,000 square foot warehouse that was empty rebuilt to serve three different purposes.

One being offices for a department for technology, another being a professional development center for the instructional programs for the system, and third, a small center environment as a startup where kids come there to work on projects that they wanna work on, and there's no...

Socol: No classes, no classrooms.

I bet that there are a lot of educators who would both love to work in an environment like that, and help build an environment like that. How do you get started though?

Moran: Try it out on a small scale, and then try to blow it up and figure out not how to scale it as the same idea in every school.

New Book Looks for 'Timeless' Approach to Rethinking Schools published first on https://medium.com/@GetNewDLBusiness

[megamanxfanfics]

S.V - Ep. 6: Recover the Laser! Fire the Enigma Cannon!!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

INT. NEW MHHQ – Control Room - NIGHT

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Caption: 7:00 PM

Alia walks into the Control Room to report to Signas.

ALIA: (sighing) 7 PM and our heroes are fast asleep…

SIGNAS: There are 12 hours left and just one more device to get until collision. I think we’re alright if they take a short nap.

[Insert Title Card – Recover the Laser! Fire the Enigma Cannon!!]

ALIA: (worried) Hmmm…

SIGNAS: I know, it’s anxiety-inducing, but we have to let them rest.  Have faith.  They’ve saved the world so many times before.

ALIA: I know.. I’m just.. not used to being this close to the action, ya know?

SIGNAS: Hm?

ALIA: In the past, I always focused on my Research to distract me during the tough times. We tried to create cures for the Maverick Virus or at least find ways to combat it… When my old boss, Dr. Doppler failed to do that, I lost a lot of faith in the world.  Then my next boss, Berkana turned on us as well..

SIGNAS: (nodding) From Laguz Island…  I remember reading up on that.

ALIA: Up until now, I feel like I’ve been constantly on the run from the Maverick Virus.  My colleague escaped with me to a new lab, over in Abel City but… that didn’t work out.

SIGNAS: (curious) What happened?

ALIA: We were only trying to help!  The Great Repliforce War was in full effect, and my old colleague Gate…  He just wanted his enhanced Reploids to join the battle. But… our Superior felt that it wasn’t our place. She did everything she could to sabotage his operation.  Including… threaten my termination if I didn’t comply…

SIGNAS: (gasping, surprised) Oh nooo…

ALIA: I took this job, because I needed a serious change.  But now, all I see is the constant struggle that you guys face against the Maverick Virus! …I’m sorry, but… I just don’t know if I can handle it.

She chokes up and looks away, trying to contain herself.

Signas calmly walks over to her and places his hands on her shoulders.

SIGNAS: (comforting) Alia…  I hired you, because you are exactly the type of person that we need. Especially, right now.  Your analytical skills are beyond top-notch, and I’ve been meaning to put good use to that Research background of yours.  So now is as good a time as any.  Come.  I have something to show you.

ALIA: Hm?

He leads her to his main computer screen and pulls up a halogen image of the DNA Data they have retrieved from Grizzly Slash, Duff McWhalen and Squid Adler.

ALIA: (shocked) This is... DNA!!

SIGNAS: (affirming) Yep.  Here is the DNA Data that X & Zero have acquired from the Mavericks, so far…  Why don’t you and Douglas see if you can make something useful out of it, while we wait for them to wake up??

Alia gasps.

ALIA: (wide-eyed) This is… Wonderful!

SIGNAS: (smiling) You had mentioned your strong background in Research at our interview. So I figured, why does that have to change?

She nods with a brightness in her eyes, which livens up her spirits once again.

ALIA: Ohhh, Thank you, boss!  You have no idea what this means to me.

She can’t help herself and gives him a hug.

SIGNAS: (surprised) Oh! Hahah.  My pleasure.  

He reciprocates the hug, patting her on the back, twice.

SIGNAS: Go ahead. Do what you love, Alia.

He lets her go to work as she happily runs out of the room and heads for the R & D lab across the hall.

He returns to his chair with a smug beam on his face. From nearby, David turns over to Signas and leans in.

DAVID: Hey, what was that all about?

SIGNAS: She just had the first day jitters… Go ahead and send out Frenzy Fox to recover that Energy Cart.  Then, alert me when X and Zero wake up.  With any luck, we can fire the Enigma Cannon tonight!

- cut to-

-----------------------------------------------------------------------  INT. NEW MHHQ – Infirmary – NIGHT ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Caption: Four hours later, 11:00 PM

Zero stirs awake and rips the energen feeding tubes off of his arms.  He looks over at X in shock, who seems to have been in the same state as him.He quickly sits up on his bed, leans over and shakes X by the shoulder.

ZERO: (shocked) X!  Wake up.

X: (groggy) Hmm? /Oh!

X grows wide-eyed at the sight of an alert, Zero who has fully recovered.

ZERO: How long have we been out, man?  We gotta get that Laser Device!

X blinks and feels his heart race at once. He sits up in bed.

X: (rising, tired) Yeeeah! Ogh.  Let’s go!

Zero stands up and helps X get out of bed.

ZERO: Alright. Come on, man!

They run out of the room.

-pan to-

-----------------------------------------------------------------------  INT. NEW MHHQ – Corridors – NIGHT ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 

X and Zero run down the hallway as they receive a com-link from Signas.

SIGNAS: (o.s, filtered, surprised) Oh! You’re both up. Excellent!  Pop in to the R & D Lab before you both set off on your next mission.  Alia and Douglas have some surprises for you.

X and Zero both look at each other, quizzically.

X & ZERO: Huh?

-pan to-

-----------------------------------------------------------------------  INT. NEW MHHQ – R & D Lab – NIGHT -----------------------------------------------------------------------

X and Zero walk in to see Douglas and Alia high five each other.

ALIA: Yes!

X: Hey, guys. What’s going on??

ALIA: Oh, I’m glad you’re both up so soon. Check out what we’ve been working on!

They both walk over to their work table, with interest.  They see that five new items in the form of data chips are waiting for them.

ZERO: What is this?

DOUGLAS: Remember how we said I could make new parts for you guys??  Well, this is it!

He proudly displays five colorful chips, before them.

ZERO: (scoffing) Hmph… I don’t need any power-ups.

ALIA: (annoyed) Wait!  We’ve been working on these for the last 4 hours. The least you could do is listen to us.

Zero rolls his eyes and folds his arms, reluctantly.

ZERO: Okaay.  What have you got?

ALIA: I’d change my tone if I were you, because most of them are for you…

Zero jerks back for a second, surprised.

ZERO: What!?

X chuckles as she continues with a scowl.

ALIA: Well, first of all, Grizzly Slash was good for more than just his Crescent slashing abilities.  We were also able to create a Shock Buffer defense out of his DNA Data.

X: (intrigued) Shock Buffer?

ALIA: This decreases the amount of damage taken by half!

X: Ooh.

DOUGLAS: It also keeps you from being knocked back after taking a hit.

ZERO: (nodding) Alright.

DOUGLAS: We were then able to make a Super Recover chip from Duff McWhalen’s DNA Data.

ZERO: What’s that?

DOUGLAS: This makes all energen and weapon refill capsules restore twice as much power than usual.

X & ZERO: (surprised) Whoa.

ALIA: The last three are for Zero, exclusively. Sorry, X…

X shakes his head, paying no mind.

ALIA: This next chip, I think you’ll like. We call it the Z-Saber extend.

ZERO: (attracted) What?

ALIA: With this equipped, your Z-Saber will project a small wave of crescent energy with each slash, increasing your range by about 10%.

ZERO: Wow. Okay, I’m interested…

ALIA: (glowing, excited) Then you’ll Love the next two…  These are weapon items, extracted straight from McWhalen and Kraken’s core DNA.

ZERO: (nodding) Alright.

ALIA: First is Duff McWhalen’s Flying Splasher, which will give you more of a defensive Air-Dash that you can control with directional flight.

ZERO: (shocked) I can fly with this!?

ALIA: Only momentarily. Don’t get too excited. But yes. Your air-dash should be more mobile than before.  And you’ll be coated in a protective layer of the same material as X’s Goo-Shaver.

Zero looks at X.

ZERO: What’s that??

X: It’s like a water-based Plasma. I can’t really explain it, but it’s powerful stuff.  It’s what helped me bring down Squid…

He looks at his buster with slight remorse.

ALIA: Well, speaking of Squid Adler, that’s where this last chip comes from.   We’ve correlated his electric weapon data to interact directly with your Z-Saber, which will give you an awesome striking Electric Blade.

ZERO: Ooh.

DOUGLAS: (smiling) Still don’t want these Power-ups???

ZERO: (bothered, smile) Alright, gimme ‘em. X can have the Shock Buffer and Super Recover though. I don’t want to hog them all.

X shakes his head.

X: No, that’s okay.

ALIA: Huh???

X: I have the Force Armor, and another one on the way. I’m okay.  Really, I think Zero should have them.

ZERO: Are you sure??  All of them???

X: (smiling) I’m positive.  Let’s save the World, Zero.

He puts his fist out for a friendly bump with the most confident and sharp look in his eyes.

Zero gives him a nod and then a fist-bump with a smile.

X runs out of the room, while Zero equips his new power-up chips.

DOUGLAS: Wow!  And here you thought you weren’t getting any of these.

ZERO: Alriight, alriiight.

Zero gets equipped with all 5 of the power-up Data Chips within his gauntlet. Then he looks up with an eager grin.

ZERO: Man! I can’t wait to test out these new abilities.

ALIA: (content) We’ll be right here.  I’ll be on coms guiding you both every step of the way.  Now, go!

She leans up and gives him a friendly pat on the shoulder, but he simply turns around and runs away, ignoring her.

ALIA: (reacting) Oh…

DOUGLAS: Something wrong?

She combs her hair with her hand for a second and walks over to the monitor.

ALIA: N-no..  I just hope they’re successful on this mission…

DOUGLAS: (smirking) Uh huh.

-cut to-

-----------------------------------------------------------------------  EXT. NOVIKOVO – Fortress Lab – DAY -----------------------------------------------------------------------

Caption: 9:05 AM - Russian Time

In the solitude of Novikovo, Russia lies a rich, fortified lab, hidden from sight by numerous tall mountains.

X and Zero teleport to the area and take in the sight of his massive fortress.  They land on a cobblestone roof, just before a drawbridge, which leads to the entrance of the fortress.

ZERO: Whoa… This place, is huge.

X and Zero instantly explore the area as they kick-jump up a small wall, which leads to the large drawbridge.

ALIA: (o.s, filtered) We can learn lots about Dr. Izzy Glow just from looking at this Laboratory… He is the world leading authority on laser technology. Therefore, the laser he created will be great use to the Enigma. I hope he will willingly give one to us, but… …I heard he is a very stubborn person so this might not be easy.

Zero grins.

ZERO: Well, I can be very stubborn, myself. Come on, X!

X nods and readies his buster

Zero pulls out his saber and slashes at the draw bridge a couple of times, admiring his new orange-tinted extended slashes as he cuts at the bridge a little harder.

X shoots level-1 shots at the bridge until it is forced down to lie flat, before the actual entrance of the hallway.

They both run on top of the bridge, which does not quite reach the hallway entrance. They stop short, when they see that below them is a dangerous bed of spikes.

ZERO: Whooa, let’s steer clear of that.

X:

Yeah!

They both carefully dash-jump inside Dr. Izzy Glow’s Fortress.

-      pan to-

-----------------------------------------------------------------------  INT. FORTRESS LAB – Hallway Entrance – DAY ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 

They proceed down the red-carpet steps, before a long wall where a Met jumps out at them.

X: (gasping) Haven’t seen one of these in a while.

He shoots at it a couple of times, but his pellet shots are blocked by it’s hard-hat.  After a moment, the met peeks his little face out, while Zero dashes and takes a strike at the air.  His extended slash is able to reach the met from a distance, surprising both him and X.

X looks over to him.

X: Whoa, you get a pretty good reach with that thing.

ZERO: It’s like a complete extra slash! I’m gonna have to get used to that.

ALIA: (o.s, filtered) Hehehe.

They both kick-jump up the wall before them and spot another met on the other side of the carpeted floor.  This time X takes it down with some carefully aimed level 1 shots, while Zero drops down and leads the way.  Zero runs into another wall and kick-jumps up towards a Guardian drone, which he easily cuts down once it’s shield guard is up.  

They drop down through the opening corridor as they come near a lethal chandelier of spikes.

ALIA: (o.s, filtered) Whoa, careful!  The platforms above you can’t be destroyed, so you will have to time it just right to get through…

X: (acknowledging) Right!

They both wait and see two spike chandeliers rapidly drop down before them.

ZERO: Damn!  This guy really doesn’t want any visitors.

ALIA: (o.s, filtered) Told yaa.

The chandeliers slowly rise up, out of sync, but with their opening they dash through and pass the platforms.

ALIA: (o.s, filtered) Oh no!!

ZERO: Hm??

X: What is it?

Zero slashes another guardian and met down, while Alia speaks.

ALIA: (o.s, filtered) There’s another researcher and he’s stuck just beyond that board above you.

X: Hmph!

X transforms into his Force Armor with a quick flash of white light and looks up at the board with a determined face.  He fires a charged plasma shot to the wooden plank, but it is simply absorbed into the mysterious virus-infected board.

X: Whaat?

ALIA: (o.s, filtered) It’s just like I thought…  You can’t break through the board unless you use a special weapon.

Zero perks up and sparks his Z-saber with lightning.

ZERO: Allow me!!

He uses his new rising Electric Blade attack, but unfortunately it does not work.

ZERO: What!?

He jumps up and tries to use his Crescent Blade slashes in the air, multiple times, but to no avail.

ZERO: Damn it!

X shoots a charged Goo-Shaver at it, which does not work either.

X: Nothing is working!!!

ALIA: (o.s, filtered) Try… Dragoon’s Rising Fire.  You should have it again..

X: (surprised) Really??

X looks up, concentrates and shifts his armor into red and white as he charges up.

X: (concentrating) Shuuuuryukeeeen!!!!

Zero takes cover as X blasts through the wooden planks only to find more spiked chandeliers in his way.

X: (reacting) Whoa!!

He quickly air-dashes and holds on to the wall, setting off his thrusters.  Once the chandeliers rise, he is able to kick-jump up the wall and assist the researcher in need.

RESEARCHER: (grateful) Ohh. Thank you!  I was installing Dr. Glow’s enhanced security platforms when this board mysteriously appeared and trapped me inside.

X nods.

X: That’s Sigma’s virus. It’s been awful to us all.  Here.

He pulls out a teleporter ring and offers it to the Researcher.

RESEARCHER: Be careful!  I fear this Fortress is ridden with the Virus.  You’ll need this.

He pulls a Power-cell out from his compartment belt and offers it to X in return.

X gasps and takes it.

X: Thank you!  Where’d you get this?

RESEARCHER: (insulted) We make them!

X: What?

The Researcher takes the teleporter ring and sends himself away.

X makes a confused face as he drops down to an impatient Zero.

ZERO: Come on, X!!!

-      pan to –

-----------------------------------------------------------------------  INT. FORTRESS LAB – Chandelier Trap - DAY ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Zero dashes across the hall to a set of ladders.  He ignores them and double-jumps in the middle of the room, narrowly bypassing a chandelier that comes down right behind him.

With the chandelier lowered, X uses the first ladder and then catches up to Zero at the second ladder with an air-dash, while the chandelier rises.

At the top level of the room X and Zero spot a guardian waiting for them at the other side of the rising chandelier.

ZERO: Got this one!!

He fearlessly air-dashes toward the guardian mechaniloid and sets off his new F-Splasher forcefield around his body.  His air-dash is just as short, but he is able to direct it more as an attack, lowering himself right into the mechaniloid as it crumbles under his water-based plasma power.

X & ZERO: Whoa!!

X: Damn, Zero. Are you crazy??

Zero looks at him with wild eyes.

ZERO: After staying in the game this long? - You know it!!

X makes an amused, but concerned face as Zero takes the lead once again.

-pan to-

-----------------------------------------------------------------------  INT. FORTRESS LAB – Spiked Room - DAY ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 

They both pass the platform to find a spiked floor below them and a series of spiked chandeliers hanging on chains from the ceiling.  

X: Oh man… How should we tackle this one?

ALIA: (o.s, filtered)

You should proceed by stepping on the platforms.  Please be careful.

ZERO: (revved up) You heard her!

Zero anxiously air-dashes to the first chandelier platform after it drops.  Then the next, as they both rise towards the ceiling.

Zero turns around and gives X a thumbs up.

ZERO: See X?  It’s no biggie…  Just do what I do.

X looks in horror and points behind him.

X: Look out!!!

ZERO: Huh??

He turns around to find a small purple Sigma head with devilish horns right behind him.

ZERO: SIGMA! What the- Uaarrrggghhhh!!!!!

SIGMA: (v.o, echoing) Heeheeheeheehee.

With no time to react, Zero has no choice, but to dash through Sigma’s head, which dissipates and relinquishes itself into his pores like a ghost virus.

X & ALIA: (horrified, o.s, filtered)

Oh NOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!

Zero glows with a purple aura as he air-dashes to the other side and carefully looks at his body.

X: (wary, worried) ZEEERRROOO!!!!!

The purple aura slowly disappears as Zero stares at his hands and blinks, confused and awestruck.  He keeps his back to X and stands there in silence.

ALIA: (o.s, filtered, scared) Oh, God…

X fights through the chandelier platforms with a determined glare in his eyes as he nears, Zero.

ZERO: It’s… okay.

X lands right behind him.

X: (fretful) Huh?

Zero turns around with his armor looking pristine and glossy, as if he was first created.

ZERO: (surprised) I’m.. okay!!!

He shows X his clean hands, opening and closing them as if they are brand new.  

ALIA: Was it the Shock-Buffer that protected you??

ZERO: Maybe… I don’t know…

He twists his wrists and stretches his fingers, until he unfurls the Z-Buster from his right hand only to find that it has completely been repaired.

X: (worried) What the-

Zero shakes his head.

X: Did Sigma just… repair you???

ZERO:

(wide-eyed) I don’t… know!

He makes a firm grimace of his own as he looks away, trying to focus on the mission.

X: Why would he do that…?  And how???

He shakes his head, a little more annoyed.

ZERO: I don’t, know!!  Come on, we don’t have any time.

He runs away, while X is left to simply shake it off and continue to push past more chandelier obstacles in a short maze-like descending hallway.

They both wrestle through short spiked chandeliers and a couple of mets in their way, before they find another Researcher who looks hurt, near a tall chandelier.

ZERO: Here, man.

He gives the researcher a teleporter ring and air-dashes above, into another descending set of spiked platforms.

ALIA: (o.s, filtered) Break the door that you can see below, and proceed to the next room.

They carefully make their way down until they find the door and break it down a combined charge shots.

ZERO: (smirking) Haven’t done that in years…

He runs in to the next room.

-      pan to –

-----------------------------------------------------------------------  INT. FORTRESS LAB – Spiral Staircase - DAY ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 

In the next room, they come to a flight of stairs which spiral upward seemingly endlessly.

X: (worried) Zero, are you sure you’re okay?

They come across a bunch of spiky mechaniloids and tiny hotarion firefly mechaniloids.  

ZERO: (upset) I don’t want to talk about it!

He slashes the spikys down with an extended slash.  Then he crescent slashes a set of hotarian’s brutally and swiftly air-dashes ahead.

X: (reaching out) Waait!!

X dashes, only to get cut off by another ghost virus of Sigma’s head, which has appeared before him.

SIGMA: (v.o, echoing) Heheheh….

X: (spooked) Whoooa!

X blasts him with level 1 shots, but they go right through him.  He frantically dashes around the ghost virus and runs away from him.

SIGMA: (v.o, echoing) What’s the matter??

It disappears and reappears before him, as X gets stung by some hotarian lasers in the process.

SIGMA: (v.o, echoing) Are you scared that I might find you? …The real youuuu???

An image of iX appears in X’s mind.

He charges up.

X: NNNNNOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!

X blasts a large Plasma shot, which takes out a set of hotarians in his way as he finally catches up to Zero, who has been halted by aPrism Guardian.

Four poles have dropped from the ceiling, in which three block-shaped laser turrets have taken their positions against Zero and fired their first set of lasers at him.

Zero manages to jump to the far pole and cling to it with his wire-hook, evading the bottom two laser blasts.  However, he takes the brunt of the top laser blast as he attempts to slash it down with his Z-Saber.

ZERO: Auughh!

X: /AAH!!

X blasts down the laser turret that was hurting Zero with a Plasma Shot, while the other two, retreat back into the ceiling.

Zero drops down with a grateful look.

X: You okay?

Zero makes a weakened smile and gives him a silent thumbs up.

Then, three more laser turrets come down in different positions.  X and Zero fire and crescent slash at two pink turrets near them, but their attacks only ricochet off.

X uses his old Aiming Laser, which attackes all three turrets at the same time with a green, red and yellow laser.  The black turret is the only one, which is affected and destroyed.

X: The black turret is the target!

ZERO: Nice, X!!

The turrets retreat once again, and then reappear in different positions.  A black turret is directly above Zero.

He narrows his eyes with a smirk and uppercuts it with an Electric Blade slash.

ZERO: (proud) Yeah!!!

X smiles at his partner, then charges up as he sees them come down again.  This time, the black turret is in the middle, while a pink turret lands directly in front of him.  He jumps on the pink turret and blasts the black one away with a Plasma Shot before it can fire upon him.

The other lasers fire anyway, despite missing their targets and retreat into the ceiling once again.

When they reappear, Zero double jumps towards the far black turret and uses his crescent spinning slashes to annihilate the Prism Guardian.  With his last attack, the entire Security system explodes and the poles themselves are fried out of their sockets, falling down to the ground, pathetically.

ALIA: (o.s, filtered) Wow! You did it!!

ZERO: (cocky) As if there was any doubt…

ALIA: (o.s, filtered) Okaay, okaay. Easy, boys.  There should be a teleporter at the end of the stair-case.  Proceed with caution.

The two smile as they run towards the teleporter and use it, one after another.

-pan to-

-----------------------------------------------------------------------  INT. FORTRESS LAB – Top Defense Systems - DAY ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 

X and Zero teleport into a nice open hallway with an excellent view of the mountains by an open balcony with gorgeous architecture.  But these sights are ruined by spiky mechaniloids which bounce after them on the luxurious carpeted floor.

X: Aah!

X fires level-1 pellets at them, annoyed as they are put down quite easily.  They make their way up a carpeted ramp, which leads towards a very threatening laser cannon.

ALIA: (o.s, filtered) His defense system is engaged. It attacks you with powerful plasma. You may be able to neutralize it with your other weapons.

X: Hmm…

He tries his X-Buster, but it ricochets off. Zero’s Z-Buster, as well.

Zero then tries using his crescent slashes, which work like a charm as they completely destroy the large laser cannon.

X: Nice, work Zero.

They look up and come to find that the whole hallway above them is riddled with these laser cannons.

X: Oh man. We have our work cut out for us.

ZERO: Then let’s get started!!

Zero double-jumps up, ignoring the ladder right by them and kick-jumps off the wall to reach the next floor, only to get knocked down by a large Plasma Blast.

X carefully climbs up the ladder and creates a forcefield out of his C-Shot, immediately destroying the laser cannon.

X: Hmph, That’s what you get.

X dash-jumps over Zero and dashes ahead.

Zero shakes his head with a smile as he gets up.

ZERO: Whatever..

He dashes after him, up the ramp.

With X’s C-Shot forcefield, he runs through a hotarion and easily kick-jumps through two defense systems on the wall, as he reaches the next floor. Then, his radar suddenly perks up.

[RADAR]: Light Capsule above.

X: (gasping) Really??

His C-Shot forcefield dissipates when he looks up and finds a small nook near the ceiling.

X: Ooh.

Zero catches up with X, to see him distracted by another power-up.

ZERO: While you’re busy with that, I’ll clear the path ahead.

X: (nodding) Alright, bud.

He air-dashes towards the wall above and sees a laser cannon before him.  X simply fires C-shots in a rapid fashion, cutting away at the cannon as it fires it’s plasma at him.  At close-range, X persistently dodges with side-dashes and nearby close calls until the cannon is destroyed.

X: Yes!!!

He walks into the hidden room and stands before another Light Capsule, surprised to see him again so soon.

DR. LIGHT: (smiling) This is the final program for the Falcon Armor. Analyze this arm upgrade and store it into a secure area with Alia’s help.  Once it is successfully uploaded, your Falcon Armor will be complete.

X smiles.

DR. LIGHT: With the arm part equipped, you can maximize the attack power of your original shot and fire a piercing laser as your Fully Charged shot. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to charge the special weapons in this armor, but luckily you still have the Force Armor for that. As this armor specializes in mobility, you might find that this is all you need.  

X makes a thoughtful nod as Dr. Light disappears.

X: (at ease) Hmm… It seems that Dr. Light was concerned about balancing my power-set, after all.

He steps inside the capsule to receive his upgrade.

-pan down and across the hall-

Zero has destroyed a set of defense cannons within the hallway, and is dropping down into an open room, where more plasma cannons await him.

ZERO: Hey Alia.  Any idea how close I am to Dr. Glow??

He swiftly advances towards the wall and double jumps with crescent slash attacks as he ascends through the corridor with kick-jumps.

ALIA: (o.s, filtered) You’re very close, actually. Dr. Izzy Glow’s room is above you, about 30 clicks away. There are several plasma defense devices installed on the way, so keep using your C-Slash!

ZERO: (smiling) Got it!

He ascends up the stairs and chips away at the cannons ahead of him.  As he kick-jumps up the long vertical hallway, X catches up to him with a C-Forcefield of his own.

X: Hey.

ZERO: Hey!

They both take their sides on opposing walls and proceed to plow through Dr. Glow’s defenses, until they reach the top floor and find the gateway to his chamber at last.

X gasps as they run through the gateway.

ZERO: This is it, man. You ready?

X: (nodding) Let’s save the World, Zero.

-pan to-

-----------------------------------------------------------------------  INT. FORTRESS LAB – Izzy Glow’s Chamber – DAY ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 

A siren immediately goes off, as the two intrude on Dr. Glow’s private space.  From there, the lights go out dramatically as Izzy Glow makes a colorful appearance with a teleport that has a firefly glow.

The lights go back on, but so does the device to his laser cannon, which he seemed to be working on, before they barged in.  It sparks omionously amidst the dim light as he scowls down at them in mid-air.

IZZY GLOW: (unamused)

What a graceful entrance…

X: This laboratory is so badly infected by the virus. There was no other way for us to enter.

IZZY GLOW: Hmph!

ZERO: Dr. Izzy Glow, will you do us a favor?

IZZY GLOW:

(stubborn) My work is not for Maverick Hunters! I’ve never trusted your approach. Therefore, I will not cooperate with you.  However, I do find you both fascinating… No one has ever managed to analyze the infamous X and Zero…

X: Doctor!  We don’t have time to argue with you.  Please, understand.

IZZY GLOW: (shaking) My body… has already been infected, too. I realize these thoughts may be wrong… But it’s too late to change now…  Soon, I’ll be one of the Mavericks…

X: Noo!!

ZERO: Brace yourself, X!!

IZZY GLOW: It’s time…  I’ll have to learn about you two through battle. Now…  Put me out of my misery!

X: DAMN IT!

ZERO: LET’S GO!!!

Zero runs towards Izzy Glow and instinctively uppercuts him with an E-Blade, which violently shocks the stubborn specialist.

X reluctantly switches to his new Tri-Thunder power with a frown.

X: (v.o, thinking) Alright, Adler…  You’re gonna help me save the World after all.

Izzy Glow teleports away from Zero, only to get blasted down by X’s Tri-Thunder, which covers the room in three currents of power.

IZZY GLOW: Caaauuughhh…

X shakes his head.

X: This is unfair..

ZERO: (firm) We have a job to do, X!

He dashes towards the Firefly and slashes at him in a combo.

IZZY GLOW: AAAAAGGGGHHHHH!!!!!

He teleports away, swiftly and angrily.

IZZY GLOW: Take this, you foul Hunters!!

He shoots out a sophisticated Firefly-shaped laser, which directs itself down towards X.  When X dashes away, he directs it to Zero, who powers up and defiantly air-dashes above it with an F-Splasher.

The F-Splasher reaches Dr. Glow’s legs and stings him as he teleports away.

Zero proceeds to use his 2ndjump to stay airborne and Crescent slash him on the back on the way down.

IZZY GLOW: AAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHHHH.

He teleports over to the wall and juts out his bottom-light, which he powers up.

IZZY GLOW: Get AWAAAAAYYYY!!!!!!

He fires a powerful green laser at them, which knocks them both down.

Then he swiftly comes near them and teleports away, faking them out constantly as a form of defense.

ZERO: Agh!  What the Hell is with this guy!??

X: He doesn’t know how to fight, Zero. We’re forcing his hand!

ZERO: (aggravated) WE NEED THAT LASER!!!

X: (torn) I KNOW!!!!

Izzy Glow floats above them and blasts his bottom Prism Laser at them vertically.

ZERO: NO!! I refuse to feel guilty.

He dashes away and uppercuts him again with an E-Blade.

IZZY GLOW: AAAAAAIIIIHHHHH.

ZERO: You’re not cooperating, and told us you’re becoming Maverick.

X shakes his head with tight, closed eyes, holding back some tears as he charges up.

X: I can’t believe I’m doing this… I’m sorry Doctor… but WE HAVE TO PUT YOU OUT OF YOUR MISERYYYYY!!!!!

He unleashes a charged Tri-Thunder, which creates six currents of lightning around the room.

IZZY GLOW: AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH.  

He tries to evade the thunderbolts with swift teleports, but gets shocked three times and falls to the ground, smoking.

IZZY GLOW: (panting, hurt) To die at the hands of the Notorious X & Zero… Is this my cruel fate..?

X: It doesn’t have to be!!

He shakes his head, huddling over, in pain.

IZZY GLOW: (obstinate) No…  I’m too far gone…  But if I get out of this alive..  I’m coming after what’s left of this planet and tormenting everyone you Love!!!!!

ZERO: That’s it!!

Zero runs after him as Izzy Glow unfurls his last desperation attack.

IZZY GLOW: Prism Shot!

He spreads his arms out to create lights across the floor, where a multitude of green light-balls attack them from all directions.

X: Aghhh. No..!

Zero grits his teeth and electrifies his Z-Saber once more.

ZERO: It’s time to /DIE!!!!!

With a final uppercut from his Saber, he slices Izzy Glow in half and absorbs his DNA instantly.

Zero gasps as he feels a new power enter his veins.

ALIA: (o.s, filtered) You got Izzy Glow’s Chaos Flasher from his DNA Data! His weapon chip is the Will Laser, which X may use.

X sniffles.

X: (regretful) I don’t care.  I just wanted the Laser Device for the Enigma...  Why does it always have to come to this…?

He walks over to Izzy Glow’s remains and picks up his weapon chip.

ALIA: (o.s, filtered) It looked like a quiet Laboratory… but the inside was in complete ruins.  The Sigma Virus has caused total disorder everywhere… In order to fix the situation, we need to make good use of Dr. Izzy Glow’s Laser Device.

At this moment, she teleports Douglas and their Recovery Team – Rho, Frenzy Fox, Freeze Alopex and Frostbite into the room.

X looks at them, awestruck.  Their surviving teammates are as focused as ever as they go right to work at dismantling the laser device with Douglas’ help.

ALIA: (o.s, filtered) We’ll finish taking the Laser Device back to the base.  Thank you for your help.  We’ll meet you at the Hunter Base.

X nods and powers down into his base armor, feeling a sense of relief for the first time in a while.  Maybe they were going to win this one, after all.

-fade to-

-----------------------------------------------------------------------  INT. NEW MHHQ – Control Room – NIGHT ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Caption: December 6th, 1:00 AM – 2 hours later…

X, Zero, Alia, Douglas, Signas, Hector, Kirk, Dave, Lucas, Rho, Frenzy Fox, Freeze Alopex, Frostbite and Lifesaver all look at the Main Monitor with hope in their eyes.

Displayed is a schematic of the completed Enigma Cannon.

DOUGLAS: At last!  The Enigma has been completed!!  It’s old, but we’ve reinforced it with those devices… It should work fine…  Well, we’re ready!

Everyone nods as a group as they all look ahead at the screen with anticipation.

SIGNAS: The time has come at last! We are going to launch the Enigma.  The fate of the Earth depends on it.

Alia calculates her figures one last time.

-pan to-

-----------------------------------------------------------------------  EXT. NEW MHHQ – The Enigma Cannon - NIGHT ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 

On the right side of the base, we see a bird’s eye view of the upgraded cannon, pointed at the sky.

ALIA: (o.s) The energy, the power, the angle… everything is clear.

-      pan to –

-----------------------------------------------------------------------  INT. NEW MHHQ – Control Room – NIGHT ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Signas clenches a fist as he makes his fateful command.

SIGNAS: All right…  This is it.  /FIRE!

-pan to –

-----------------------------------------------------------------------  EXT. NEW MHHQ – The Enigma Cannon - NIGHT ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 

SIGNAS: /FIRE!!

We see the Enigma Cannon /fire a powerful blue blast from a close angle.

SIGNAS: /FIRE!!!

We see a side-angle view of the same fateful blast.

SIGNAS: /FIRE!!!!

We see a final back-angle view of the cannon as it blasts it’s huge wave of energy into the sky.

We follow the giant blue wave of energy into Outer Space, where it collides with the Space Colony, Eurasia.

-pan to-

----------------------------------------------------------------------- 

EXT. OUTER SPACE – Eurasia - NIGHT

----------------------------------------------------------------------- 

The Space Colony is struck by the blast, which does severe damage to it’s front and side.  The blast erupts into a brilliant flash of light.

-Fade to White-

SIGNAS: (o.s) Did we make it? …Did it get crushed apart?? Alia, give us the report.

ALIA: (o.s) …Negative! We only destroyed 62%!!

Jeers from the Hunters can be heard.

HUNTERS: (o.s, layered) Damn it!!

HUNTERS: (o.s, layered) Shit!!!

-fade in-

We slowly see that the Eurasia Colony is still fully operational, with only a chunk of damage done to it’s frontal and side regions.

ALIA: (o.s, disheartened) We have merely made it change orbit… and delayed the time of impact…

-pan to –

-----------------------------------------------------------------------  NEW MHHQ – Control Room – NIGHT ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Alia winces at the screen, and looks down feeling hopeless.

X’s mouth is agape, as he stares at the screen in disbelief.

Signas looks at the screen with a dogged, unwavering glare, while Douglas makes a confused, crooked look at the screen with a slight grimace.

ZERO: Curses!

Zero looks down with closed eyes, while the other Hunters console each other.

Frenzy Fox and Freeze Alopex give each other a saddened hug, while Rho bends down to hold Frostbite in consolation.

Lifesaver takes a deep breath, lets out a sigh and leaves the room.

DOUGLAS: The Enigma was not successful?

SIGNAS: (confirming) No…

He makes a firm grimace.

ZERO: Now what…?

-Freeze frame. Grainy Effect.-

The failed Hunters all look down in defeat and despair, while X stares at the screen with a determined face.

-Fade to Black-

[lockcolor79]

Technical Editing Services ~ Technical Proofreading Services



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Technical Editing Services since 1991

The other beautiful part is that you can get some help.

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The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

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When you write, that’s what you want. With Michael Edits, that’s what you get.

Great writing is like a window pane. Let Michael Edits be your Windex™.

Send me an email

I always give you the best possible editing and proofreading services. If you're not satisfied, don't pay me.

I edit your document on the computer screen a few times until I think it's perfect. Then I print it and edit it again, because it's not. I repeat this procedure until your manuscript is flawless. Yes, this sounds time-consuming, but I started editing and proofreading in 1991 and I've never missed a deadline.

If you're wondering how long it'll take me to edit something, start by assuming I'll do 10,000 words per day. If that's not fast enough, tell me what you need and I'll do more. I won't charge extra or sacrifice quality for this.

Editing is not the same as proofreading, but I always do both. Back when I worked at Scribendi (I was EM392), the only thing I was scolded for was giving someone an edit who had only paid for a proofread. Well, that's just how I'm wired. If I see a way to improve your writing, I'm going to point it out. Thinking "I see a mistake but you didn't pay me enough to fix it" strikes me as unethical.

Most authors pay me after they receive the edited document, but if you want to prepay, I won't stop you. I've never been asked for a refund, but if you're the first, I'll give it to you. No questions asked.

The price for my editing and proofreading service is 2 cents per word. I don't charge one price for one type of editing/proofreading and a different price to add on another type of editing/proofreading. Two cents per word covers everything.

I do not edit printed documents. I work by email. My preferred format is Microsoft Word, but I also work with other files types.

PayPal is my usual payment method, but if you prefer something else, we can do that too.

My Editing and Proofreading Process

When you use my editing and proofreading service, you know I'll be looking at your writing from a different vantage point than you are. I'm not as close to your work as you are. If you forgot to mention something that you know but your reader doesn't, I'll spot it. If you've repeated yourself but were just too weary after a dozen rounds of fast-paced deadline-driven self-editing to notice it, I'll spot it.

I'll ensure that your writing is clear and concise, that the overall flow and structure are logical, and that your document is free of spelling or grammar errors. I'll eliminate run-on sentences, wordiness, awkward constructions, vague language, and anything else that makes a reader stop and go "Huh?"

I'll always respect your writing style, your overall tone, and your unique writing voice. This is why I make my changes using the Tracking feature in Microsoft Word (or Google Docs). Tracking rocks.

If you'd rather receive a clean "I don't want to edit my editor" copy, we can do that too. You're the boss. I'm just the gadfly.

I start by turning on Tracking and running Word's imperfect spellchecking and grammar checking tool. I know when to agree and when to disagree. This "pre-edit" also allows me to use Search & Replace and maybe Copy & Paste to improve your document's internal consistency before I start reading it.

Next, I read your document on my computer and suggest every change that I think needs suggesting. I'm looking at spelling, punctuation, grammar, and the silly "oops" stuff that it's so much fun to mock on Twitter. But I'm also looking for clarity, repetition, organization, and just anything at all that could be done better. Many editors will make several passes, each focusing on a specific type of error. Many others are wired to do it all at the same time. I'm in the second group.

When I think it's perfect, I go away for a while. Or catch up on the email. Or torture a song on the guitar in my office. Then with a clear mind, I read your document again and see all the stuff I missed.

When I think it's a perfect manuscript, I print it. Then I read it again and see what I missed, marking up the printout with a pen. I make those corrections on the computer, print it again, repeat until it really is perfect.

My music doesn't improve, but your manuscript always does.

Editing, Proofreading, and Other Resources

7 Proven Strategies for Editing and Proofreading Your Own Writing

How To Write A Scientific Paper Worth Reading - A PDF based on the lectures I gave at Chiang Mai University.

Interview with Sharon Hill of WCHL radio in Chapel Hill

The Life of Mr. Chabuduo by Hu Shih - You do not want Mr. Chabuduo to edit your writing.

The Michael Edits Star Wars feed

Proofs and Three Parables by George Steiner - A novella in which one of the characters is a proofreader.

Where Are the Offices of Michael Edits? I created the company in Hong Kong in December 1999, but have since moved to mainland China, then Thailand, then Vietnam, then North Carolina.

Some of my Editing and Proofreading clients

Carl Dickson, PropLIBRARY and Capture Planning: "Michael LaRocca has been our editor [since 2006], reviewing dozens of documents, as well as our weekly newsletter. He has kept us from looking stupid countless times. Working with Michael is easy and friction-free. He has been extremely flexible and helped us meet even our most unreasonable deadlines. He has spoiled us."

Nicolás Antonio Jiménez, Senior Editor at Cigar Snob Magazine, Founding Editor at DADE: "Michael has been editing the copy we publish in Cigar Snob Magazine [since 2008]. We keep stupid hours when we're up against a tight deadline; that, combined with a fully stocked bar just a few steps from our desks (research supplies) means we're making little mistakes often, but seldom catching them all. We've been able to count on Michael, who's a pleasure to work with, to keep our magazine's copy coherent when we are anything but."

Brenda Robinson, First African American female Navy pilot; President of Aviation Camps of the Carolinas Inc.: "Michael continues to save me and my reputation, by making sure what I meant to say is what people actually read. I am so very impressed with his work and his turnaround time is amazing. I don't send out important documents, emails, or a whole book without going through him first. I am 100% assured that all grammar, punctuation, and spelling is perfect before I send it on as complete. He's got my business for life."

Michelle Hill, Legacy Builder for Sports Professionals: "I have read books about ghostwriting by professional ghostwriters that were so riddled with typos, it was painful to get through. Once you think your manuscript is perfect, let a proofreader do their magic to it. You'd be surprised what they catch, and you'll find yourself saying, "How the heck did I miss that?" Professional proofreaders are worth their weight in gold! Mine is Michael LaRocca and he is a gold medalist when it comes to finding the errors that everyone else missed."

Natalia Marshalkina, Lead CRA at Worldwide Clinical Trials, Inc.: "I've had the pleasure of working with Michael on several of my academic projects [since 2011] and I've always been impressed with the efficiency and the highest quality of his work. My task was (and is) to follow the flow, to express ideas, whereas Michael goes through my sometimes over-complicated "final draft" and makes it just perfect - not only by correcting those inevitable spelling and grammar errors, but also by bringing the meaning to the surface. "Yes, this is exactly what I was trying to say!" - but the language magically became more straightforward and easily understandable for the reader. For anybody trying to create a masterpiece in writing - regardless of the topic or level of complexity - Michael's editing is a great asset."

Derek Lewis, Business Book Ghostwriter: "Impressively quick, impressively accurate, and impressively savvy. Michael is my secret weapon. He has saved me from countless embarrassments and faux pas. Nothing I write is fit to show until Michael says so."

Joelle Klein, Health & Lifestyle Writer / Blogger / Storyteller: "Michael is the perfect pair of second eyes for my articles. I find it impossible to edit my own work. When I need something to be perfect, I make sure Michael reads it before I send it out. He's reliable, fast and accurate."

Daniel Schuller, Software Developer, Unity Technologies: "Michael helped me with the technical editing for my book How To Make An RPG. He made the whole experience painless and was a great help. The text quality improved massively. He was very responsive throughout the entire process and it took far less time than I'd expected."

Jens Graff, Associate Professor, Censor Secretariat, Ministry of Education, Denmark: "To find Michael LaRocca as a professional editor was a scoop for me when I needed my English cleaned in a more than 300 page English language scientific dissertation in 2008. He did his work within a few days and related to me for best result. Michael was able to perceive the whole manuscript as it was intended and choose a language that was professional, simple, and fresh. I was extremely satisfied with his work and will use him in the future, when I have serious text to publish." [We've worked together several times since then, most recently in 2017.]

Trish Saemann, Digital Marketing Professional, GoBeyond SEO: "Michael is a very detail-oriented professional who produces exemplary work consistently. We have been using Michael's services since July of 2013 and we plan to continue as long as he'll have us! The nature of our industry requires well-written content for blogs, ebooks and website copy. Nothing can tarnish a document with strong content like spelling errors and grammatical mistakes. Michael is the filter we use before publishing content. He is a vital part of our workflow. It is with great pleasure that I recommend Michael LaRocca."

Erik Calvino, Owner, Cigar Snob Magazine: "Michael has been an asset to our publication since his first assignment with us [in 2008]. His response times, accuracy, and adaptability to our industry vernacular have been his strengths. I highly recommend him."

Andrew Freiburghouse, Founder/CEO, Pronto Tax School: "One of the best in the business! Efficient. Great value. Pride of craftsmanship. Highly recommended."

Iris Benrubi, Simply Success Coaching: "Working with Michael was great! He took great care when editing my work and always had it ready for me on time! I would highly recommend him!"

Kellie Hedrick, P.E., Environmental Process Solutions PLLC: "Michael has been instrumental in reviewing proposals and reports that we issue to our clients ensuring that the information we are communicating makes sense. It is always good to have another set of eyes reviewing information. We appreciate the great work that Michael has done for us."

William Saemann, Managing Partner, GoBeyond SEO: "Michael is a detail-oriented editor and exactly what we need at GoBeyond. We send him everything from blog posts to page copy for editing and his services are invaluable."

Darrell Bain, Fictionwise Author of the Year: "Michael LaRocca has edited my books. His command of the English language is better than mine and I have a B.S. degree."

Building Maintenance Optimization Consultants: Facilities management (FM) consulting firm supporting FM organizations that manage portfolios of buildings for their full life cycles.

Flynn IP Law: Located In North Carolina’s Research Triangle, but obtaining US patents for the planet. Legal services, patent searching, trade secrets, due diligence, licensing.

Eastern Instruments: I was their sole Technical Editor from 1991-1999. If I hadn't left to create Michael Edits, there's a 93.14159% chance I'd still be their in-house editing department. Approximately.

Tethered Aerostat Crane: I edited this request for a Federal research grant. It won.

Festo: Multinational industrial control and automation company based in Esslingen am Neckar, Germany. Festo is an engineering-driven company, producing and selling pneumatic and electrical control and drive technology for factory or process automation.

Lime Energy: Overcoming the challenges to small business energy efficiency.

CIMTEC Automation: PLC and HMI repair services through the only factory-authorized GE 90-70 repair center in the world.

Qualitrol: Sales and service of new and remanufactured GE Fanuc PLC parts.

Intelligent Systems & Engineering Services: Facilities management consulting - facilities condition assessment, O&M planning and programming, utilities infrastructure condition assessment, organizational analysis.

Raquel Eatmon: Public speaker, author, CEO of Rising Media LLC, founder of Women of Power Leadership Conference, TV broadcaster, Huffington Post contributor, founder of Project Heard.

Adonal David Foyle: Author, speaker, consultant, NBA center (Golden State Warriors, Orlando Magic, Memphis Grizzlies).

TreeceCo Senior Financial Services: Fixed annuities, life insurance, estate planning, Medicare supplement insurance. I've edited their weekly newsletter and all their other correspondence since 2013.

Health Tips From The Professor: I edited both of his books, "Slaying The Food Myths" and "Slaying The Supplement Myths." Then, as a fringe benefit, I followed his advice and got myself healthy.

Matthew Pollard: Business coach (the "Rapid Growth Guy"). Find thesis help and create a sales system to get more customers and close more sales.

About Michael Edits and Michael LaRocca

I gave the long bio its own page. Here's the timeline.

[kidsviral-blog]

The Hunter, The Hoaxer, And The Battle Over Bigfoot

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/the-hunter-the-hoaxer-and-the-battle-over-bigfoot/

The Hunter, The Hoaxer, And The Battle Over Bigfoot

Jeffrey Meldrum is a respected anthropologist risking his reputation to prove Sasquatch is real; Rick Dyer is a self-described “entertainer” unapologetically capitalizing off it. Their rivalry represents two sides of the fractious but booming subculture.

View this image ›

Illustration by Morgan Schweitzer for BuzzFeed

It’s a sweaty July day, and Rick Dyer is in his tank-like Toyota, barreling down a highway just south of Atlanta. It’s a comically oversize SUV, with a rack of roof lights and an exterior wrapped in flat-black vinyl. If Batman drove a Jeep, it would look like this.

Somewhere near the turnoff for a Christmas tree farm, Dyer abruptly turns into a sloping grassy median, then into a field of knee-high weeds beyond the road, then down a narrow dirt trail, where, after rumbling over an impressive heap of felled trees, we arrive at a small clearing just on the other side of a trailer park. Dyer, 37, is wearing a red T-shirt, red gym shorts, and a camouflage hat embroidered with a Bigfoot logo. His neatly trimmed beard frames a mischievous grin. “Let’s go do a Bigfoot investigation,” he says.

Moments later, we’re parked beside a trailer where a couple of boys are milling around a rusty grill. “Are you the one who called about Bigfoot?” Dyer asks. The pair looks confused. Soon, there’s a small gathering and Dyer explains that someone from a nearby trailer said that a Bigfoot attacked his car. “I went up there and checked it out, and his door from his car is ripped off,” Dyer says matter-of-factly. Someone asks what kind of car it was, and Dyer provides a make and model, and says a tow truck is on its way. If they see anything, Dyer tells them, please contact him through his website.

“What are you going to do if you find it?” a man in a basketball jersey and sunglasses asks.

“Well, I’ve already killed one,” Dyer says.

The boys look on in amazement as Dyer offers his bona fides. Look him up on Google, he says. They’ll read the accounts of how he bagged a Bigfoot. They’ll see the photos. Then, the boys scuttle away in search of the car with a missing door.

It’s an odd thing to witness such instinctive slipperiness. But Dyer is untroubled. To him, lying about one of the world’s most enduring wilderness mysteries is no different than a pro wrestler getting in the ring. “I’m an entertainer,” he likes to say. Or: “You can choose to believe my story or not.”

It’s been more than a half-century since a Northern California newspaper printed the headline that made “Bigfoot” a household name. In the decades since, no definitive proof of the large, ape-like creature that people also call Sasquatch (from Canada), Yeti (from the Himalayas), or Skunk Ape (from Florida) has surfaced. But the eyewitness accounts, the indistinct photos, the brief, blurry videos, the footprints — they’re as persistent as ever.

There are news stories about the latest sightings and YouTube clips purporting to show them. There are successful television series like Spike TV’s 10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty, which premiered earlier this year, and Animal Planet’s Finding Bigfoot, now in its fifth season; on the channel’s website, there is a “Bigfoot Cam,” where “the search for Sasquatch goes 24/7.” There are countless groups and clubs and museums with names like North American Wood Ape Conservancy and Bigfoot Discovery Project. There are self-styled, expedition-leading Sasquatch “hunters” and online radio talk shows and origin theory-peddling experts.

Against this backdrop, Dyer’s anything-goes hustle means business. He markets himself as a “master tracker” after all, a label that is prominently attached to the short-sleeve camouflage button-up he wears.

As we get in the Toyota, Dyer delivers a full-throated roar. “They’re going to be talking about that for weeks and weeks and weeks,” he says. And yet, this off-road adventure is nothing compared to Dyer’s big hoaxes.

Over the last 50 years, allegations of devious men using wooden feet and fur suits have cast a long shadow over the Bigfoot phenomenon. But Dyer’s dark talents are rare. He’s an admitted serial hoaxer with a chameleon-like ability to cultivate a new persona for each gambit, from bumbling neophyte to Sasquatch evangelist to P.T. Barnum-like showman. “In the annals of Bigfoot hoaxers, he’s earned himself a place in the hall of fame,” says Benjamin Radford, the deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer and author of Hoaxes, Myths and Mayhem.

As Dyer has become a wily villain in the Sasquatch scene, he has drawn outsize media attention, swarms of paying customers and fans, and loathing from the many people who consider Bigfoot a living creature. After a hoax earlier this year, a petition was posted on Change.org demanding that he be charged criminally (he has not been). Loren Coleman, the cryptozoologist and author of Bigfoot! The True Story of Apes in America, describes Dyer as a “disgusting phenomenon” who just won’t go away.

For this second variety of Bigfooter, the search for Sasquatch is a serious endeavor. They are modern-day explorers, amateur investigators, and even academically credentialed researchers who have sought to not only bring science to Bigfoot, but Bigfoot to science. While no bones, body, or DNA have been discovered, they argue that there is considerable circumstantial evidence that Bigfoot is real.

For these dedicated few, Rick Dyer is more than an entertainer — he’s a danger to a field of study that already has credibility issues. That they all toil under the same big tent is one of the great oddities of a subculture that is as crowded and fractious as ever, one that can seem like an amalgam of a cult and an earnest explorers club, with competing camps of believers and skeptics, hoaxers and hunters, self-appointed experts and serious-minded scientists, all seeking to advance, in their own peculiar way, the mystery of Sasquatch.

View this image ›

Photograph by Tim Stelloh for BuzzFeed

Jeffrey Meldrum’s office is on the second floor of a plain redbrick building in Pocatello, a college town in southern Idaho. It’s cluttered with books about anatomy and biomechanics, evolution and mammalogy. There are plastic skulls and wooden skulls, framed images of the surreal-looking red-faced uakari, and a silverback gorilla, his arms aimed piercingly straight into the ground.

Then, there is the Bigfoot stuff: hundreds of plaster foot casts believed to be Sasquatch, sitting on the floor, scattered on a work table, crammed into shelves. There are cartoons and tiny statues, books and envelopes labeled “hair.” Meldrum, 56, with a white beard, is wearing a black T-shirt with a pair of green eyes that stare back at me. “Sasquatch as seen through night-vision goggles,” he explains.

Against the far wall is a life-size image of the most well-known Bigfoot of the modern era: “Patty,” a nickname derived from the man who filmed her, an out-of-work cowboy named Roger Patterson. In a few dozen shaky seconds in 1967, Patterson captured her on film in the remote woods of Northern California striding along a creek bank. The footage, which he shot with the help of a rancher named Bob Gimlin, has remained an obsession, endlessly watched, dissected, debated.

An anthropologist at Idaho State University whose work on Bigfoot garnered a rare, significant endorsement from famed primatologist Jane Goodall, Meldrum specializes in the evolution of primate movement — he’s sometimes called “the foot doctor.” His scientific pursuit of Bigfoot began in the late 1990s with a brief question: “Is there a biological species behind the legend?” In the years since, Meldrum has analyzed hundreds of footprints, examined reams of supposed hair, and developed a working hypothesis. He’s trekked across dozens of miles of Western wilderness, where he says he’s had his own Bigfoot encounters, and in 2006, he published Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science. In addition to Goodall’s praise, the book won support from the pioneering field biologist George Schaller, who wrote that Meldrum “disentangles fact from anecdote, supposition, and wishful thinking” and has “done more for this field of investigation than all the past arguments and polemics of contesting experts.”

View this image ›

Jeffrey Meldrum with a plaster foot cast in his Idaho office. Photograph by Tim Stelloh for BuzzFeed

The year after Meldrum’s book was published, he developed a scientific name and set of characteristics for the creature’s mythically massive footprint; it is, he says, one of the few peer-reviewed papers supporting the existence of Sasquatch to appear in mainstream academic literature. A few years later, he founded a peer-reviewed journal that publishes Bigfoot research. Among his current collaborations is a project that would use a drone to fly over suspected Sasquatch habitat in the United States and possibly Canada.

Meldrum’s research has made him a lonely figure in academia and an unlikely public face on this side of the Sasquatch phenomenon. He’s become The Bigfoot Guy — the level-headed, go-to scientific authority for conference organizers, countless documentary filmmakers, and on-deadline reporters who may not know the first thing about Bigfoot but are calling to ask about someone named Rick Dyer who claims to have killed one. The two know of each other, and they’re not friendly.

When Meldrum was a kid living in Washington State in the 1960s, his father, a grocery store manager at Albertson’s, took him to see the documentary that featured Patty. He was taken with snakes, insects, dinosaurs — anything natural history-related — so it didn’t take much to get him to the Spokane Coliseum, where it was showing. Meldrum sat transfixed as Patty’s slow-motion image meandered across the screen. “The notion that there might be a caveman stomping around out there was fascinating to me,” he recalls. For him, there were no questions of authenticity. “It was like, ‘Here it is. Wow.’ It was a mystery to be explored.”

View this image ›

“Patty.” Still from Patterson Bigfoot sighting footage

At the time, Bigfoot was just beginning to lurch into the American imagination. Meldrum had no idea about the footprints found a decade before that produced the Bigfoot moniker. Nor did he know that for the Hoopa in California, for the Anasazi in the Southwest, and for many more, stories of wild, hairy men in the woods had been told for generations. The term “Sasquatch,” after all, was derived from the Salish tribes of British Columbia.

In 1993, Meldrum got a call from the prominent cryptozoologist Richard Greenwell. A television production crew in Northern California had been filming b-roll when they picked up what looked like a Sasquatch; when the crew wanted some expert opinion, they called Greenwell, who wondered if Meldrum wanted to tag along. Meldrum didn’t think much of Bigfoot anymore, but he wasn’t a strange choice: For years, theories had been floated that perhaps the Yeti was related to a giant ape that once lived alongside prehistoric humans. The creature was believed to have gone extinct, but perhaps it survived “in refuge areas,” as the primatologist John Napier suggested in 1973. Who better to examine the evidence than a primate expert?

Meldrum was skeptical, but he agreed. “I thought it would be an easy exercise in exposing the zipper,” he says. “Instead, I kept finding these different things that were quite compelling.” It was grainy video, and it was night, but he could see how its foot bent when it walked. He could see how the hair hung down from its arms, like an orangutan. They were able to determine its height too: more than 8 feet tall.

Then, after visiting the late Grover Krantz, the eccentric Washington State University anthropologist who was among the few academics to conclude that Sasquatch existed, Meldrum got out into the field. For the first time, he examined what were purported to be fresh tracks. They were 14 inches; there were a few dozen of them, pressed into the muddy foothills outside Walla Walla in eastern Washington, on the shoulder of a restricted-access farm road. When Meldrum bent down, he was astonished. He could see the telltale traces of a living foot, a foot where dozens of bones and joints appeared to be interacting with the ground beneath it. “I could see tension cracks, push-off ridges,” he recalls. “I could see toe slippage, dragging.”

This was not what happened when a blocky piece of wood was stamped in the mud, Meldrum thought. If it were a hoax, it would have been executed by someone who understood the subtleties of foot anatomy.

“As I sat there kneeling beside these tracks, I said, ‘Is this a path you’re willing to go down? Are you willing to preoccupy a portion of your attention, your career to this question, at the risk of jeopardizing your credibility?’ I’m looking at these tracks and I’m thinking, How could I not?”

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Photo by Tim Stelloh for BuzzFeed

Rick Dyer and I are driving around an affluent black suburb of Atlanta, a neighborhood of large lots, elegant brick homes, and golf course lawns. In a driveway, he sees what he’s looking for: a black luxury SUV with low mileage and a low asking price. Dyer, who’s wearing his camouflage Bigfoot hat and matching “master tracker” button-up, is looking to flip it — this is his day job — and he’s sized up the seller immediately. “The oil is full but he doesn’t know what a jumper cable is,” he says. “What you’re looking at is the perfect person to buy a car from.”

After a quick drive around the block, Dyer tells the seller that the transmission is shot. It needs a rebuild, and thus, the $2,000 price tag just doesn’t make sense. The two men haggle for a moment, and eventually settle on $1,400.

Afterward, I ask Dyer what he’ll make reselling it.

“$5,500,” he replies.

“Does that include what you’ll pay for a new transmission?”

“It doesn’t need one,” Dyer says, chuckling. “But it does need some transmission work.”

It can be difficult to untangle basic details about a man who lies for a living and seems to have no connection to his past. I ask, for instance, if he’ll put me in touch with his sister, and, in a text, he says there’s zero chance she’ll talk to me. I ask who his oldest friend is, and he connects me with a chicken farmer in Virginia named Jackie Pridemore. Pridemore tells me that the two met a couple of years ago, after he wrote a rap song about Dyer’s Bigfoot exploits. Dyer says his mother is a country music songwriter, but he can’t tell me who she is because the “haters” in the Bigfoot scene will go on the attack. His car has been vandalized, he says, and a variety of pranks have been orchestrated against him and his clique of Bigfoot friends.

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Dyer’s peculiar enterprise seems driven in part by money — he claims to have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars — though as Loren Coleman explains, there just isn’t that much to be made from Bigfoot hoaxing. (“It’s not like a stock market scheme,” he says.) Attention seems to be Dyer’s motivating force, and he is relentlessly on-message: The Bigfoot scene is filled with self-serious crybabies, and Rick Dyer might be a hoaxer, but he only hoaxes because, like Santa, Bigfoot brings joy to people. And really, you should listen to Rick Dyer because Rick Dyer is the only person to have ever killed a real live Bigfoot.

Dyer embraces the confusion. “I want people to write that I’m very deceptive, that I dance around stuff,” he says. “I want people to write all kinds of shit. I want people to write that I don’t have a body, so that when that time comes and I do, then it’ll make the people who said I didn’t look like idiots.”

Unlike Meldrum, Dyer was never a Bigfoot-phile. When he was a boy with a stutter growing up in Stockbridge and attending Christian school, he had never seen the Patterson-Gimlin film, as the grainy Patty footage came to be known, or heard of the persistent rumors surrounding it — that the fur suit had been created by the Hollywood makeup artist behind the original Planet of the Apes franchise, for instance. Nor had Dyer heard of Ivan Marx, the alleged hoaxer behind the 1976 film The Legend of Bigfoot, or of one of the other (alleged) classics: that the original “Bigfoot” prints from Humboldt County, California, came from a pair of carved wooden feet owned by a man named Ray Wallace.

Mainly, Dyer says, his interests, after a stint in the Army, were traveling — he went to Thailand, to Mexico, to Japan — and women; with three, he has seven children. But in March 2008, not long after he quit his job as a corrections officer at a state prison, Dyer’s first hoax was born. It happened while he and a friend, a police officer named Matthew Whitton, were hiking in Tennessee. It wasn’t exactly inspired. “I said, ‘Hey man, I saw Bigfoot,’” Dyer says he told Whitton. “He said, ‘Me too.’ We didn’t. I said, ‘Let’s do a Bigfoot hoax.’ He’s like, ‘OK.’”

They built a cheap website and started a YouTube page, where he and Whitton posted videos and advertised expeditions and gear. They were “the best Bigfoot trackers in the world,” they claimed and, as Dyer put it in one video, “they had some very compelling evidence” that would “change everything you knew about Bigfoot.”

“We thought we’d get a couple of hundred views,” Dyer says. “But it took off.”

After appearing on a Bigfoot radio show, Dyer and Whitton were in touch with a man named Tom Biscardi. Biscardi is a brash, self-described “real” Bigfoot hunter who is from Brooklyn, but now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is also an accused hoaxer and the proprietor and “team leader” of the California-based Searching for Bigfoot Inc., which investigates sightings, and, through its website, sells all manner of Bigfoot paraphernalia. In Dyer’s telling, Biscardi told him that he knew they didn’t have a body. “But we can make a lot of money,” Dyer recalls him saying. In Biscardi’s version, Dyer’s the con man. “He’s a motherfucker,” Biscardi says.

“DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO FIND GOAT BALLS?”

Dyer and Whitton set about building a fake body; the plan was to present a staged, video-recorded autopsy in the tradition of the famously hoaxed alien autopsy film of the 1990s, Dyer says. He spent a few hundred dollars on a rubber costume, and filled it with a macabre mix of animal bones and innards: There were pig intestines. There was a cow jaw. For the genitalia, they went to a slaughterhouse. “Do you know how hard it is to find goat balls?” Dyer says. The body was placed in a deep freezer, which was slowly filled with water, then switched on. For an accompanying DNA analysis, Dyer found an opossum on the side of the road. He carved off a sliver and bled on it; the hope, he says, was to have the analysis come back as human.

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Tom Biscardi displays one of the photographs given to reporters during a press conference on August 15, 2008 in Palto Alto, Calif. AFP / Getty Images IAN SHERR

In Dyer’s telling, Biscardi liked what he saw, and agreed to pay $50,000 for the finished product; Biscardi says that he never actually saw the body. “They gave me a piece of intestine,” he recalls. In the parking lot of a redbrick county courthouse in suburban Atlanta, Dyer and Whitton were given $50,000 in cash, and the freezer was loaded into a U-Haul and driven to an out-of-state “safe house.” Then, the pair flew to California, where Biscardi scheduled a news conference for noon on Friday, Aug. 15, 2008, at the Cabaña Hotel in Palo Alto. In a press release, Biscardi offered a few tantalizing details: Dyer and Whitton found the creature in the woods of north Georgia. It weighed more than 500 pounds. DNA tests were being conducted and the results would be presented at the news conference.

This last detail, says the author Benjamin Radford, was key to selling the hoax: No one had ever dangled a promise of that modern scientific marvel, DNA, before an audience desperate for direct evidence. An onslaught of media attention followed. Most was dubious, but there was plenty of it. Stories appeared not just in the local media, but in Scientific American and the New York Times, on CNN and NBC. “It was pretty fucking intense,” Dyer says.

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Illustration by Morgan Schweitzer for BuzzFeed

It’s a cold, damp summer night deep in the Wyoming wilderness, and a night vision scope is pressed to my right eye. In the distance, the flickering black-and-green tree line looks like an ’80s-era computer screen. Beside me, Meldrum’s research partner, the wiry wildlife biologist John Mionczysnki, is sitting on a small canvas stool, accordion in hand, playing a lullaby-like Scottish folk tune, which he swears is a soothing animal lure. Periodically, he trades his squeezebox for a portable floodlight and scans the foliage. In front of us, Meldrum is stretched out on a sleeping bag, peering through binoculars into the inverted darkness.

We’re here in this boggy, bug-infested section of Wyoming because there have been Sasquatch stories dating back more than a century — everything from visual eyewitness accounts to elk hunters reporting what’s been described as Bigfoot behavior: something lobbing rocks in their direction. Earlier in the day, they spent a couple of hours trudging through the area, doing what they often do on these trips. They survey. Meldrum looks for traces of Sasquatch: footprints, hair, scat. He finds turned-over rocks — most likely a bear — and a long line of elk prints. He finds tufts of hair snagged on a branch. “Deer or elk,” he says. Mionczysnki, who’s also a botanist, catalogs the flora. He notes the sorts of things that might satisfy the appetite of a large mammal — the pocket gophers, the carbohydrate-rich sedges, the limber pines and their high-calorie pine nuts, the lily ponds and their fish and insects and frogs, the thistles, a favorite of gorillas.

This is a fairly routine night of research for Meldrum. Fifteen years ago, he had been so impressed with the footprints in Washington State that he ignored his inner pragmatist and decided to seriously pursue the question of whether an ape-like creature could have made them. He was untroubled by the lack of additional evidence: bones of uncommon top predators are rarely found and the fossil record is notoriously patchy. Plus, the discovery of new mammals — some of them large — is not unheard of. In 1994, a rare species of ox was located in Vietnam. The following year, a breed of prehistoric horse was found roaming in Tibet. In 2001, the three-toed pygmy sloth was identified in Panama.

“IT’S SO EASY TO SAY, ‘OH, IT’S JUST A MAN IN A FUR SUIT’ UNTIL THEY SEE IT BESIDE A MAN IN A FUR SUIT.”

So Meldrum’s search began in earnest. One element was a close examination of plaster foot casts and footprints that appeared credible. He thought enough of them that he told me, “It’s the most elegant adaptation of a giant bipedal” — or on two legs — “primate living on the ground in steep mountainous terrain.” Another still-ongoing project has been a collaboration with a costume and robotics designer to reexamine the footage he first saw as a young boy in Spokane. “It’s so easy to say, ‘Oh, it’s just a man in a fur suit,’” he says. “Until they see it beside a man in a fur suit.”

Finally, there was fieldwork, and the hope of acquiring DNA from hair, or perhaps shooting some high-quality photos or video. And that required money. Bigfoot was hardly a burgeoning research subject in academia, though. As University of Florida anthropologist David Daegling observed in Bigfoot Exposed, “Within the Ivory Tower, it is perfectly legitimate for a folklorist to pursue unicorns; for a biologist, it is a foolish commitment of resources.” (A letter circulated at Idaho State signed by more than a dozen colleagues complained that Meldrum’s work was “fringe science.”) So, like many Bigfoot searchers before him, Meldrum secured private funding. With money from a wealthy oil and gas businessman in Texas, a foundation in California, and others, he planned weeks-long expeditions to the remote corners of the West where, often with Mionczysnki, he spent many nights listening, watching, and waiting.

Meldrum has stories of encounters from trips like this. He was weeks into a month-long expedition in Northern California when, late one night, he heard something rummaging through his guide’s pack. The two men jumped out of their tents, but whatever it was disappeared. Not long after, Meldrum heard footsteps. “I could hear the pat-pat-pat coming right towards me,” he recalls. “It brushed against the fly of my tent and hit the pole.” He called out to make sure it wasn’t his guide, then leaped from his tent. As he chased after it, he could hear it splashing through a marsh, and when he pointed his flashlight at the mud, he could see a pattern: right-left-right-left. Each track was about 16 inches. Then, it vanished.

It’s a dramatic story, but it’s among the most compelling pieces of evidence from Meldrum’s expeditions. He’s collected no DNA, and he’s gotten no photos and no video. When I ask if this gives him pause, he tells me that a combination of variables (including bad weather) and the nature of the work — “You’re looking for a moving needle in a haystack,” he says — can make this an all too common experience in wildlife tracking. Based on the evidence he’s seen, he’s concluded Sasquatch is a living thing, a large, upright ape of which there are a couple thousand west of the Mississippi in Canada and the United States.

Sitting in our camp, the three of us look beyond a narrow, shallow creek, toward a large pine tree to which Meldrum has strapped a camouflage digital camera with a built-in motion detector. If a Sasquatch is going to appear tonight, he and Mionczysnki reason, it’s going to come from the area that they surveyed earlier in the day.

So we wait.

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Photograph by Tim Stelloh for BuzzFeed

In the summer of 2008, Meldrum was among the first to weigh in on the hoax from north Georgia. Even before the Palo Alto news conference, during which Biscardi distributed a close-up photo of the teeth — “It’ll prove to you people that this is not a mask,” he said to the crowd — Meldrum told Scientific American that it looked exactly like the thing it was: “a costume with some fake guts thrown on top for effect.”

It took just a couple of days to unravel. In Dyer’s telling, it was over money. Someone at the so-called safe house wanted more, but Biscardi refused to pay, and, lest he be extorted, outed the hoax. In Biscardi’s version, he got a call from a costume maker who claimed that Dyer’s body matched their product. So Biscardi instructed his associate at the safe house to heat the slab of ice. “Seven hours later, they call me back and say it was a rubber suit with body parts,” Biscardi says. So he confronted Dyer and Whitton. “I say, ‘Is there anything you want to tell me?’” he recalls. “They say, ‘Oh no.’”

Biscardi says he contacted Fox News, and a wave of stories about the boys from Georgia followed. Biscardi pursed fraud charges, and though they were unsuccessful, Whitton was fired from the Clayton County Police Department. (He and Dyer are no longer friends, and Whitton couldn’t be reached for this story.) For Dyer, though, the event served as a strange entry point into a new hustle. People kept contacting him, wanting to go on Bigfoot expeditions, he says.

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So Dyer obliged. He created a new storyline, and presented himself as a reformed hoaxer. “He said that he had seen Bigfoot, and that he was on a mission to redeem himself,” a documentary filmmaker named Morgan Matthews told the Canadian Broadcasting Company last year. (Dyer would later appear in one of Matthews’ films.) Dyer made T-shirts and hats, and he took people on what were little more than backcountry fishing trips that ranged from two days to two weeks in Tennessee, Texas, north Georgia, California, and beyond.

Among the people to contact him was Matthews, who was working on a project about Bigfoot hunters. And so began Dyer’s next hoax. It’s a convoluted tale that begins, of course, with the real killing of a real Bigfoot.

During the summer of 2012, Dyer and Matthews embarked on a week-and-a-half-long expedition in a forest on the edge of San Antonio. On the morning of the sixth day, Dyer says he awoke to the sound of bone crunching; he looked out of his tent and saw what he claims was a large creature with reddish-brown hair. It was, Dyer says, his moment of conversion to Bigfoot believer. “I was in shock,” he says. “I didn’t even think Bigfoot exists.”

Matthews didn’t respond to interview requests, but Dyer claims the filmmaker captured the encounter on a high-resolution camera. Dyer, meanwhile, says he got it on his cell phone. But they wanted more. So that day, Dyer says, he and Matthews bought a rack of ribs from Walmart and Dyer nailed it to a tree at their camp. Then, they waited. Around 11:30, Dyer says he heard footsteps and twigs snapping. He jumped out of his tent and, with Matthews chasing him, ran after the creature. Dyer had his .30-06 hunting rifle; Matthews had his camera. In the end, Dyer says, he fired three shots at the thing, killing it.

Within a couple of weeks, Dyer says he uploaded video footage to YouTube, where it vaulted into the pantheon of furiously debated Bigfoot films. Andrew Clacy, a 47-year-old former television news cameraman and longtime Sasquatch enthusiast in Australia, was among the converted. He knew about Dyer’s history as a hoaxer, but he didn’t care. “Everyone overlooked it because we thought he had the real deal now,” Clacy says. “We thought it helped lead him to the real thing.”

When Meldrum got involved, the spectacle turned nasty. Two pro-Dyer amateur researchers visited Pocatello, Meldrum says, hoping to convince him of the body’s authenticity. It had already been autopsied, and DNA and tissue samples had been obtained, Meldrum recalls them saying. Plus, they had seen it. Were Meldrum to examine it, he would receive a $10,000 bank check; were the body to be proved a fake, he could cash it. When Meldrum declined, they upped the offer to $15,000. Meldrum says he laid out his terms: He’d need high-quality photographs posted on a secure website; he’d have to independently verify the credentials of the experts who examined it; and he’d need a no-contest stipulation for a fraud lawsuit in the event that the body was a fake. “I said, ‘This should be a no-brainer,’” Meldrum recalls.

There was no deal, and a video soon appeared on YouTube. In it, Dyer is wearing a cowboy hat and a striped short-sleeve button-up. In one hand, he’s holding a bottle of lighter fluid; in the other, he’s waving Meldrum’s book, Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science. “Dr. Jeffrey Douchebag Meldrum,” Dyer says to the camera. It’s dark, and Dyer is surrounded by a small audience. He looks like a drunk preacher as he reads aloud: “He knew his footprints were fake, but he thought in his mind, ‘Hey, there’s never going to be anything to compare it to.’ Until Rick Dyer. You’re busted, Mr. Douchebag.”

Dyer sprays the book with lighter fluid and drops it on the concrete. One of the men emerges and lights a match. Eventually, Dyer unzips his fly. “Roasted nuts,” someone says. The group laughs.

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Illustration by Morgan Schweitzer for BuzzFeed

Meldrum has done his best to avoid a cage match with Dyer, to keep Bigfoot madness at the margins. But if one of Meldrum’s goals has been to rescue Sasquatch from the ditch of tabloid mania and force high-minded scientists to at least consider the evidence, he doesn’t appear to have made much progress.

There are a couple of exceptions. A decade ago in Bigfoot Exposed, Daegling examined Meldrum’s footprint work and concluded that he hadn’t considered plausible alternatives for the anatomical detail that he saw. With Patty, Daegling was noncommittal, saying that while the “dynamics” of her movement appeared real, it could have also been a very, very good costume.

Then, earlier this year, a molecular biologist from Oxford published the first-ever systematic DNA analysis of 30 hairs collected from around the world that were purported to have been collected from Sasquatch-like creatures. The results were not good for Bigfoot — they came back as horse, cow, raccoon, bear, even human — though the biologist, Bryan Sykes, seemed troubled by the lack of interest in the subject. “Science neither accepts nor rejects anything without examining the evidence,” he wrote.

I wanted to find out if Meldrum had convinced any of his colleagues to take Bigfoot seriously, so I assembled a brief anonymous survey and sent it to 10 anthropologists at 10 universities who specialize in primates. I asked if they were familiar with Meldrum’s work on Bigfoot and what they thought of it. I wondered if they thought Bigfoot could be a real species of primate and if it deserved to be considered by science. I heard back from three.

All of them knew of Meldrum and respected his non-Bigfoot research, but none were convinced that Sasquatch should even be examined; their argument, in essence, was that Bigfoot isn’t possible. “A mammal that large going undetected and undocumented in the Western United States for this long defies all probability and logic,” one said. When I asked what they thought it was, all three said a hoax. Or, as one put it, “a compound of hoaxing, confusion, hallucination, and folklore.” Meldrum is used to this. Once, when he tried to present Bigfoot-related research at a meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, his submission was rejected. The program chairman later related the comments of one reviewer. “This is just not a subject that is of general interest to the anthropological community,” Meldrum recalls him saying.

In Meldrum’s view, the scientific reaction isn’t so much about evidence — though he did publish a scathing review of Bigfoot Exposed and he doesn’t have kind words for the molecular biologist. In his telling, it’s mostly a perception problem. Some academics have encountered little more than the tabloid mythology. Or the hoaxer. Others are overwhelmed by the intensity of the Bigfoot scene. “When a serious scientist shows some interest in the subject, they often become inundated with correspondence and contact requests from the amateur enthusiast community,” he says. “And there are some real strange people out there.”

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Courtesy of Rick Dyer

In Rick Dyer’s telling, he believed that Morgan Matthews’ documentary, Shooting Bigfoot, would prove him a reformed hoaxer. He believed it would contain the high-quality version of that brightly lit, early morning encounter, and on his Facebook page, he began a countdown to last year’s Hot Docs film festival in Toronto, where the movie was to premiere. “I built it up like you wouldn’t believe,” he says. The film, however, contained just one brief scene from that night — Matthews chasing Dyer into the woods, then getting knocked over by something big and mean-looking. Its werewolf-like face and arm flash across the screen. Soon after, the movie ends.

Speculation cascaded: Was the shooting staged? Had Matthews participated in an elaborate hoax? Where was Dyer’s body? Matthews has remained cagey on the matter, telling the CBC, “There was something quite extreme” at the end of his film that “may or may not have been a close encounter.”

Dyer says the corpse was moved to a secure facility, and his investors were unwilling to release it. He was losing patience; he had a fanbase to satisfy, after all, and he wanted to capitalize on the attention. “I saw an opportunity,” he says. “I said, ‘Let’s make money off a fake one and let’s make money off a real one.’” Like the traveling sideshow exhibits that once enthralled 19th- and 20th-century audiences, he would tour the South, spinning fantastic Bigfoot tales. And he would show the evidence.

In the final weeks of 2013, Dyer assembled a small team that included Clacy, the Australian cameraman, and a few other fans. From a Spokane-based toymaker, he says he commissioned a $4,000 latex, Styrofoam, and camel-hair Bigfoot, which he called Hank and placed inside a plywood-and-Plexiglas box. It would be viewed in a trailer, which would be attached to a motor home. The whole enterprise, which Clacy says was underwritten by two investors and an $80,000 loan, would rumble down the highway wrapped in gaudy, impossible-to-miss advertisements that included a massive photograph of Dyer’s cowboy hat-clad head next to the comic book text of his pitch: “See the only dead Bigfoot.”

In Clacy’s telling, he had no idea Hank was fake. He packed up his home in Wodonga and flew to Las Vegas, where Dyer was living at the time, because he believed Hank was the creature shot dead in Texas. “We wanted to be part of history,” he says. (Dyer disputes this, saying Clacy knew that it was a hoax.)

Despite a dismal start in Phoenix in January, Texas proved lucrative. From Amarillo to Houston, San Antonio to Katy, Hank was presented in flea markets and a Home Depot parking lot, at Alamo Drafthouses, and, when passing drivers flagged them down, on the side of the road. Dyer says he usually charged between $5 and $10 a head, but for the roadside stops, he claims $100 wasn’t uncommon. About 10 people could fit in the trailer at a time, and the routine was fairly brief, Clacy says. He would tell the story of how Dyer killed Hank, and he would use the photographs on the wall as supporting evidence. “I think we had a 95% belief rate,” Clacy says, adding that even taxidermists and a medical doctor in Paris, Texas, seemed convinced.

The media was incredulous. In Las Vegas, before the tour even started, a reporter from Esquire wondered why anyone would believe an admitted hoaxer, while Meldrum was again asked to weigh in, this time by a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor. “The thing has clearly been fabricated,” Meldrum said. “It smacks of images of alien autopsy.”

Clacy says his suspicions grew, but they were tempered by the endorsements from the taxidermists and the doctor (who he now thinks may have been a fake too). Finally, in March, in Daytona, Florida, he says Dyer confessed. It was Bike Week, and they were in the parking lot of an event. “He said, ‘I needed you to believe,’” Clacy recalls. “I feel like an idiot,” he adds. “I believed a con man.”

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Hank with Jimmy Smith II and Jimmy Smith at his new home in Denver. Photograph by Tim Stelloh for BuzzFeed

In the days after, Dyer revealed the hoax in a long, blustery video message on Facebook because, he tells me, “I didn’t want no one else to bust it.” Half a year later, he still claims to have the body of the thing he killed with Morgan Matthews, and he’s still sanguine about his Southern tour. “It’s entertainment,” he says. “If you want to believe I would haul around a life-changing specimen in the back of a $10,000 trailer, then you go ahead and believe it.”

Afterward, Dyer sold Hank to a marijuana dispensary in Denver called Mr. Nice Guys. The owner, Jimmy Smith II, says he bought it for $5,000, and that he’s planning to build a terrarium for it. “I look at it as an investment,” he tells me.

When I met with Dyer in July, he told me he was planning a news conference for early next year to unveil the body of a Bigfoot — for real this time — and he was offering full-access viewings for $150,000. By September, though, he was promoting a new project, a Bigfoot hunt in Pennsylvania.

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The body Dyer claims is a recently killed Bigfoot. Courtesy of Rick Dyer

On a Sunday morning a couple of weeks ago, Dyer sent me a text saying that his “team” killed a Bigfoot the night before. He forwarded “exclusive” photos of something wrapped in a blue tarp, of his friends unloading ice bags from a shopping cart, of him in a camo hat and camo shirt attaching something to the roof of his black Toyota. Later, an image of what looked like intestines arrived on my phone. “That’s the inside of the Bigfoot,” he said. The creature, Dyer told me, was found outside Hazelton, and like most Eastern Bigfoot, at least as described by Loren Coleman, it was small: 5-foot-7 and a few hundred pounds. “I got this one in my possession and it can be proven,” he wrote.

When I tell Meldrum about some of Dyer’s plans, he chuckles and offers the “Fool me once, fool me twice” line.

“What about a third time?” I ask.

He laughs. “Double shame on me,” he says.

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correction

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[the-record-columns]

Jan. 17, 2018: Columns

Perusing old phone directories...

By KEN WELBORN

Record Publisher

    It has been said many times that it doesn't take much to amuse me.

    This is most often said by the random person here and there who visits the offices of The Record and Thursday Printing and think that what passes for "decoration" here is less than the most wonderful exhibit of history, oddities and memorabilia they have ever seen.  This is, of course, after I have tried my best to get them into my "web" of stories and amazingly detailed information on most anything in the place--and failed.

    To that end, one of my personal favorite pastimes after I have been working on bookkeeping for what seems like forever, is to take a break and dust things off a little or move pieces around to get something up off the floor, making room for the fact that something "new/old"  is going to come in every so often.  During those fits of reorganization, I sometimes run across something I haven't paid any attention to lately or have even forgotten I have.  This past weekend, that item was a series of Central Telephone Company phone books running from 1950 to about 1970.  Most, if not all, of these phone books were given to me my friends Walter and Mary McSwain of North Wilkesboro.

     In looking through a couple of the Central Telephone books, 1950 and 1954 to be exact, it is clear that the phone company had figured out that the same business that was willing to pay them a couple of dollars a month for a telephone, would also be willing to pay a lot more for an advertisement in the phone book.  Some of those ads were quite interesting and, of course, it was interesting to note how many of the businesses are long gone by now.

    The catch lines and slogans were fascinating to say the least.  One I have heard fairly often seemed to date way back at least to the 50's.  In an ad for Fletcher Motor Company of North Wilkesboro it  proudly states, "Where used car prices are born, not raised."  Another old stand-by was in the ad for Busic's Cabs, after listing their three locations, their closing line appears, "If we please you, tell others, if we don't, tell us."  An early import car dealer in Wilkes was Pennell Motor Company of Wilkesboro, selling the French-made Renault, with the engine in the rear and touting its  45 miles to the gallon rating--in 1950, when gas was probably 15 cents a gallon.  They promoted the Renault as "The lowest priced 4-door sedan in America."

    The McNeil family's  Coca-Cola Bottling Company on the corner of 10th and C Streets in North Wilkesboro always advertised in every venue possible.  The parent Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta was always coming out with a new slogan or catch line.  In the local bottler's 1950 ad it read, "Coca-Cola--the Global High Sign."  By the 1954 edition, it was "Time Out for a Coke." 

    One West Jefferson company advertised International Harvester refrigerators and home freezers.  Yes, International Harvester,  and, being way ahead of their time, referred to their products as "femineerd."  Speaking of International Harvester, I always think of Clyde Cothren's City Sales Company which was for years located across from the old YMCA in Wilkesboro.  I can still remember the big trucks sitting around that old yellow building as I would ride my trusty Schwinn bicycle to the YMCA to go swimming in the late 50s.  However, in the old phone books appear ads for Willis cars, trucks, and Jeeps. Yet another City Sales ad was for the Nash Airflyte automobile--and from it came a slogan that must not have panned out too well, "Nash, the World's Most Modern Cars!!"   

    It is now time to wind up for the day, so I will leave you with the all-time best slogan I have ever seen, heard, read, or otherwise been made aware of.  Now, remember, Dizzy Dean always said "It ain't  bragging if it's the truth," so here goes. I must leave the phone book venue for this one and go back to an old Blum's Almanac from the late 20's which is here in the office somewhere among the treasures.  In this old Blum's Bible for Farmers, a man was advertising that he had fence posts for sale.  Not just any kind of fence posts, mind you, but Locust fence posts.  And, as Millers Creek's own resident lumberman Roy Triplett will tell you, Locust is special stuff.

    The ad in question ended up with this quote, or slogan if you will, "Our locust fence posts will outlast the hole."

    I love it.

 Listen first

By LAURA WELBORN

At Church this Sunday, Rev. Ann Dieterle reminded us of the movie "Field of Dreams" where the star hears the voice say: "Build it and they will come."

How often do we listen to the voices and clues around us?

I know that as hard as I try I still do not listen for the "voices or clues" as it is easier to go forward with my own plan and forge ahead.

St Benedict reminds us of the Monk's Rule:  "Listen first before you speak, act or judge."

I have decided listening is one of the hardest things for me- really listening, paying attention to what is happening around me and then taking in the clues or signs of direction.  I come to the conclusion that it is not the saying "build it and they will come," but that someone listened to a voice that did not make much sense at the time. It’s the act of faith to move forward with something we don't understand.  

Richard Rohr in his daily meditation says, "God reveals God’s self to us through what unfolds as our life, along with every visible thing around us. These ordinary revelations must be respected and deeply listened to.  Life itself is the primary divine revelation.

Maybe we start by asking better questions like who are we, what do we live for, what is worth the pain, what do you never give up on, what do you look forward to?  These questions challenge us to live intentionally and focus on what is important to us.  But to go one step further and listen to the voices and clues we are given in life is to ask ourselves about the ransom life situations that are causing us stress and heartache-  “What else could this mean?”  

·                 What is the story I’m telling myself about this situation?

·                  Can I be absolutely certain the story is true?

·                  How do I feel and behave when I tell myself the story?

·                  If I stopped telling myself the story once and for all, what else might I see, hear, or experience?

While I would love to have an honest to goodness voice tell me to build it and they will come, I realize my voices maybe already there if I will simply ask the questions to myself first and then listen to my own answers. 

Time to Balance the Books

By EARL COX

U.S. President Donald Trump recently tweeted a clear, long overdue message to Mahmoud Abbas; in effect: you can’t have it both ways.

Offended by Trump’s December speech, which clearly left Jerusalem’s final boundaries to be negotiated by both sides, Abbas overreacted with trademark false accusations, and a huffy rebuttal of the U.S. role as peace broker.

 Like the proverbial farmer sawing off a tree limb but forgetting he’s sitting on it, Abbas overlooked the billions in U.S. aid funneled to the PA since the mid-’90s, which last year alone totaled more than $730 million in all sectors—economic and humanitarian, security and justice, and UNRWA. Abbas’s tantrum backfired. It’s payback time.

Trump recently tweeted: “We pay the Palestinians hundreds of millions of dollars a year and get no appreciation or respect. They don’t even want to negotiate a long overdue peace treaty with Israel. So why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?”

It’s about time America balanced these books.

The PA has long misappropriated U.S. and European aid to support jailed terrorists and their families at more than half its annual budget—$300 million annually, and more than $1 billion in the last four years. Convicted terrorists even got a 13 percent raise last year (their families gained 4 percent), according to Palestinian Media Watch. Though safeguards have attached to U.S. aid, some observers cite that evidence indicates that the attempted controls did not significantly alter this practice, according to Jim Zanotti, for the Congressional Research Service.

But that’s not all. PA leaders also siphon off foreign assistance for personal enrichment for themselves, family members and cronies at the expense of the Palestinian people.

The intent of development assistance is to “help the Palestinians build the physical and social infrastructure to enable the emergence of a sustainable, prosperous society. But few seriously questioned how much money is sent and how it is used,” Deputy Foreign Minister Tsipi Hotovely told The Wall Street Journal.

Aid from Europe has also been misappropriated. The Times of London quoted an EU report on the “loss” of development assistance due to “bribes and misuse of aid” amounting to €2 billion ($2,405,421,820) to the West Bank and Gaza Strip from 2008 to 2012.

The Palestinian Authority’s abject trail of corruption began upon its inception in 1994, as money and aid for the Palestinian people were funneled to the Fatah budget, said Sawsan Ramahi for Al-Monitor. “Money meant for the establishment of a state quickly turned into balances in Swiss bank accounts, personal projects in neighboring countries and partnerships.”

It surprised no one that the Panama Papers exposé of tax evasion and money laundering by international elites included leading Palestinian Authority figures, Adnan Abu Amer reported for Al Monitor. Just one example: Abbas’s son Tareq secretly owns, in partnership with the PA, a holding company in the British Virgin Islands worth more than $1 million. In addition to money laundering and tax evasion, there also has been theft of public money, bribes, transfer of government land to officials for private use and more, he said.

“The Panama Papers confirm that the PA is a nongovernmental entity,” Palestinian author Adel Samara said. Its model more closely resembles the infrastructure and clientelism of the Sicilian Mafia, which built its crime empire on illegal profits using bribes, extortion, threats, violence and murder—and perpetrated its ranks by recruiting young boys and turning them into “soldiers” who did the dirty work and were lowest and least paid on the food chain.

“Corruption in the PA … gives the Palestinian ruling elite a strategic tool to control the popular bases … maintain the status quo, dominate political and economic assets, and implement its political agenda without facing any effective opposition,” Amer said.

The Trump administration and the U.S. Congress—which recently passed the Taylor Force Act—are taking a good hard look at U.S. support for the PA and UNRWA. The president understands that perpetuating previous failed U.S. policies could be catastrophic, especially with Abbas at the helm.

Perhaps Trump should make him an offer he can’t refuse.

  Sizzling on the Grill

By CARL WHITE

Life in the Carolinas

Upon arrival, Sylvia said, “this morning’s ice on the roads were the worst I have seen in my 50 years of driving a school bus”. I was setting at the counter waiting for breakfast to come off the grill when those words drifted through the air. I had seen a little ice on my drive to Alvin’s Dockery Grocery & Snack Bar in Traphill, NC and I knew that school had been delayed for a few hours, but I did not realize that the early drives had been so challenging. The thing that stuck in my head most was not the ice but rather the fact that someone had just announced that she had been driving a school bus for 50 years.

I ask Sylvia if her bus did much sliding on the ice, not really, she replied, I’ve been driving long enough to know what I am doing. Way to go Sylvia.

I try to visit Alvin’s place at least once a year, I enjoy the random conversations about life and a good country breakfast.

Ray was talking about the single digit cold weather and the cows that stand in the pasture, and for whatever reason, they do not huddle together for the benefit of combined body heat. This line of conversation opened the floor for other cold weather stories.

Another fellow shared a story about the cold weather causing iguanas to fall from trees in Florida. Some in the room thought that they were frozen to death, while others seem to think that maybe they were hibernating due to the cold weather. Iguanas like it above 45 degrees. And when they get colder things move much slower and they become frozen, and that’s why they were falling out of trees like ripe fruit. In most cases, active life will return to the iguana when warmer weather returns.

Another story about the effects of cold weather surfaced about Swamp Park, in southeastern North Carolina.  The alligators found themselves living under a frozen lake. Before the lake is frozen over the alligators will stick their nose above the water line so they can breathe as the lake freezes over, and then they just wait for warmer weather.

Alvin stays busy at the grill preparing food but always finds time to share colorful thoughts and often it relates to a reflective memory from youth or maybe a movie reference.

It is evident that for the most part, he enjoys the people he serves, he’s been on the grill for a long time. And it seems like everyone is treated like family and friends.

We all deal with things in life that at times overwhelm us, so maybe we can learn a few things from our shorter legged friends. Maybe we just need to poke our nose out of the muck and just wait for things to get a bit more comfortable.

I ask Alvin for his quote of the year, “When I was young, my mind was always moving fasts. Now my mind is more focused on profound thoughts with purpose, (he tilted his head and with a classic smirk says) O hell, I’m just getting older, now go and have a nice day.”

And so, it goes, Sizzling on the Grill at Dockery Grocery & Snack Bar.

 Carl White is the executive producer and host of the award winning syndicated TV show Carl White’s Life In the Carolinas. The weekly show is now in its seventh year of syndication and can be seen in the Charlotte viewing market on WJZY Fox 46 Saturdays at 12:00 For more on the show visit www.lifeinthecarolinas.com, You can email Carl White at Carl@lifeinthecarolinas.com.  

[lodelss]

Bundyville: The Remnant, Chapter Two: The Hunter and the Bomb

Leah Sottile | Longreads | July 2019 | 25 minutes (6,186 words)

Part 2 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB. 

  I.

Bill Keebler dumps a sugar packet into his coffee and calmly explains that the government is after him. They’re always watching him — constantly surveilling his every move, he says. He’s even at risk here, inside a Denny’s attached to a Flying J truck stop, about a half hour outside Salt Lake City.

He’s also pretty sure that Bundyville producer Ryan Haas and I are federal agents, posing as journalists. “I’m gonna be honest with you, it wouldn’t surprise me if both of you pulled out a badge,” he says. 

Just after 4 p.m. on a frigid February day, Keebler, 60, shuffles toward the back corner table we’d staked out for the interview.  He’s about a half hour late, uttering his deepest apologies for getting the time wrong. He’s never late, he says. 

Keebler is a raspy-voiced Southerner with skin that looks brittle from working in the sun all his life as a horse wrangler, ranch hand, hunting outfitter, and construction worker. At Denny’s he’s wearing a sandstone-colored canvas work jacket, and his hair sprouts from underneath a khaki Oath Keepers hat, which covers a shiny bald spot on the top of his head. He smokes a lot. Drinks a lot of coffee.

On the phone a few days before, I told him that I’d read the court documents for his case and was surprised by what I saw. I wanted to hear his version of what happened in June 2016 on the day three years before when Keebler believed he was detonating a bomb at a building owned by the Bureau of Land Management, only to find that the bomb was a fake given to him by undercover FBI agents embedded in his militia group.

The bombing itself was shocking. But the part that surprised me at the time was that, despite having pleaded guilty, serving 25 months in jail, and being released on probation, most of his case was still under federal protective order. Keebler’s attorney told me he’s not allowed to say why. I’m at the Denny’s hoping Keebler might be willing to tell me anyway.

In reading about what happened that day in the desert with the bomb, I learned — through the few court documents available — that Keebler was close friends with LaVoy Finicum. He’s the rancher who was a leader at the Malheur occupation, in Oregon, and was shot and killed by authorities after fleeing from a traffic stop.

But before we can talk about that, we’ve got to calm him down. He nudges his head in the direction of a young waiter, walking in a loop around by our table. Under his breath, Keebler says, “We’re being watched.” 

“Right now?” I ask. 

“Yeah.” 

“By who?” 

“A fed or an informant,” Keebler says. 

Haas asks if he means the Denny’s server, who’s walking by to see if we need any refills on coffee. That’s the guy, Keebler says.

If there’s so much at risk, why meet us? Why tell your story?

“Because if I don’t it’s going to die with me,” he says. “I’ve been on borrowed time for years.” He says he survived cancer, a massive heart attack, and “four heart procedures, looking at a fifth.” That’s not to mention the other stuff — things much harder to believe but that Keebler swears up and down are real, like the federally organized hits on him by the gang MS-13 while he was behind bars.

So I assure him: I’m not a fed. Google me. And I tell him he’s in control of what he says. If I ask something he doesn’t want to answer, something he thinks might get him in trouble, he doesn’t need to respond. He agrees, and for three hours, Bill Keebler gives his side of what happened leading up to that day in the desert with the bomb — a version of the story in which he is the hero, the government is the enemy, and where America is so rapidly nearing its demise, he can almost taste it. 

***

In the three years since the Bundys mobilized a force to take over the Malheur National Wildlife refuge in Oregon, the world has morphed in ways I couldn’t have imagined. For one thing, Donald Trump became the president of the United States. He has increased his attacks on media, stepping up from calling the very newspapers I write for “fake news,” to neglecting to hold the Saudi Arabian government accountable for putting into motion the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

In June 2019, Trump — in a meeting at the G20 Summit — laughed with Russian president Vladimir Putin about journalists. “Get rid of them,” he said. “Fake news is a great term, isn’t it? You don’t have this problem in Russia. We have that problem.” And Putin responded: “Yes, yes. We have it, too. It’s the same.” They both laughed. 

Oft-cited research collected by the Southern Poverty Law Center has shown that since 1996, anti-government activity surged when Democratic presidents were in office. Militia groups that claimed to see proof of tyranny thrived in the 1990s — specifically when Vicki Weaver and her teenage son were killed during a standoff with federal agents at Ruby Ridge in 1992, and when the feds stormed into the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993. 

In President Obama, the anti-government movement saw the embodiment of tyranny: someone upon whom they could project their worst fears. They called him a socialist globalist Muslim who, after ascending to the highest seat of power, would bring Sharia law upon the people. There was no proof or evidence to support this. But that didn’t matter to them.

Under Trump, suddenly, anti-government groups are pro-government. Nearly everything about Trump’s rhetoric — from questioning Obama’s nationality, to draining the swamp of elites, to building a border wall, to pushing for anti-Muslim legislation, to zealous nationalism — is lifted from the anti-government handbook.

“It blows my mind. The Patriot militia movement, anti-government movement — however you want to refer to them — under Obama was so concerned about tyranny and executive power … and yet they’ve been some of the most vocal advocates for Trump unilaterally grabbing and exerting executive branch power,” said Sam Jackson, an assistant professor in the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity at the University at Albany-SUNY. Jackson researches the militia movement — he wrote his dissertation on the Oath Keepers. 

“If Obama had talked about declaring a national emergency … they would have been up in arms in a heartbeat,” he said.

So what gives? How do the anti-government go pro-government? 

“It makes it really hard to take them at their word,” Jackson told me. “It really makes it seem like all of that was just rhetoric that they deployed in pursuit of other goals that perhaps they perceived would be less popular amongst the American public — whether that’s Islamophobia or anti-immigration or whatever else they’re really interested in. It seems like perhaps now they’re willing to talk about these other things more blatantly than they were in the past.” 

***

Bill Keebler tells us he was born in Mississippi and grew up in Georgia the descendant of a long line of military veterans. During the Cold War in the early 1980s, Keebler says he enlisted in the Army and served in Aschaffenburg, Germany. There, he says, he was on the frontlines of the fight against communism. And it was also during this time — he claims — that he placed third in the 1984 World Championships in Kung Fu.

It’s clear that he’s not the guy he used to be — or at least that the person I’m seeing before me at Denny’s isn’t the fighter he is in his head. Keebler claims that, after winning that championship, he created his own style of martial arts, called “Jung Shin Wu Kung Fu” before a “board of masters,” but the Bundyville team wasn’t able to confirm this.

After years of working on farms and ranches, Keebler found himself in Utah — far, far from home — where he worked as a hunting outfitter, trained horses, and says he became a member of the Utah Oath Keepers. Around Tooele County, Utah, he was so well-known as an ardent prepper and varmint hunter that the Salt Lake Tribune ran a story on his coyote hunting skills. In one scene in the story, Keebler crouches in underbrush and wears camouflage that’s been drenched coyote-urine scent. 

In 2011, he was running a hunting outfitting business called Critter Gitter Outfitters and often posted photos on social media of his excursions into the wild. In one, a muscled, tanned Keebler poses with a baby deer he’d rescued. 

Keebler spends a lot of time on the internet — has for years. Online, Keebler makes lots of dad jokes and even more jokes where a woman’s demise is the punchline. In one video he shared on his Facebook page, a blond woman in a white robe pleads with her husband until he hands her the keys of a black SUV with an oversize bow on the hood. When she starts the car, it explodes, the man smiles, and the words Merry Christmas, Bitch fill the screen. 

By 2013, Facebook had become a place for Keebler to vent about Obama — “I call him O-bummer,” he told me during one phone call — where he openly shared his belief in an encyclopedic number of conspiracy theories. “FEMA camps are everywhere, Muslims and illegals are taking over, Obama is the biggest Traitor this country has ever known, No Jobs, 16 trillion in [debt] and no relief in sight,” he wrote one February morning. “Anyone protesting Obama is assassinated and turned into a monster by our own media.”

None of this is true — his sources are websites that are notorious for generating fake content. His words dipped in and out of coherence, in and out of overt racism. “Our jobs have all gone over seas to other country’s as they get Fat off our money and we send them aid, weapons and anything else they desire for free. Jets, food what ever they want because we OWE it to them somehow,” he wrote in one such post. “I have been patient, tolerant and offended too much for any more. I am an American, have lived as I will die as my ancestors did, As A FREE MAN. I speak fucking English and you can press 1 and kiss my ass ya muslim, communist Jackasses! If this offends you then I have succeeded in my intentions.” 

He signed off on another post: “Stay safe, armed to the teeth, prepared and with God. Bill Keebler.”

Later that month, he wrote that “Someday SOON chit is gonna happen and this country will l;iterally EXPLODE, and when it does it will be a very messy situation… soon BOOM, we will explode. Hope you are prepared.”

Keebler hunting coyotes in 2011. (AP Photo/Al Hartmann – The Salt Lake Tribune)

By spring 2014, Keebler seemed to have a new personality altogether. He wrote near-constantly about what to do when SHTF (prepper-speak for “shit hits the fan”). He signed his posts “th3hunt3r.” He breathed in false information about the Bureau of Land Management killing endangered species and exhaled posts about the hypocrisy of not letting Cliven Bundy graze his cattle. 

Much has been written about the algorithms employed by sites like YouTube, which keeps users on the site — generating more and more advertising dollars — by directing them toward more extreme content. Reporters and analysts often reflect on how this affects young people. But the algorithmic drive toward extreme content has taken hold with a much older generation, too, with guys like Keebler. Online, they can fantasize about who they’ll be when the end finally comes. They water their ignorance and hatred at an online trough with others who think just like them.

In April 2014, Keebler sprung into action after seeing a video on Facebook of a confrontation between Bureau of Land Management agents and protesters who’d assembled at the Bundys’ side — that video I mentioned way back at the beginning of this story, of Ammon Bundy being tased in the midst of a chaotic confrontation. Keebler loaded up his camper and drove several hours south to Bunkerville, Nevada, where he says he set up a mess hall and provided supplies.

“Well, I made it to the ranch, all is well, getting settled in, been intersting so far, and I aint shot no one, YET! lol” he wrote on his Facebook page on April 10 after he arrived. 

Once there, Keebler solicited money online to help pay for supplies. He claims he kept hot tempers under control. 

“I stopped some people wanted to shoot people,” he says to me at the truck stop. “One of them got mad about it and put a gun in my face. He wanted to start the war. … He said, ‘I’m gonna fire a shot just to get it started.’ … Things were that close. Volatile.”

Keebler also takes credit for ejecting Jerad and Amanda Miller — who would go on to murder two police officers in Las Vegas and die in the midst of a shoot-out with officers inside a Walmart. He claims that if it wasn’t for him, Bundy Ranch would have been a bloodbath. Less than a year later — according to Keebler’s defense attorney’s presentencing memo — an undercover FBI agent was embedded in Keebler’s own militia and then began to regularly talk about stepping into action, about blowing up federal agents and federal properties, and scouting a mosque as a potential target alongside Keebler. 

And yet, Keebler never kicked that guy out. 

  II.

After the militias assisted in preventing the BLM from seizing the Bundy family’s cattle, Keebler left feeling excited about the movement. He lived on Bundy Ranch for about two weeks. “To me it was one of the biggest events in this country … short of the Boston Tea Party,” he says. “It was a wake-up call.”

“After the standoff and everything, we had momentum,” he says, offering his mug to the waiter for a refill. “It started because Cliven Bundy, but we started a movement that had the potential to be tenfold what it was.”

When he came back home to Utah, he quit the Oath Keepers. He proudly recounts a story about trading heated words at Bunkerville with the group’s founder, Stewart Rhodes. Keebler claims he asked whether Rhodes would accept “radical Islamic Muslims” into the group; Rhodes said the Oath Keepers doesn’t discriminate. Back at home, he started his own militia: Patriots Defense Force (PDF). 

At the height of its membership, PDF had just seven members including Keebler. They held “field training exercises” where they’d shoot targets. They’d talk about raising “backyard meat rabbits” and chickens, and living off-grid. Mostly, they were a bunch of preppers. 

But before PDF was even formed — even had a name — the FBI began to monitor him, according to court documents submitted by Keebler’s defense team. They began immediately upon his return home from Bundy Ranch. The Bureau eventually embedded three confidential informants in his militia and three undercover agents, including two men who went by the names Brad Miller and Jake Davis. Miller and Davis  — people Keebler believed to be other God-loving Patriots — were sworn into PDF in May 2015. Excluding Keebler, the FBI agents, and informants, there were — at most — three members of PDF. 

According to the defense, one informant was paid $60,000 for his undercover work inside the militia. The stories the FBI agents gave to Keebler must have seemed like he found a gold mine: Davis told stories of his expertise in hand-to-hand combat; Miller positioned himself as an expert in mining and explosives. Another FBI agent played the part of a successful business guy interested in funding a militia.

Unlike all the other times Keebler imagined the government conspiring to snoop on him, this time they actually were — but he was so focused on the “deep state” that he didn’t seem to notice what was happening right in front of his face. 

As the FBI surveilled Keebler, he frequently spoke about martial law. “Under marshal [sic] law, Mr. Keebler expected the federal government to turn against the people…” His attorney wrote in his sentencing memo, “He envisioned house-to-house gun confiscations and the government putting ‘undesirable’ and ‘unsalvageable’ people in FEMA camps.”

By fall 2015, Keebler was meeting with LaVoy Finicum. Finicum, too, had been excited by what he had encountered at Bundy Ranch: a group of citizens who believed in Cliven Bundy’s conspiracy theories about the federal government coming to get him. 

Finicum, after seeing Cliven Bundy successfully get away with shirking his grazing costs,  had recently violated the terms of his own BLM grazing permit — accruing fines for grazing his cattle out of season. Finicum spoke to Keebler about fortifying his property in case of a situation like Bundy Ranch — or maybe even Ruby Ridge or Waco.

“At the Bundy’s we got there after the fact. If we knew it was coming, we could be there prepared,” Keebler says. Finicum was expecting the same. He’d stopped paying his grazing fees after going to Bundy Ranch and assumed the BLM would come get him, too. “We were going to stop them from taking the cattle,” he says. “Now I don’t mean ambush assault and kill and shoot. None of that crap.” 

Keebler walks Haas and I through the plan: When the BLM came in, apparently the group planned to dig out the road the agents came in on with a backhoe — making it impossible for them to leave. Miller pushed for the group to instead explode the road, he says. Keebler said that was crazy, and the two traded words over it. 

The group, without Finicum, drove toward Mt. Trumbull, where the government says Keebler got his first view of a building owned by the BLM — the remote property that, months later, he aimed to destroy with a bomb. 

Over the course of our interview, Keebler mentioned several arguments with Miller. But he always let him stay. 

If he was so extreme, such a loose cannon, I had to wonder, why keep him?

Because Miller, Keebler says, paid for gas to go to Arizona to meet with Finicum, and Keebler alleges, even to Washington State for a secret ceremony in which he was inducted into a Coalition of Western States militia by Washington state representative Matt Shea.

According to Keeber and his attorneys, federal agents were basically bankrolling his militia. And the way Keebler sees it, those same federal agents forced him to blow up a government building. 

“The FBI covered Mr. Keebler’s expenses on many similar trips. The FBI also made repeated and timely donations to … keep it (and Mr. Keebler) afloat,” defense attorneys wrote. “In the end, Mr. Keebler did exactly what he was induced to do: he picked a target and ‘went on the offense.’”

“They were hell-bent determined to do something, and I guess I kind of let it get in my head,” Keebler says. “Maybe if we did something to kind of let them know that it’s kind of like a warning signal.”

***

Central to the Patriot movement are many, many theories about people its members believe are involved in a vast conspiracy against the American people. In my reporting, the most common names that came up in Patriot conspiracies (aside from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama) were BLM agent Dan Love, who led the Bunkerville round-up at Bundy Ranch in 2014, and Greg Bretzing, who was the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Oregon office during the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. 

After the events at Malheur, Bretzing retired from the FBI, and he now works in security, safety, and corporate affairs for a private company that builds barges and railroad cars. “So, are you plotting a conspiracy with Dan Love against the Patriot movement?” I ask him one morning last winter, sitting in his office.

Bretzing laughs. “No, no. I do know Dan Love.” 

Bretzing worked for the FBI for 22 years, for much of that time on terrorism cases, both international and domestic. I want to know how the FBI views and defines international extremist groups differently than domestic ones. The biggest difference, according to Bretzing, is the law.

“There’s clear statutes against violent acts for political purposes or to overthrow a government,” he tells me. The FBI has squads devoted to domestic terrorism — but Bretzing said membership in any group isn’t what will get the feds on your trail. 

“Anybody’s political beliefs, religious beliefs, First Amendment rights — none of that is an issue,” he says. “You can be a member of any group you want to be, and it can be a pro anything or an anti anything group. That’s fine. It’s when those groups then take steps to commit violent acts or to break the law or to defraud — that is when the FBI or other law enforcement starts to look at them.”

Someone has to break the law — or look like they’re going to break the law — to get the attention of the FBI. Bretzing is clear: The FBI does not go on fishing expeditions of people it doesn’t like. 

I tell Bretzing about the Keebler case; it didn’t ring a bell. But when I tell him more about it, he says it reminds him of a notorious 2010 case in Portland involving the would-be “Christmas tree bomber.” In that case, a young man named Mohamed Mohamud believed he was detonating a bomb that would have caused large-scale fatalities of civilians attending the city’s annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony in the center of the city. 

When Mohamud attempted, twice, to ignite the bomb — which was provided by an undercover agent — it didn’t go off. He was arrested immediately. Mohamud’s attorney argued his client was entrapped. Prosecutors argued the violent religious extremist ideology was already in place; they were preventing him from acting on it. He was convicted in 2013 for attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and sent to prison for 30 years.

“Having undercover agents inside is important to both effectively gather the evidence and to ensure that nothing violent actually does take place,” Bretzing tells me. “If you look at the tapes on Mohamed Mohamud, many, many, many times the undercover agents say, ‘We don’t have to do this. This is not something that has to be done, we can put it off … Are you sure you want to do this?’ Constantly ensuring that this is something that the individual is pushing, not the government. But the reason it’s important to have an agent inside is if an agent wasn’t there with this individual, then [they would] be taking these steps on their own.

“The public would rightfully be unhappy if then a violent act occurs and we didn’t do all we could do to stop it,” he says. 

But, how can law enforcement agencies be so sure people will go on to commit acts of violence? And what’s the right way to go after domestic terrorists? 

I ask Karen Greenberg, the director of Fordham Law School’s Center on National Security these questions. For years, she’s been examining cases that show an intersection of national security, policy, human rights, and civil liberties issues. 

Greenberg is extremely cautious of creating overarching laws that target domestic terrorists. “Washington is looking for is a domestic terrorism statute — that will be a federal one, which we don’t have. We have one for international terrorism, and it’s quite broad in its application,” she tells me. “Part of the reason is they want to be able to have greater surveillance powers.”

To apply that to domestic terrorism cases, she feels, is “a very dangerous road.” 

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I call up Michael German to get his perspective. He’s a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice now, but in the 1990s, he was an undercover FBI agent inside militia groups in Southern California and the Pacific Northwest. I want to get a sense from someone who’s been undercover why the feds might home in on a guy like Keebler. 

German says that in the years after 9/11, successive attorneys general amended guidelines that gave the feds greater flexibility. They were allowed to open investigations into people they might not have bothered with in previous years. They might look into a guy like Keebler even if they weren’t sure he was committing any crimes. That sounds like the opposite of what Bretzing told me, I say. 

“It sounds like from what you’re telling me after 2002 and after 2008 it became maybe a little bit more permissive to go on fishing expeditions of people that you don’t ideologically agree with,” I say to him.

“Right,” he says. FBI agents want to believe they don’t do that, “but clearly evidence shows the opposite.” German rattles off a list of cases and explains to me, “There was a case in Southern California where an FBI informant eventually got sideways with the FBI and came forward acknowledging that he had been directed to probably target Muslim communities in Southern California.” The agent “used listening devices to record people’s conversation when there was no suggestion they were actually involved in any kind of criminal activity,” he says. “So the difference is now that’s allowed.” 

German says the FBI doesn’t need an indicator of criminal activity anymore in order to watch a person. All they had to show was that an individual needed to be watched because they fit into the parameters of an established FBI’s mission to stop terrorism. That is, maybe they could commit a terroristic act someday in the future. 

“They have continued using that tactic and initially it was mostly used against Muslims but has broadened out because it’s a successful tactic as far as the FBI is concerned,” he says. “My concern with that is you’re targeting the lowest-hanging fruit.”

“I know from my own investigations that there are actually people out there plotting serious attacks who have obtained weapons, who have recruited people who have violent pasts, who are willing to commit violent crimes,” German adds. “Why we’re focusing on people who were so incapable and using the resources of the government to improve their capability of doing harm, rather than focusing on people who are engaging in violence, it’s hard for me to understand that that’s a legitimate use of government resources.”

For years, Greenberg has kept a close eye on international terror cases unfolding in U.S. courts, often with elements that feel similar to Keebler’s: A person believed to be associated with al-Qaeda is surrounded by informants and undercover agents, and the person of interest is given a bomb to ignite in the name of an international terror group. 

“So the FBI’s defense on this, and it’s worth thinking about, is ‘Look, I could have been al-Qaeda. I could have been an al-Qaeda operative trained and on-message. … If I could get him to do it, don’t you think an al-Qaeda guy could have gotten him to do it?’ And it works with a jury. It works. Because they say to the jury, ‘Would you have said yes to this guy?’”

  III.

In February 2016, one month after Finicum was shot by authorities after fleeing the traffic stop in Oregon, the members of Patriots Defense Force met at a Carl’s Jr. near Keebler’s home. One way this meeting had been viewed was as a planning session for the group’s next steps — ones that could have potentially led to violence.

Put another way, entirely: Keebler’s defense attorney framed this as a meeting at a fast food restaurant with two FBI agents — one of whom taunted him as a coward and pushed him toward action — and a government informant.

According to court documents, at that meeting Miller mocked Keebler, saying that the Patriots and PDF were just a group of “Facebook fuckin’ Nazis” who have a lot to say on the internet, but never take action in real life. 

Keebler, in response, suggested the group do some reconnaissance of potential targets in Salt Lake City. Miller — who, don’t forget, was there as an undercover FBI agent — suggested targeting Muslims. According to his attorney, Keebler told Miller he didn’t how to find any. Miller then offered to google a mosque, and the group drove there in two cars. 

Keebler says that once outside the mosque, agents asked him why he wouldn’t bomb it. Keebler claims he pointed to the buildings around it. “I said, ‘I’ll tell you why you can’t. You see that big-ass building behind you over your left shoulder?’” he recalls. “I said, ‘That’s one reason you can’t. You’re never getting out of this place. Second: Look at the terrain.’ 

“People were walking around coming in and outside, and started playing basketball. And I said, ‘You see that? Those are kids. There’s women and children playing basketball and shit.’ Like, y’all have lost it.” 

So, the group moved on. The caravan drove past an FBI building and a Bureau of Land Management office. Miller suggested that they send a mail bomb to it, or use a truck bomb to blow it up. Keebler, again, resisted — and the recon mission ended.

Around this point, even Davis, the other undercover agent, was unsure about the tactics he and Miller were using with Keebler. In text messages presented in court by Keebler’s defense, Davis wrote to his handler, Steve Daniels: “So I was thinking on the drive home. I hope we didn’t open Pandora’s box in a way by taking [Keebler] to a mosque he might not have found on his own. With the case winding down on our end I am worried about our liability if he happens to go back sometime on his own.” 

In another message, Davis wrote to Daniels: “I’m all for pushing him, but we can’t sound more radical to him.” Davis expressed concern that it seemed like he and Miller would leading the recon mission: “To me, that’s what it sounds like we are doing,” he texted. 

In another text, Davis noted that pushing Keebler was “grinding” on him. “I wanted to push [Keebler] outside his comfort zone to take his temperature, not lead him to something,” he wrote. “I am not down with giving him all the ideas like when [Miller] told him that we would have to mail a bomb to the BLM office … or drive a car bomb up to it. We can’t be putting crazy ideas into a crazy guy’s head.”

Daniels said he’d listen to the recordings. “I haven’t got the mail bomb stuff. (Yikes),” he wrote. 

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

If it sounds like Bill Keebler was pushed to an act of domestic terrorism by the government itself, that’s certainly what defense intimated during court proceedings. And I tried to get the government’s side of this — filing a FOIA request for the full context of these text messages. But after half a year of waiting for those documents, I still haven’t gotten a response. So I’m stuck with what Keebler tells me, sipping his coffee as he worries our waiter is watching him.

After 26 months of surveilling Keebler, he was handed an improvised explosive device by one of those undercover officers — the same one who said he had an explosives background — and a detonator. Together with the agents, they made the long drive from Keebler’s Utah home, several hours south in the rough desert of Northern Arizona, to an empty BLM building. 

Arguably, along the way, Keebler had plenty of opportunities to say stop, turn around, let’s not do this, I can’t. But he didn’t. And when the bomb was placed at the building near Mt. Trumbull by the undercover agent — near where the Bundy’s ancestors once tried to make a home — Keebler’s finger was the only one on the button. 

Court documents show differing views on what Keebler was willing to do if people were inside the building. In sworn testimony, Daniels told the court that Keebler and Miller discussed what to do if BLM officers were inside, and Keebler “made a comment of: ‘fuck ‘em.’”

He hit the button three times. An explosion went off, but Keebler was too far away to see that his “bomb” was actually a fake, and the sound he heard was a concussion grenade deployed by the FBI. His lawyer called his intent to destroy the place a “serious property crime.” The government called it a bombing. 

***

I ask Keebler what the federal government, ideally, would look like to him. After Bundy Ranch, what did he decide he’d like to see change? 

He says not only does he want the federal government to stay out of the business of individual states, he wants it to be purged of the people he believes are ruining the country. The “deep state,” he says. 

“Everybody knows they’ve outlawed prayer in school,” he says. “You can’t do the Pledge of Allegiance in our schools, but now we got Muslims praying in the hallways in our schools and in our classrooms, and teachers are now making kids dress up like Muslims. And —”

“Where is this happening?” I stop him.

“A number of places. Yeah. They have taken over whole cities. 

“They want to stop prayer, they want to stop all the American stuff. The Boy Scouts and everything. Make it Islam. They’re out there on the streets right now with hundreds of them bowing, they’ve shut down whole roads, and the cops are standing over them making sure nobody interrupts them. Are you serious? It’s what Bradley tanks are for. You get about 50 rednecks with four-wheel-drive pickups and we’ll end that problem.” 

Keebler is advocating for something that sounds like intimidation at best, and slaughtering Muslims in the streets of America at the worst. And it’s all informed by his conspiratorial worldview. Maybe this is the kind of talk that brought the FBI to him.

“They have their own cops now,” he says. They’re arresting Christians, he says, and I’m shaking my head at him. It’s on the internet, he says. “You need to do your homework.”

“Do you think the federal government is involved in that?” Haas, my producer, asks. 

None of this is based in fact, but that doesn’t matter to Keebler. “I know damn well they are,” he says defiantly.

It should be no shock at this point to tell you that Keebler is an ardent Donald Trump supporter. He loves him. 

“Obama’s not even a black. He’s not African American, he’s Muslim — Kenya or some shit,” Keebler says. “The agreement that they put him in as the president is that he would make way for more Muslims to be up again in the United States. That’s what’s actually come out recently.”

“But who says that?” I press him.

“One of the news — some reporter somewhere,” he says. 

“Soros is financing a lot of it,” Keebler says, calmly, like this is a normal thing to believe and I’m thinking, again, about how people can pick ideas like these up from Trump now. 

It seems like this is what happens when conspiracies become the language the powerful use to communicate to disenfranchised people aching for a target — an explanation and a reason — for their discontent.

“A lot of this is about the New World Order. Look at the pedophilia going on right now. …  It’s all over the internet.” Keebler looks from Haas to me and back again, shocked at our ignorance. 

“I can’t believe y’all don’t know none of this stuff,” he says.

But what would be the point of “knowing” something that isn’t real? 

****

Before we leave Keebler, I ask him about the bylaws of Patriots Defense Force — which were presented as evidence against him in his case. 

I was particularly drawn to the “alert levels” that spell out how members should react in various stages of emergencies. In the worst-case scenario — a level 5 or “black” situation — the bylaws tell militia members to prepare for the absolute worst: “Get gear, family and haul ass to pre-arranged rendezvous point, or bunker down,” it reads. “THE BALLOON HAS GONE UP!”

“What is the shit hits the fan scenario?” I ask.

“During the Obama administration,” he says, “if he calls martial law I’m not gonna wait till he comes to my town. It’s too late. That would have been a shit hit the fan.” 

“So what’s the difference now?”

“I think if Trump declares martial law, it would be in a more controlled manner. He’s not coming after Patriots. He’s not coming after militia,” he says. 

“Do you mean he’s not coming after white people?” I ask.

“No. No, see there you go pushing the racist bullshit,” he says, despite the fact that, for two hours, he’s been talking about Muslims in the most hateful terms I’ve ever heard in an in-person conversation.

“What do you think happens if the Democrats impeach Trump or some kind of charges are brought?” he asks us. “What do you think happens? It’s over. All bets are off,” says Keebler.

“What does that mean?” Haas asks him. 

“All bets are off,” he smiles. “Take that for what it’s worth. People are wanting retaliation. They want revenge, they want payback for a lot of things. This abortion crap. What happened to LaVoy. What is happening to our children. What has happened to our streets. What is happening in our schools. People want retribution.”

***

Bill Keebler says he’s never even heard of Panaca, Nevada. Never heard of a Jones, or a Cluff or another bomb in the desert the summer he tried to bomb the BLM building. I’ve learned tons about the Patriots from talking to him, but nothing more about Panaca.  

We spend the next week driving through the mountains, through deserts, through towns built by polygamists and pioneers. I see the appeal of life out here. Of disappearing into the wild and forgetting about the rest of the world.  

But no matter how many times I use my job as an excuse to disappear into parts of the West I wouldn’t otherwise go to, I always end up feeling a sense of relief when I’m back, sitting in traffic in a city again. 

I’m thinking of Keebler the next day, at the TSA checkpoint inside McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas. Where people say goodbye to their family members and start to weave through a long, snaking line, there’s a man who looks as rumpled as Keebler — but isn’t white — seated with three police officers standing around him. 

It’s a busy Sunday, there are people and kids waiting in line, watching this scene. Things seem calm, albeit weird. And then the man raises his voice. I’m close enough to hear him yell something about the Constitution, about liberty. And the officers stand him up and restrain his wrists behind his back, then lead him away. The line slithers on.

But something’s different. At the front of the line a TSA agent barks orders: Stand side by side. Walk slowly. As we progress two by two, a thick black dog led by a Homeland Security agent sniffs everyone in a circle. I hear the guy being led away shout something about “We, the People.”

The orders continue. Show your ID. Put it away. Shoes off? No, shoes on. Take out your laptops. Use two bins for all your stuff. Stop. Walk. Wait. 

It’s a language we all seem to speak in a dialect that’s always changing, for reasons we don’t know — but what we understand is that this language doesn’t include the words that guy was saying. Or, what he is now likely still saying somewhere else in this airport, in a secret place or room we also know, but don’t really.

I think about Keebler, how I could see him in that same situation here, and how he’s been called a terrorist, and yet still, there’s all these things we don’t know about the government’s role in his story. His case is sealed tight. Why are they keeping it so opaque?

I’m still not convinced a guy like Keebler really could carry out an elaborate bomb plot without ample help. But even so, there’s one thing in court documents that I kept coming back to: that in the hours after Keebler believed he detonated a bomb, as he drove back to Utah, amped up on what he’d just done, he offered a declaration. According to the government, Keebler said after the bombing, “This isn’t about LaVoy, it’s what he stood for.” 

In Panaca, police reports said Jones mentioned LaVoy Finicum in the same breath as his bomb. And now here, with Keebler, there he is again. 

All these years later, the ghost of LaVoy Finicum continues to push the Patriot movement forward. And yet all this time I’ve been reporting on this movement, I know so little about him. He was the guy who was killed by police, who no one heard hide nor hair of before Bundy Ranch. But what did he actually believe and why is it so persuasive? 

I can understand how people who have questions, who never get answers, form their own explanations. How out here in the West, so far from where the decisions are made about how this society works, people can’t figure out how to access the information they need. Everything about Keebler’s case feels Orwellian. He’s a racist, and it’s easy to write him off. But I see now how writing him off means patrolling what he thinks, and that policing certain thoughts — no matter how gross — means a denial of certain rights. 

At the airport, I don’t ask questions about which of my liberties are being violated when I go through the security line. I don’t scream and shout about the Constitution when I’m loading my laptop into the bin. Or when I take off my shoes. Or when I put my hands above my head in a machine that seems to suggest it can see through me for things maybe even I don’t know are there.

***

Leah Sottile is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in theWashington Post, Playboy, California Sunday Magazine, Outside, The Atlantic and Vice.

Editors: Mike Dang and Kelly Stout Illustrator: Zoë van Dijk Fact checker: Matt Giles Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Special thanks to everyone at Oregon Public Broadcasting.

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