Mystery death of the week

xymphora

Sunday, June 18, 2006
Mystery death of the week

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Aviation/aerospace reporter Michael A. Dornheim has died in what looks like a very mysterious automobile accident. Sploid summarizes the oddness. He had met friends at a restaurant, and had told them which road he was going to take home. Then he disappeared for nine days, when his car was spotted by a police helicopter crashed in a ravine off another road. The accident must have occurred moments after he left the restaurant, and thus moments after he made a point of saying he would be taking a different road. Sploid:

“Beyond the mystery of why Dornheim's car crashed on a road he had no intention of driving on, police are baffled by the crash itself.

California Highway Patrol Officer Leland Tong said he and his fellow officers were ‘scratching their heads’ over how the editor's car got in the ravine at all.

‘He navigated the turns just fine, and then, in a straightaway, for whatever reason, he went off the cliff,’ Tang told the Los Angeles Times.

‘Not a rock was disturbed. Not even the brush was disturbed.’

As for how the crash scene was missed for more than a week - a helicopter pilot finally spotted the Honda on Monday - the CHP says there was nothing to indicate a car had gone off the road beyond ‘a slight rubber scuff mark on one of the guardrails,’ the Times reported.”

Since they are going to leave the car jammed into the ravine, it won’t reveal any forensics, including whether it actually left the scuff mark which is supposed to indicate where it left the road.

Dornheim’s last article was on research being conducted by DARPA on robotic satellite servicing. The religious freaks at NASA – the world’s best funded cult – think that non-human space research is some kind of sin, which is why they resist the sensible replacing of human astronauts by machines. Instead, they keep sending up space-shuttle cannon fodder. They are so crazy about this that they would prefer to see the Hubble telescope turn into space junk rather than send robots up to fix it. The fear is that robots will prove so safe and effective that it will no longer be necessary to use human astronauts, thus ending the Cult of NASA. Is it possible Dornheim rubbed some religious nut at NASA the wrong way? Or did he uncover something else that he was not supposed to know?