A month or so ago I was contacted by a reporter for a local paper here in Tucson who had stumbled upon the Mystery and been ensnared by its weirdness. He works for The Northwest Explorer, which is one of those little neighborhood-localized newspapers. Last week I drove myself way the hell out to Oro Valley to pick up a few copies of the May 14th issue.

My overall take on the article:

This is a really well thought out, well researched, and well executed article, and I think the reporter did a really good job of tackling this whole mess of a Mystery and packaging it into a nice feature.

On the other hand, when I first spoke to the reporter about all this I explained - as I often do - that there were certain ways of going about 'solving' all this that I wasn't going to take, and he explained to me that he probably would.

So while I'm a little torn about that - the idealogical shift of shifting from trying to solve the Mystery as a puzzle to solving the Mystery as 'focusing on an individual', as a large portion of this article does - it's moot point now. I only wonder what effect it'll have on our efforts to comprehend all this.

Some more afterthoughts:

On page 1, I'm listed as a 'current web page designer' for Student Media - this is wrong, I'm a sysadmin, so instead of doing web design stuff I do more things like keep the servers running, repair equipment, design databases, etc. Much more boring. :)

Hosting costs for maintaining the maydaymystery.org website were listed in the article at $120 a month, when it should be $120 a year. Of course, if you factor in all the lost time I've spent on this, the costs could get pretty ugly :)

The reporter also managed to dig up a few ads I *don't* have - April 18 and 29 of 1983 - and he promised me copies, which I never got. Even though they are supposed to be identical to a previous ad, I'd still like to have them in the collection. So, Nate, if you read this, send me copies of those ads.


Onto the article! Sorry if the scans aren't that great, I'll try to rescan them later and clean them up.

  • Article page 1
  • Article page 2
  • Article page 3
  • Article page 4
  • Article page 5
  • {back}