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How the FBI Discovered a Real-Life Indiana Jones in Rural Indiana

146 points by Amorymeltzer 5y ago

jamal-kumar 5y ago
Did anyone else keep on hearing Indiana Jones saying "THAT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM" when considering the kinda ironic title of this article?
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  It's even more ironic when you consider how limited the government's means of putting all the stuff the museums and tribes don't want into anything but a dumpster are. You or I can post a free add on an amateur archeology FB group looking for takers to keep stuff out of the dumpster. The government doesn't roll that way, especially when it comes to property that was evidence in a high profile case. Of course the nice stuff will find homes in museums but nobody has a collection that's all nice stuff. The pristine pot will wind up in a museum. The pottery shards that no museum can justify the space for but some small time private collector would want will probably mostly be trashed. If we're lucky some intern will be tasked with taking a ton of ultra hd photos on the way to the dumpster so they're not completely lost forever. The government simply doesn't have good mechanisms for getting rid of stuff like this (whereas private individuals will happily send a flat rate box to whoever paypals them $25 if it means sending part of grandpa's collection to a good home). Seeing as this is a high profile collection they may expend the effort but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it to show up on govplanet.
- AutumnCurtain 5y ago
  It seems beyond charitable to call him an Indiana Jones type to be honest, it glamorizes and romanticizes a man who spent his life bribing officials and robbing graves for his personal satisfaction.
- djmips 5y ago
  He had a museum. It's kind of a personal dream of mine as well. I wouldn't actually do that but I certainly dreamed of it as a child and it still occupies a place in my mind. Despite the moral and legal ramifications of this man's museum it is a pretty damned awesome thing he had. A lot of his thinking was probably rooted in mores of days gone by.
  - jamal-kumar 5y ago
    Bruh there was a raccoon in a bag full of human bones, does that sound like an archival quality childish dream to to you?
Topgamer7 5y ago
What a read! > The agents analyzed skulls pierced with arrowheads and determined that Miller hammered in those arrowheads himself. At first I was fascinated, then I was horrified!
anm89 5y ago
I don't know why but I really despise this article. It isn't journalism. You don't have cartoon recreations of the story in journalism. This is somebody's lit journal piece covered in cartoons masquerading as journalism to grab some ad revenue by using the name Indiana Jones in the title for vanity fair. That probably seems like too much but something about this really rubs me the wrong way.
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  I stopped reading and decided to google Don Miller. https://www.sapiens.org/culture/fbi-repatriation/ https://www.sapiens.org/culture/fbi-repatriation/ This had a few photos and I found it quite interesting. Would love to find a photo dump of what he had!
  - jterrys 5y ago
    Here are some better articles https://www.indystar.com/story/entertainment/arts/2019/02/27/what-happened-don-miller-artifacts-fbi-found-indiana-farm/2990542002/ https://www.indystar.com/story/entertainment/arts/2019/02/27... https://culturalpropertynews.org/plundered-artifacts-from-aged-missionarys-collection-go-to-colombia/ https://culturalpropertynews.org/plundered-artifacts-from-ag... The FBI seized his collection despite not being able to validate his authenticity of ownership. They couldn't actually prove he illegally obtained those items, in part because he collected these objects over the course of decades of his life (when and where laws he'd broken didn't even exist yet, and probably still don't), and because he also willingly gave up his collection.
    - distances 5y ago
      The Vanity Fair article said how FBI only seized human remains and those artifacts that were obviously illegally obtained. Miller got to keep majority of his collection and wasn't even prosecuted. No word in the article what happened to rest of the collection after his death.
      - IncRnd 5y ago
__m 5y ago
Wow he survived an atomic bomb? Or just a regular thief? I don’t think we should idolize these people
- upwardbound 5y ago
  Just a thief and a conman. The article explains that he was not involved in any actual atomic bomb tests, but rather helped develop a minor piece of equipment. He lied and exaggerated his involvement to sound larger-than-life.
imwillofficial 5y ago
What a tragic waste of a mans life work.
- distances 5y ago
  I can only imagine how much better the outcome would've been if he used his locating skills to flag archeological sites without taking anything out of the ground. Now his legacy is a grave robber with an illicit, useless hoard of antiquities that have no documentation to place them in context. A complete waste of a life indeed.
  - thatguy0900 5y ago
    He didnt get permission to dig anywhere or take anything he found. That is the hard part, not finding where to dig.
- upwardbound 5y ago
  What life work?? The guy robbed graves and disfigured people's remains. "The skeleton Miller said was Crazy Horse was actually several people. Miller had taken pieces from other skulls, a different mandible, someone else’s teeth and bones, and glued it all together, Frankenstein-like." "The agents analyzed skulls pierced with arrowheads and determined that Miller hammered in those arrowheads himself." "A video clip shows Miller and others at a burial cave on Easter Island, one of the world’s most famous archaeological sites, bringing out skulls and other remains, grinning while tossing the skulls into a bag. And in one of the most disturbing shots, a Native American skull cut in half is filled with yellow apples."
  - zivkovicp 5y ago
    40k items. Imagine trying to amass a collection of 40k pieces of ordinary silverware; I'll bet most people couldn't, or would require a lifetime to accomplish it. This man could fill museums with genuine artifacts. "Life work" seems perfectly appropriate. While I can't condone collecting the human remains, and fail to see the allure personally, there is no denying what he had accomplished was exceptional. The article is obviously heavily biased and sensationalistic, written to prioritize ad revenue and social media sharing, so I'm reserving judgement on a man I've never met; especially judging his 90+ years through the lens of 2020's social norms.
amingilani 5y ago
> Miller got his ham radio license in 1943, founded his own electronics company called Wyman Research, and helped develop slow-scan TV, a technology that transmits still images across high-frequency radio bands. Don't they mean VHF, and UHF? I haven't yet worked HF, but is SSTV used on HF? Also, wow, this guy helped create SSTV.
- mlyle 5y ago
  Yes, SSTV is mostly used on HF, with a little bit of use on VHF/UHF (mostly from e.g. satellites and the ISS as a curiosity/postcards, though there are some local SSTV nets). On 20m, all kinds of random pictures go by: pictures of ham shacks, scantily clad women, fast cars. http://www.wb9kmw.com/WB9KMW/live_SSTV.html http://www.wb9kmw.com/WB9KMW/live_SSTV.html Fast scan TV (aka normal analog TV, DVB, etc) is used on UHF and up.
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  Yes, SSTV is so slow that the bandwidth requirements satisfy the regs for transmission on HF.
  - GoodbyeMrChips 5y ago
    > bandwidth requirements satisfy the regs Please note that only the USA (afaik) imposes an arbitrary and restrictive 300 bd limit on HF digital modes. Here, amateurs are free to experiment with as much bandwidth and as high a baud rate as the physics will allow, provided we keep within legally allocated spectrum.
    - dmd 5y ago
      Where's "here"?
      - CamperBob2 5y ago
        Sounds like the Woodpecker site at Chernobyl. Hey, that was "legally allocated spectrum" too, right? To be fair, occupied bandwidth limits that were designed for 1920s-era modes don't make much sense with modern spread-spectrum technology. I don't care if an interferer takes up the whole HF spectrum, as long as their chip rate is too fast to make it through my < 3 kHz IF. Those ancient regulations have done a lot to keep Amateur Radio in the dark ages, as well as radio communications in general.
carabiner 5y ago
Google "don miller artifacts" and you can see pictures and other accounts. It's really extraordinary what this guy had. I can't believe this wasn't bigger news. Here's a Roman mosaic of his: https://www.fbi.gov/image-repository/indianapolis-artifacts-case-mosaic-100218.jpg https://www.fbi.gov/image-repository/indianapolis-artifacts-...
- Accujack 5y ago
  Yeah. If he'd have been younger he'd have been prosecuted for doing what he did... sympathies of his neighbors notwithstanding, this guy probably destroyed more information about native culture than any other person since Cortez. Plenty of people nowadays get their vehicles seized and jail time for getting caught digging one hole somewhere they shouldn't... this guy wholesale looted graves for decades and people thought he was just a nice old guy.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    And 50 years ago he probably would have been given awards and accolades.
philliphaydon 5y ago
https://youtu.be/tZxMvAArHBw https://youtu.be/tZxMvAArHBw Short video on youtube about this: FBI Seeking Owners in Cultural Artifacts Case Only 7000 items were seized from the collection of 42,000. I wonder what will happen with the remaining items.
- progre 5y ago
  It belongs in a museum
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  > I wonder what will happen with the remaining items. They will give away what they can to museums who will take what they can (museums are space limited). Most of it will probably go in a dumpster. Frankly they will probably do a much worse job than whoever miller's heirs would. Private individuals tend tend fall back to give that sort of stuff away to other private collectors when they can't give it to museums. Government agencies don't expend nearly as much kind of effort on that kind of thing nor do they have a workflow for posting free shit ads on enthusiast forums, FB marketplace and CL. They do however, have people who's normal duties involves throwing things in the dumpster, so that's what will happen to it in all likelihood. The stuff that's in cases and ready to display will probably all fine homes but whatever stuff was low value enough that Miller wasn't already displaying it will probably mostly be thrown away.
  - bildung 5y ago
    Imagine Miller dug out your parents, along with some other bones, glued them together es he saw fit, hammered arrows into the skull of your mom, and then baked the result in the oven to make them look like on TV. That guy wasn't some honorable private archeologist looking for roman coins or something. According to the article, those bodies were sometimes only a few decades old. He just dumped most of the remains into plastic bags and let them rot for decades, simply for his private amusement.
    - bell-cot 5y ago
rmason 5y ago
When I was a freshman at MSU in 1970 I was a member of the MSU amateur radio club. One day the faculty leader recruited me to help a Phd student with his Slow Scan TV experiments. The Phd student had a technicians license which didn't have operating privileges on the HF band. So we operated in tandem and I got to learn all about the then brand new world of SSTV. It was really jerky video but you could send it all over the world. Remember vividly talking to an Egyptian ham who did a live broadcast from the pyramids with camels walking about and it was all live, hot stuff for the time. The SSTV community was pretty small at the time, no more than a dozen leaders in the U.S. One of them was a fellow by the name of Don Miller from Indiana. Even after all these years I remember the name because there was earlier a rather infamous ham by the name of Don Miller who was an MD, who quit to travel the world putting rare nations on the air. https://www.amateurradio.com/the-don-miller-enigma/ https://www.amateurradio.com/the-don-miller-enigma/ Shocked to learn a half century later that I was speaking with the greatest archeological thief of all time. Guess both Don Miller's from Indiana were scoundrels.
- jterrys 5y ago
  According to your article, that Don Miller got sentenced to prison for 25 years to life for trying to murder his estranged wife. I'm not so sure its the same person, but maybe the article is wrong?
  - drcongo 5y ago
    The post says it's not the same person, talks about two Don Millers.
  - rmason 5y ago
    The first Don Miller from Indiana is the sole reason I remembered the name of the second Don Miller after fifty years.
    - jterrys 5y ago
      Ah okay. Now if only the vanity fair article linked in this thread didn't mention this, which got me confused: "Miller got his ham radio license in 1943, founded his own electronics company called Wyman Research, and helped develop slow-scan TV, a technology that transmits still images across high-frequency radio bands. In 1972, he was honored as Amateur of the Year by a ham radio convention and later helped get SSTV aboard the Mir space station, building the system that beamed back images of earth in December 1998." It's just so strange that there's two Don Millers (both whom live in Indiana) involved in the relatively small amateur ham radio scene, one developed SSTV tech, the other traveled the world and tried to kill his wife.
indymike 5y ago
This story reads like a plot for about 12 movies. Amazing this wasn't a bigger story here in Indiana where a world record steer is front page news. I will say this: it is amazing the things people have in barns and sheds in the middle of nowhere, Indiana.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  >Amazing this wasn't a bigger story here in Indiana Because they know their customers. "Elderly amateur archeologist has collection seized by FBI for doing basically what professional state sanctioned archeologists do but without state permissions" would go over like a lead balloon pretty much anywhere that isn't fairly affluent and left leaning. The details here don't paint a charitable picture of the FBI unless you go into this with a lot of priors that the FBI are the good guys (and generally speaking being "not poor" and "not right" are prerequisites to those priors). This isn't a cache of antique machine guns so you don't get the benefit of having ~half the people who care biased against the guy from the get go. There's zero chance Miller's heirs want and have the capability to do anything do to with several shipping containers worth of archeological junk that need to be cared for lest it go bad. The only thing the FBI did here was accelerate the process of combing through the collection, repatriating remains as applicable and cold calling museums and asking if they want junk as applicable by making it happen during his life rather than immediately after. Regardless of who his heirs were they almost certainly would have gotten in contact with someone who knew their archeology and had them see the collection, the bones and native stuff paired together would have raised flags, they'd have called authorities and we'd be right in the same place. So what good came out of any of this? That said, I think as far as the feds go they acted pretty reasonably here, way less needless destruction than I'm used to expecting from them.
  - mbreese 5y ago
    > So what good came out of any of this As far fetched as it may be -- I'm not sure who would do this in the first place -- this will help to dissuade any future persons from trying to do the same thing. It's not always about the current crime, but preventing the next one. But, here, it seems like this was never about prosecuting Miller. > There seemed to be little will at the Department of Justice to prosecute Miller, who was 91, for what was tantamount to property crimes The main focus of the FBI was to get the items and remains back to where they belonged. They just wanted right the wrong. Finally, the article does cover exactly what you mentioned -- that more of these "collections" will likely be discovered over the coming years as the next generation inherits them and wants to have nothing to do with them. > He expects to hear about more problematic private collections over the years as they’re handed down to younger generations more troubled by them
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
The article talks about 'cabinet curios' collected in the 1800's by amateurs. I remember the drug store downtown Iowa City, had a cabinet with 'indian bones' displayed among other things. The old guy was long gone but his collection remained on display. Later I discovered a 'History of Johnson County' local vanity-press book published in 1882 that described the collecting! There were 50 to 100 'indian mounds' in the county, and one person's interview in the book told of digging them up. They'd find a burial in each one, curled up with arms around knees and facing West if I remember right. Anyway one of the skeletons was a particularly robust individual. That was the skull and jaw on display in the drug store! The guy claimed it came from some proto-man because of the enormous jaw. But who knows. The drug store is long gone, the collection scattered to the four winds or discarded. The mounds long ago plowed over and no trace remaining (I've looked).
Maxburn 5y ago
Top. Men.
jccalhoun 5y ago
Here's a local article with some photos: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2021/10/how-the-fbi-discovered-a-real-life-indiana-jones-in-indiana https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2021/10/how-the-fbi-discove...
hereforphone 5y ago
What's up with the WikiHow style illustrations?
- carabiner 5y ago
  The first picture at the top struck me as reminiscent of the the 1989 Indiana Jones: Last Crusade computer game: https://images.gog-statics.com/05869835e8442e054b58246339b0712dbd9c550430200a3e9b16845399dd003b.jpg https://images.gog-statics.com/05869835e8442e054b58246339b07...
IG_Semmelweiss 5y ago
Some people go thru life wandering aimlessly. Some others find their calling. Even fewer turn out to be a Don Miller. Unfortunately for society as a whole - he skipped a few steps in the process (apprenticeship in archeology)

146 points by Amorymeltzer 5y ago

Did anyone else keep on hearing Indiana Jones saying "THAT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM" when considering the kinda ironic title of this article?

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
It's even more ironic when you consider how limited the government's means of putting all the stuff the museums and tribes don't want into anything but a dumpster are. You or I can post a free add on an amateur archeology FB group looking for takers to keep stuff out of the dumpster. The government doesn't roll that way, especially when it comes to property that was evidence in a high profile case. Of course the nice stuff will find homes in museums but nobody has a collection that's all nice stuff. The pristine pot will wind up in a museum. The pottery shards that no museum can justify the space for but some small time private collector would want will probably mostly be trashed. If we're lucky some intern will be tasked with taking a ton of ultra hd photos on the way to the dumpster so they're not completely lost forever. The government simply doesn't have good mechanisms for getting rid of stuff like this (whereas private individuals will happily send a flat rate box to whoever paypals them $25 if it means sending part of grandpa's collection to a good home). Seeing as this is a high profile collection they may expend the effort but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it to show up on govplanet.
AutumnCurtain 5y ago
It seems beyond charitable to call him an Indiana Jones type to be honest, it glamorizes and romanticizes a man who spent his life bribing officials and robbing graves for his personal satisfaction.
djmips 5y ago
He had a museum. It's kind of a personal dream of mine as well. I wouldn't actually do that but I certainly dreamed of it as a child and it still occupies a place in my mind. Despite the moral and legal ramifications of this man's museum it is a pretty damned awesome thing he had. A lot of his thinking was probably rooted in mores of days gone by.
- jamal-kumar 5y ago
  Bruh there was a raccoon in a bag full of human bones, does that sound like an archival quality childish dream to to you?

Topgamer7 5y ago

What a read! > The agents analyzed skulls pierced with arrowheads and determined that Miller hammered in those arrowheads himself. At first I was fascinated, then I was horrified!

anm89 5y ago

I don't know why but I really despise this article. It isn't journalism. You don't have cartoon recreations of the story in journalism. This is somebody's lit journal piece covered in cartoons masquerading as journalism to grab some ad revenue by using the name Indiana Jones in the title for vanity fair. That probably seems like too much but something about this really rubs me the wrong way.

philliphaydon 5y ago
I stopped reading and decided to google Don Miller. https://www.sapiens.org/culture/fbi-repatriation/ https://www.sapiens.org/culture/fbi-repatriation/ This had a few photos and I found it quite interesting. Would love to find a photo dump of what he had!
- jterrys 5y ago
  Here are some better articles https://www.indystar.com/story/entertainment/arts/2019/02/27/what-happened-don-miller-artifacts-fbi-found-indiana-farm/2990542002/ https://www.indystar.com/story/entertainment/arts/2019/02/27... https://culturalpropertynews.org/plundered-artifacts-from-aged-missionarys-collection-go-to-colombia/ https://culturalpropertynews.org/plundered-artifacts-from-ag... The FBI seized his collection despite not being able to validate his authenticity of ownership. They couldn't actually prove he illegally obtained those items, in part because he collected these objects over the course of decades of his life (when and where laws he'd broken didn't even exist yet, and probably still don't), and because he also willingly gave up his collection.
  - distances 5y ago
    The Vanity Fair article said how FBI only seized human remains and those artifacts that were obviously illegally obtained. Miller got to keep majority of his collection and wasn't even prosecuted. No word in the article what happened to rest of the collection after his death.
    - IncRnd 5y ago

__m 5y ago

Wow he survived an atomic bomb? Or just a regular thief? I don’t think we should idolize these people

upwardbound 5y ago
Just a thief and a conman. The article explains that he was not involved in any actual atomic bomb tests, but rather helped develop a minor piece of equipment. He lied and exaggerated his involvement to sound larger-than-life.

imwillofficial 5y ago

What a tragic waste of a mans life work.

distances 5y ago
I can only imagine how much better the outcome would've been if he used his locating skills to flag archeological sites without taking anything out of the ground. Now his legacy is a grave robber with an illicit, useless hoard of antiquities that have no documentation to place them in context. A complete waste of a life indeed.
- thatguy0900 5y ago
  He didnt get permission to dig anywhere or take anything he found. That is the hard part, not finding where to dig.
upwardbound 5y ago
What life work?? The guy robbed graves and disfigured people's remains. "The skeleton Miller said was Crazy Horse was actually several people. Miller had taken pieces from other skulls, a different mandible, someone else’s teeth and bones, and glued it all together, Frankenstein-like." "The agents analyzed skulls pierced with arrowheads and determined that Miller hammered in those arrowheads himself." "A video clip shows Miller and others at a burial cave on Easter Island, one of the world’s most famous archaeological sites, bringing out skulls and other remains, grinning while tossing the skulls into a bag. And in one of the most disturbing shots, a Native American skull cut in half is filled with yellow apples."
- zivkovicp 5y ago
  40k items. Imagine trying to amass a collection of 40k pieces of ordinary silverware; I'll bet most people couldn't, or would require a lifetime to accomplish it. This man could fill museums with genuine artifacts. "Life work" seems perfectly appropriate. While I can't condone collecting the human remains, and fail to see the allure personally, there is no denying what he had accomplished was exceptional. The article is obviously heavily biased and sensationalistic, written to prioritize ad revenue and social media sharing, so I'm reserving judgement on a man I've never met; especially judging his 90+ years through the lens of 2020's social norms.

amingilani 5y ago

> Miller got his ham radio license in 1943, founded his own electronics company called Wyman Research, and helped develop slow-scan TV, a technology that transmits still images across high-frequency radio bands. Don't they mean VHF, and UHF? I haven't yet worked HF, but is SSTV used on HF? Also, wow, this guy helped create SSTV.

mlyle 5y ago
Yes, SSTV is mostly used on HF, with a little bit of use on VHF/UHF (mostly from e.g. satellites and the ISS as a curiosity/postcards, though there are some local SSTV nets). On 20m, all kinds of random pictures go by: pictures of ham shacks, scantily clad women, fast cars. http://www.wb9kmw.com/WB9KMW/live_SSTV.html http://www.wb9kmw.com/WB9KMW/live_SSTV.html Fast scan TV (aka normal analog TV, DVB, etc) is used on UHF and up.
CamperBob2 5y ago
Yes, SSTV is so slow that the bandwidth requirements satisfy the regs for transmission on HF.
- GoodbyeMrChips 5y ago
  > bandwidth requirements satisfy the regs Please note that only the USA (afaik) imposes an arbitrary and restrictive 300 bd limit on HF digital modes. Here, amateurs are free to experiment with as much bandwidth and as high a baud rate as the physics will allow, provided we keep within legally allocated spectrum.
  - dmd 5y ago
    Where's "here"?
    - CamperBob2 5y ago
      Sounds like the Woodpecker site at Chernobyl. Hey, that was "legally allocated spectrum" too, right? To be fair, occupied bandwidth limits that were designed for 1920s-era modes don't make much sense with modern spread-spectrum technology. I don't care if an interferer takes up the whole HF spectrum, as long as their chip rate is too fast to make it through my < 3 kHz IF. Those ancient regulations have done a lot to keep Amateur Radio in the dark ages, as well as radio communications in general.

carabiner 5y ago

Google "don miller artifacts" and you can see pictures and other accounts. It's really extraordinary what this guy had. I can't believe this wasn't bigger news. Here's a Roman mosaic of his: https://www.fbi.gov/image-repository/indianapolis-artifacts-case-mosaic-100218.jpg https://www.fbi.gov/image-repository/indianapolis-artifacts-...

Accujack 5y ago
Yeah. If he'd have been younger he'd have been prosecuted for doing what he did... sympathies of his neighbors notwithstanding, this guy probably destroyed more information about native culture than any other person since Cortez. Plenty of people nowadays get their vehicles seized and jail time for getting caught digging one hole somewhere they shouldn't... this guy wholesale looted graves for decades and people thought he was just a nice old guy.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  And 50 years ago he probably would have been given awards and accolades.

philliphaydon 5y ago

https://youtu.be/tZxMvAArHBw https://youtu.be/tZxMvAArHBw Short video on youtube about this: FBI Seeking Owners in Cultural Artifacts Case Only 7000 items were seized from the collection of 42,000. I wonder what will happen with the remaining items.

progre 5y ago
It belongs in a museum
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
> I wonder what will happen with the remaining items. They will give away what they can to museums who will take what they can (museums are space limited). Most of it will probably go in a dumpster. Frankly they will probably do a much worse job than whoever miller's heirs would. Private individuals tend tend fall back to give that sort of stuff away to other private collectors when they can't give it to museums. Government agencies don't expend nearly as much kind of effort on that kind of thing nor do they have a workflow for posting free shit ads on enthusiast forums, FB marketplace and CL. They do however, have people who's normal duties involves throwing things in the dumpster, so that's what will happen to it in all likelihood. The stuff that's in cases and ready to display will probably all fine homes but whatever stuff was low value enough that Miller wasn't already displaying it will probably mostly be thrown away.
- bildung 5y ago
  Imagine Miller dug out your parents, along with some other bones, glued them together es he saw fit, hammered arrows into the skull of your mom, and then baked the result in the oven to make them look like on TV. That guy wasn't some honorable private archeologist looking for roman coins or something. According to the article, those bodies were sometimes only a few decades old. He just dumped most of the remains into plastic bags and let them rot for decades, simply for his private amusement.
  - bell-cot 5y ago

rmason 5y ago

When I was a freshman at MSU in 1970 I was a member of the MSU amateur radio club. One day the faculty leader recruited me to help a Phd student with his Slow Scan TV experiments. The Phd student had a technicians license which didn't have operating privileges on the HF band. So we operated in tandem and I got to learn all about the then brand new world of SSTV. It was really jerky video but you could send it all over the world. Remember vividly talking to an Egyptian ham who did a live broadcast from the pyramids with camels walking about and it was all live, hot stuff for the time. The SSTV community was pretty small at the time, no more than a dozen leaders in the U.S. One of them was a fellow by the name of Don Miller from Indiana. Even after all these years I remember the name because there was earlier a rather infamous ham by the name of Don Miller who was an MD, who quit to travel the world putting rare nations on the air. https://www.amateurradio.com/the-don-miller-enigma/ https://www.amateurradio.com/the-don-miller-enigma/ Shocked to learn a half century later that I was speaking with the greatest archeological thief of all time. Guess both Don Miller's from Indiana were scoundrels.

jterrys 5y ago
According to your article, that Don Miller got sentenced to prison for 25 years to life for trying to murder his estranged wife. I'm not so sure its the same person, but maybe the article is wrong?
- drcongo 5y ago
  The post says it's not the same person, talks about two Don Millers.
- rmason 5y ago
  The first Don Miller from Indiana is the sole reason I remembered the name of the second Don Miller after fifty years.
  - jterrys 5y ago
    Ah okay. Now if only the vanity fair article linked in this thread didn't mention this, which got me confused: "Miller got his ham radio license in 1943, founded his own electronics company called Wyman Research, and helped develop slow-scan TV, a technology that transmits still images across high-frequency radio bands. In 1972, he was honored as Amateur of the Year by a ham radio convention and later helped get SSTV aboard the Mir space station, building the system that beamed back images of earth in December 1998." It's just so strange that there's two Don Millers (both whom live in Indiana) involved in the relatively small amateur ham radio scene, one developed SSTV tech, the other traveled the world and tried to kill his wife.

indymike 5y ago

This story reads like a plot for about 12 movies. Amazing this wasn't a bigger story here in Indiana where a world record steer is front page news. I will say this: it is amazing the things people have in barns and sheds in the middle of nowhere, Indiana.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
>Amazing this wasn't a bigger story here in Indiana Because they know their customers. "Elderly amateur archeologist has collection seized by FBI for doing basically what professional state sanctioned archeologists do but without state permissions" would go over like a lead balloon pretty much anywhere that isn't fairly affluent and left leaning. The details here don't paint a charitable picture of the FBI unless you go into this with a lot of priors that the FBI are the good guys (and generally speaking being "not poor" and "not right" are prerequisites to those priors). This isn't a cache of antique machine guns so you don't get the benefit of having ~half the people who care biased against the guy from the get go. There's zero chance Miller's heirs want and have the capability to do anything do to with several shipping containers worth of archeological junk that need to be cared for lest it go bad. The only thing the FBI did here was accelerate the process of combing through the collection, repatriating remains as applicable and cold calling museums and asking if they want junk as applicable by making it happen during his life rather than immediately after. Regardless of who his heirs were they almost certainly would have gotten in contact with someone who knew their archeology and had them see the collection, the bones and native stuff paired together would have raised flags, they'd have called authorities and we'd be right in the same place. So what good came out of any of this? That said, I think as far as the feds go they acted pretty reasonably here, way less needless destruction than I'm used to expecting from them.
- mbreese 5y ago
  > So what good came out of any of this As far fetched as it may be -- I'm not sure who would do this in the first place -- this will help to dissuade any future persons from trying to do the same thing. It's not always about the current crime, but preventing the next one. But, here, it seems like this was never about prosecuting Miller. > There seemed to be little will at the Department of Justice to prosecute Miller, who was 91, for what was tantamount to property crimes The main focus of the FBI was to get the items and remains back to where they belonged. They just wanted right the wrong. Finally, the article does cover exactly what you mentioned -- that more of these "collections" will likely be discovered over the coming years as the next generation inherits them and wants to have nothing to do with them. > He expects to hear about more problematic private collections over the years as they’re handed down to younger generations more troubled by them

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

The article talks about 'cabinet curios' collected in the 1800's by amateurs. I remember the drug store downtown Iowa City, had a cabinet with 'indian bones' displayed among other things. The old guy was long gone but his collection remained on display. Later I discovered a 'History of Johnson County' local vanity-press book published in 1882 that described the collecting! There were 50 to 100 'indian mounds' in the county, and one person's interview in the book told of digging them up. They'd find a burial in each one, curled up with arms around knees and facing West if I remember right. Anyway one of the skeletons was a particularly robust individual. That was the skull and jaw on display in the drug store! The guy claimed it came from some proto-man because of the enormous jaw. But who knows. The drug store is long gone, the collection scattered to the four winds or discarded. The mounds long ago plowed over and no trace remaining (I've looked).

Maxburn 5y ago

Top. Men.

jccalhoun 5y ago

Here's a local article with some photos: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2021/10/how-the-fbi-discovered-a-real-life-indiana-jones-in-indiana https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2021/10/how-the-fbi-discove...

hereforphone 5y ago

What's up with the WikiHow style illustrations?

carabiner 5y ago
The first picture at the top struck me as reminiscent of the the 1989 Indiana Jones: Last Crusade computer game: https://images.gog-statics.com/05869835e8442e054b58246339b0712dbd9c550430200a3e9b16845399dd003b.jpg https://images.gog-statics.com/05869835e8442e054b58246339b07...

IG_Semmelweiss 5y ago

Some people go thru life wandering aimlessly. Some others find their calling. Even fewer turn out to be a Don Miller. Unfortunately for society as a whole - he skipped a few steps in the process (apprenticeship in archeology)