Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut.
When the lunar module Eagle, descending from Columbia, touched down on the moon on July 20, 1969, Colonel Collins lost contact with his crewmates and with NASA, his line of communication blocked as he passed over the moon’s far side. It was a blackout that would occur during a portion of each orbit he would make.
“I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life,” he wrote in recreating his thoughts for his 1974 memoir, “Carrying the Fire.”
“If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God only knows what on this side,” he added. “I like the feeling. Outside my window I can see stars — and that is all. Where I know the moon to be, there is simply a black void.”
Ole Anthony, one of those interesting characters you may never have heard of.
Mr. Anthony was trained in electronics, and in 1958 he was sent to an island in the South Pacific, where he was supposed to watch a small nuclear test many miles away. But the explosion was much larger than expected, and the radiation left him with scores of knobby tumors throughout his body.
He left the military in 1959 and took a job with Teledyne, a defense contractor. In a 2004 profile in The New Yorker, he told the journalist Burkhard Bilger that he had continued his work for the Air Force, sneaking behind the iron and bamboo curtains to install long-range sensors to detect Chinese and Soviet nuclear tests, though a later investigation by The Dallas Observer, a weekly newspaper, called that claim into question.
He went on to become active in Republican politics and became rich. Then in 1972, he found Jesus, but with a twist: he built his own religious community and specialized in taking down scam evangelists.
He specialized in what he called garbology — rooting through dumpsters for evidence of legal or spiritual fraud by televangelists like Robert Tilton, Benny Hinn and W.V. Grant, just three of the more than 300 he went after during his nearly 35-year campaign.
He compiled the results in long reports that he fed to reporters, and he made frequent appearances on shows like “Primetime Live” and “Inside Edition.” His work was largely responsible for the implosion of Mr. Tilton’s $80 million-a-year empire and Mr. Grant’s 1996 imprisonment for tax evasion. In 2007, he worked with the U.S. Senate Finance Committee in its own investigation into televangelists.
…
At first, Mr. Anthony tried to gather his flock among the Republicans and Rotarians of wealthy Dallas. But his abrasive style — he talked about his sex life in Bible study and was permanently barred from Pat Robertson’s “700 Club” TV show — turned off the well-to-do.
Mr. Anthony didn’t seem to mind. With no religious training, he was teaching himself theology, and he became obsessed with the austere mysticism and doctrinal fluidity of first-century Christianity. He incorporated Jewish practices into Trinity’s evolving creed: The group celebrated Passover and insisted on having a minyan (at least 10 people) for Bible study.
As word about Trinity got around, it began to attract disciples from the margins of Dallas society: addicts and ex-hippies, disaffected students and people who otherwise found themselves at a dead end — as well as the occasional curious blow in.
I cannot tell a lie: “permanently banned from the ‘700 Club'” is what hooked me. (And “often obscenity-laced, sometimes violent Bible study sessions”. And “a Trinity member who, like Mr. Anthony, had taken a vow of poverty before acquiring a private investigator’s license”.)
Among those “margins of Dallas society” he attracted: Joe Bob Briggs.
Noted: DEFCON is holding an online memorial for Dan Kaminsky on 2021/05/02 at 12 PM PDT. Link to the Discord is at the top of the DEFCON page.