The collar bomb case raised questions about complicity and manipulation that investigators never fully resolved, and it remains one of the FBI's most studied crimes. The discovery of Dactyl, meanwhile, quietly rewrote what scientists thought they knew about what an asteroid could be.
On 28 August 2003, a pizza delivery driver in Erie, Pennsylvania walked into a bank with a bomb locked around his neck. His name was Brian Wells, and what followed would be described by the FBI as one of the most bizarre crimes in its history. Not a superlative they hand out lightly.
Wells had been given an elaborate scavenger hunt. The device around his neck was real. And there were twenty-two minutes on the clock. The scheme had been planned by Marjorie Armstrong and Kenneth Barnes, involving carefully constructed notes, timed tasks, and a device that represented hours of deliberate preparation directed towards something terrible. Investigators spent years on the case. The question they kept returning to, and never quite resolved to anyone’s satisfaction, was how much Wells himself actually knew.
The Moon Nobody Was Looking For
Ten years earlier to the day, on 28 August 1993, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft flew past asteroid Ida. It was a routine flyby; nobody expected anything remarkable. But when scientists examined the photographs, something appeared in the corner of the frame: a tiny rock, orbiting Ida. It was named Dactyl, and it became the first confirmed moon of an asteroid ever discovered, found entirely by accident, in the margin of a photograph nobody was scrutinising for moons.
There is something quietly pleasing about that. You glance sideways from what you were doing, and suddenly there is a new category of thing in the universe.
An Election With One Real Candidate
Also on 28 August 1993, Singapore held its first popular presidential election. Ong Teng Cheong won. His opponent, however, had been recruited specifically by the government to make the ballot look contested. So: an election, yes. A genuine contest, loosely speaking.
Three stories from the same date, across different years. A crime too strange for easy answers. A cosmic discovery hiding in a photograph’s corner. And an election that told you considerably more about its designers than its voters.
History doesn’t always announce itself with trumpets. The full episode is ten minutes and goes into considerably more detail on all three, including that uncomfortable question about exactly what Brian Wells knew. Worth your time.