Thursday, February 26, 2015

Update on the BillCaseyHoneyPot mystery

If you don't know who "BillCaseyHoneyPot" is, read or skim the preceding post, then come back.

That investigation had me careening back and forth for an entire day. At first, I suspected that our mystery man was just a crackpot, then I learned a few things which suggested that he might really be someone with inside information about "spooky" matters, and that he had reason to adopt an exceedingly cryptic writing style. 

Well, it turns out that the mystery man is just a 46 year-old Pennsylvanian named Timothy Felix Miltz, an unsuccessful former software developer who lives (or lived) in a small, quaint green house in Indiana, Pennsylvania. For whatever reason, he likes to send lengthy comments to various websites. He usually talks about parapolitical matters, in a style best described as intriguing but not very comprehensible. Often, he adopts bizarre pseudonyms. Last year, he sent a series of messages to the Time Magazine website which appeared to threaten Carmen Ortiz, the prosecutor who brought down Aaron Swartz.

Although Miltz claims to be a child prodigy who attended college at the age of 12, his name does not appear on any website that discusses prodigies.

(As a side note, I did some basic homework on the topic of child prodigies, and was surprised to learn how many of them have had sad lives. A man with a reputed IQ of 250-to-300 -- yes, 300 -- ended up working a string of crappy blue-collar jobs. And then there's the Unabomber...)

Ah well. A writer must pursue the occasional long shot, or there's no fun to be had. The day will come when one of my long shots will pay off. But yesterday was not that day.

Incidentally, a kind reader informs us that the "Roman" mentioned so prominently in Mr. Miltz' ramblings is probably Khalil Roman, the former chief aide to Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

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