March 6, 1997
J. Orlin Grabbe sits in the Area 51 Bar on East Fourth Street, sipping a beer and accepting congratulations from friends for his Sunday performance on national TV.They shake Grabbe's hand and smile as he describes outwitting well-known "60 Minutes" correspondent Leslie Stahl during an interview in the Reno bar.
Grabbe, a Harvard graduate who taught at the Wharton School of Business, is a hero in Area 51, an alternative music hangout. He won't reveal how he earns a living in Reno.
But Grabbe's a hero despite his portrayal on the popular CBS news magazine as a Reno computer kook who transmits conspiracy theories and unbelievable information about national events to millions of people in cyberspace.
"Stahl is not that bright when you get right down to it," Grabbe says. "I could have done a much better job at ripping myself apart."
Stahl wouldn't answer phone calls for her side of the story. But CBS figures it got its man.
The network calls Grabbe "an interesting example of some of the less credible sources you can find on the Internet."
Grabbe was interviewed by Stahl at Area 51 in December for the 60 Minutes segment broadcast Sunday on the difference between fact and fiction on the Internet.
CBS says it wanted Grabbe for one main reason--he says a missile fired by Middle East terrorists caused the explosion and crash of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of New York on July 17.
That's the kind of electronic gossip, according to a local Internet expert, that floats in cyberspace.
"You have people talking about more subjects than ever before. You have a Tower of Babel," says Milton Wolf, director of library collection development at the University of Nevada, Reno, who studies computer communication.
"People are talking. Talk is cheap."
Grabbe brags that he lured CBS and Stahl to Area 51 after refusing to be interviewed at the network's New York headquarters.
"Since I know I have them on the hook, I insist on doing it at Area 51. It's hilarious," says Grabbe, a regular who knows the bar owners and employees.
"They come all the way out to Reno to interview some bar patron."
Area 51 is named for the top secret location in southern Nevada where the Air Force conducts test flights of experimental aircraft.
CBS searched the net to find Grabbe, who says he tricked the network into believing he is Reno's town crackpot.
"She (Stahl) turned around and tried to portray me as entertaining myself by making all this up," Grabbe says.
"I said, `I don't believe in anything.' "
The report on Flight 800 is on Grabbe's Internet home page, where anyone with a computer can read it. The web page site is www.aci.net/kalliste/.
"That TWA Flight 800 was taken out by a ground-to-air missile was known from the beginning by U.S. official agencies," Grabbe's July 23 report says.
"The flight path of the missile was captured both on radar and by satellite. The only question was the identity of the missile and the identity of the group responsible."
Grabbe identifies both. The missile, according to Grabbe's report, is a Stinger, possibly one of 200 missing from U.S. military bases. The group, Grabbe says, is connected to Syria. Grabbe also reports that more airplanes may be shot down.
"The group responsible, identified by intelligence sources as working on behalf of Syria, says there are five more planes to go," Grabbe says on the Internet.
"It was not something I made up. It was not information Leslie Stahl would have gotten in her wildest dreams," says Grabbe, whose other Internet reports include a claim that 60 Minutes chief correspondent Mike Wallace received a $150,000 bribe from the Democratic Party."
Grabbe says he gets a lot of information from government sources, including a report that President Clinton snorts cocaine.
"I had a source in the White House," Grabbe says.
Grabbe says his interest in cyberspace information started with computer research into world finance.
Harvard University identifies Grabbe as receiving a doctorate in economics from the school in 1981. The University of Pennsylvania confirms Grabbe was on the faculty of its prestigious Wharton School of Business from 1981 to 1986.
Grabbe says he moved to Reno in 1995 to escape high local taxes on the East Coast and continue computer research.
But Internet sources, according to Wolf, can be a couple of people who believe the same theory and send electronic messages to each other.
"You have to watch who you are talking to," Wolf says.
"It's one of the pitfalls."
