To all who have expressed concern about my recent exchanges on this Forum with Tim Mellon, please be assured that I am working closely with our legal team. The recent revelations about conspiratorial discussions on Heath Smith's Amelia Earhart Forum are a serious matter and potentially devastating to Tim Mellon's lawsuit. Tim maintains that they were all facetious. They don't look facetious to us but we want to be sure we have everything that was said and make it available so that everyone can judge for themselves. Tim has said there are emails that prove his assertions but he has not produced them. I will reach out to Heath Smith and ask him to voluntarily provide a full transcript of any correspondence or postings he has that bear on this issue. If his forum members have nothing to hide or be ashamed of they should be eager to clear their name.
I have corresponded with Heath Smith. He has not provided a full transcript of forum postings but he has been kind enough to share information which, he contends, proves that Tim Mellon intended his comments about a for-profit "tourist play" as a "spoof" to smoke out a suspected "spy" on Heath's forum. Heath sent me what appear to be screen shots of a private email and a Facebook message - in each case the sender's name has been blurred out (the term of art of these days is "redacted.")
The email was sent by an unidentified person to Tim Mellon at 12:40pm on June 1, 2013 subject "Re:ALERT!!!". The email appears to be a continuation of a conversation about the possibility that information was being leaked from the private forum.
"I would lean toward a spy rather than hacking.
How can we solve that?
The only thing I can think of is to do what spy agencies do...Plant bogus information, one at a time to different individulas and see what story pops up at the other side.
I am not sure how we could do that in the public forum."
It is not clear from what Heath sent whether the above represents a back and forth conversation or a single individual answering his own question.
At 04:17pm that same day, Mellon posted to Heath's forum under the topic : "Confidential..."
"If and when TIGHAR goes bankrupt, I am considering the formation of a for-profit company with the purpose of purchasing whatever rights and assets that estate might hold. I see a real opportunity to parlay Ric's incompetence into a profitable travel tour play.
Two questions:
(1) If members here could invest, would there be any interest in doing so?
(2) Has anyone got a clever idea for a name?"
Some time later - Heath says it was the same day - an unidentified person sent what appears to be a Facebook message to Heath Smith saying,
"Look at Tim's new post. I wish he wouldn't have put in the 'If and When TIGHAR goes bankrupt" but I guess that is a start. He wants me to save his email to me as proof that his comment was a spoof."I asked Heath to send actual copies of the correspondence and he replied:
Ric,
I contacted one of the originators of the emails that made one of the statements and he said that it was not Ok to release the entire email that includes his name and private email address. I do not believe I have the right, especially under Michigan law, to forward private correspondence with without their permission.
Other than what I have already sent, I have no other information in private email or forum messages, not even a single sentence, that can add more to the proof that what Tim said was a spoof.
HeathI'm grateful to Heath for sharing this information. We want to be fair to Tim but this correspondence raises more questions than it answers.
• Why such concern about secrecy and leaks on what was acknowledged to be a "public forum"?
• This was two days before Tim filed his lawsuit. Was there a leak at that time? The Star Tribune article did not come out until over two months later.
• Tim apparently sent the originator of the Facebook message an email specifically designed to cover him if the "tourist play" posting was leaked. Is that proof that it was a spoof?
• Although there were some facetious comments, it's certainly appears from the responses to Tim's proposed "tourist play" that, regardless of how he meant it, several members of Heath's forum took him seriously.
I'm still hoping to get permission to share the verbatim content of those responses.