The Russian Wildman has been identified. According to Federal authorities he is Mikhail Fedorik, a Russian scientist who went missing on January 14th from the Russian city of Saracov where he worked at a particle accelerator project there. Russian officials confirm the findings and have asked to have him returned.

June 21st

Searching through back issues of the magazine "The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists", I have found this picture of Fedorik, obviously taken during happier times. The question still remains, what was he doing at Yosemite? Since he's now back in Russian custody, we may never find out. How the hell did he get to America?

July 3rd

I may have found another clue behind the Fedorik mystery. On March 20th, there was a break-in at the "Robot World and Exploratory" in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin. The exploratory owns a core module of the Mir space station. This module is 1 of three that was built by the Russian Space Agency. One is in space, rusting away, the other in Russia, and this third one right here in the grand ole US of A. What links Fedorik to the break-in? A security guard at the exploratory said he was attacked by a long haired man who screamed gibberish at him and a description of the man matches Fedorik at the time of his capture. Officials at the theme park say that portions of the core module were damaged and other pieces were "removed." As of July none of the missing pieces have been found. My next step is to find out what a scientist who worked at a particle accelerator in Russia wanted with a old space station part that was thousands of miles away.

August 21st - Success! Or at least partial non-failure. Lan used her social interaction skills on a secretary at the Department of Energy and got a big fat stack of paperwork delivered to us today. It's Government documents concerning our partnership with the Russians on their particle accelerator. Thank you freedom of information act!

So what did we learn? Well it's a little hard to wade through the bureaucratic and scientific mumbo-jumbo but it goes a little something like this:

On January 7th of 1999 Mikhail Fedorik was checking something called "p-bar traps" in a shunt path experimental target chamber at the accelerator. The chamber was a safety valve for the accelerator which was whisking subatomic particles around a circular track that is over a mile in diameter at very nearly the speed of light. Evidently it was against all kinds of rules and regulations for Fedorik to be in there but nobody caught him cause they were too excited about the amount of anti-matter protons that were being produced.

Well something went wrong and caused the particles to be redirected onto the shunt path and into the target chamber that Fedorik was working at. In a split second he was showered with only God knows what kind of radiation. He was immediately sent to a hospital complex but a day later Fedorik slipped out when no one was watching and wasn't seen again until he showed up in Yosemite 3 months later.

So that explains why Fedorik went insane but the answer just raises other questions.

1. Why was he so interested (and scared) of cosmonauts and the Mir space station?

2. The paperwork listed his life expectancy in days after his run in with the anti-matter radiation but he was still alive (and healthy judging by the park rangers struggle to contain him in the pictures) over 4 months later. If he was showered with the radiation why isn't he dead? If he wasn't exposed to the radiation then why is he crazy?