First time post. Sorry, longish post follows.
I would like to share a story, and see what you people make of it. I would like to know more about this - what may be true, what may be false. This is the story as I was told.
A friend of mine has a scrap yard in Pennsylvania, where he deals mostly with electronic castoffs from the military. His father was well known in the business for many, many years. Some time ago - 1980s? - a fellow military electronics dealer/scrapper located in Scranton, PA went thru a series of events that resulted in a huge amount of old military radios getting buried in a mine.
I am not sure of the fellow's name. He apparently used a set of underground mining bunkers, perhaps for explosives, as warehouses. He was also apparently not the most honest guy in the world. At some point he purchased a bunch of electronic components as surplus. Out to make money, he sold these, and they ended up being used in pacemakers. The problem is that they started failing - the parts he purchased were not up to spec. A failed pacemaker is, of course, a very serious problem. The medical industry traced the components back to him, and he ended up in a heap of trouble. At much the same time, the FBI caught his selling "interesting" military surplus to buyers overseas. Now in two heaps of trouble, he had a heart attack and died.
His assets just sat there, having no clear heirs, and eventually went into foreclosure or tax trouble, and a developer purchased it. When confronted with the bunkers full of stuff, his engineers told him that it would be next to impossible to demolish them. They did the next best thing - they buried them, and did not even bother to empty all the goodies out. And so hundreds of radios and electronic things from the 1950s rust away in the dark.
My friend seems to think that the bunkers are located under a park or tennis court complex in a recent (1990s) housing development.
My questions - do you think this is realistic? Can anyone add any evidence to this? Were any Scranton area mines reclaimed in such a way? It sounds too goofy to be true, but then I can not see anything that would really nail it down as false.
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Will
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