The aerospace engineer who cracked the spacerex.com satellite transmissions disappeared months after configuring the now-famous satellite dish that was the source of the spacerex webcast
In 1998 John Reed left his job with a prominent aerospace firm in San Diego and began work on a series of wind-driven rovers which he tested on the salt flats outside of Wendover, UT.
We have obtained footage of John Reed's project through a third party. The master tapes of this footage were confiscated by the FBI who were investigating Reed's disappearance.
Allegations made against Spatz Curtis with regard to Reed's disappearance are questionable. Which is not to say that Curtis is above suspicion. It's not surprising that investigators were drawn to him first.
Curtis, who lived near Wendover, discovered one of Reed's Rovers which had gone off-track and been lost in the desert for several weeks. Curtis called Reed's number, which was engraved on the rover, and it was out of misplaced gratitude that Mr Reed hooked up the satellite with which Curtis first contacted Spacerex.
A federal inquiry into Reed's disappearance brought agents to Spatz Curtis' desert compound where the satellite dish and receiver were installed. By that time Curtis had purchased the domain name, spacerex.com and set up a live uplink of the spacerex feed to the web at that address. He was hoping that the actual broadcasters of the enigmatic program would buy their own domain name from him for an inflated price. This had already gotten him in a certain amount of trouble with fatbabyfood.com and motherlode-pix.com who claimed trademark infringement and copyright infringement respectively. The broadcasters of the satellite signal never came forward.
Curtis served two years of a five-year term at the Virginia State Penitentiary on fraud charges and has been engaged in dubious trucking and internet sales of electronics for years. He was questioned at length about his affiliation with Reed and displayed what agents described as "a lousy attitude toward law enforcement."
Agents were not able to make any connection between Reed's disappearance and Spatz Curtis and he was released. However, the satellite dish and receiver which Reed helped configure were confiscated and the FCC filed charges against Curtis for pirating a satellite broadcast.
Details of the FBIs case against Spatz Curtis are hard to find. The Bureau disavows any knowledge of John Reed, Spatz Curtis or any of the other disappearances. If Curtis' people at spacerex.com are to be believed, the FBI, or some other federal law enforcement agency, came to his desert compound and took him away, claiming they had new evidence linking him to John Reed's disappearance.