upon a time. A number of them, actually. But only one of them was white, Midwestern, and would be the same age today—were he alive—as your Ray-Banned man of mystery. This Kent Selkirk was born in 1976, the day before our nation’s Bicentennial, in Thief River Falls, Minnesota. His father, Norris, owned a two-plex movie theater and headed up the local chapter of a now-defunct fraternal lodge, the Ancient Order of the Plains Astronomers, which claimed to derive its creeds and ceremonies from a Native American birchbark scroll containing the “Improved Ojibwan Star Plattes.” All that’s known of Kent’s mother, who died when he was five, is her name, Alicia, and her gift of a sixteen-volume family scrapbook to her county historical society.
In 1993, the record shows, the first Kent Selkirk took seventh place in a regional essay contest backed by the National Rifle Association (“Self-Defense: A Common Good”) and was cited, twice in the same month, for operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of a scheduled substance. He enrolled one year later at Cass Academy, a military school in Minneapolis, from which he was later expelled for unknown reasons. After a misdemeanor marijuana arrest and a charge, later dropped, of sending threatening letters to the faded pop sensation Boy George, he joined the coast guard, was stationed in Sitka, Alaska, and died in the crash of a Sea King helicopter in February 1997 while evacuating a capsized Russian crab boat.
According to his recent writings on MyStory.com, the fraudulent composite who has since adopted Selkirk’s name also grew up in Minnesota and also attended Cass Academy. But according to a range of documents—some publicly available, many not, and a few of the most sensitive obtained through anonymous channels at Dad’s law firm—he shares little else with the original Selkirk, whose Social Security number he started using in the fall of 1999, first to obtain a Montana nonresident hunting license and then to complete an employment application for a “VIP personal security” post at Proton Protective Services of Chicago. The outfit fired him twenty-four days later for “violating professional decorum” while guarding the greenroom of
The Oprah Winfrey Show.
This pseudo-Selkirk, according to our data, is five inches taller than his namesake, blue-eyed not brown-eyed, sandy-haired not blond, and possessed of a nineteen-point IQ advantage that classifies him as a “low-mid near-genius.”
I’ve also seen and compared the two men’s photographs. In a CyberCupid online dating profile from 2001, your fellow posted a series of color snapshots (crudely and unconvincingly Photoshopped) depicting him in a poncho and Nike baseball cleats standing atop what he refers to as “the Six Sister Peaks of Old Bhutan.” This faux alpinist doesn’t resemble in the slightest the Selkirk in Cass’s sophomore memory book, who is shown accepting a framed citation for excellence in night reconnaissance. He does share, however, the X-creased forehead of another Cass student named Ormand Dorngren, who, after reneging on a commitment to army ROTC, went on to study dramatic arts at Furley Junior College in Spokane, Washington, but left after two semesters to play a seraph in South Dakota’s Black Hills Passion Play.
Dorngren, too, is dead, however. In the spring of 2001, during an Earth Liberation Front assault on a salmon-killing Canadian dam, he was sucked underwater by massive turbines that presumably pulverized his body, which was never recovered. Oddly, a picture that ran with the obituary in his hometown Minnesota newspaper shows a young man much leaner and sharper-featured than the sweet soldier boy of the memory book or the phony outdoorsman on CyberCupid. I can only suppose that Dorngren, the former acting student, enjoyed experimenting with his appearance, much as neo-Selkirk likes tinkering with digital-imaging software.
For the last six years or so, your
In 1993, the record shows, the first Kent Selkirk took seventh place in a regional essay contest backed by the National Rifle Association (“Self-Defense: A Common Good”) and was cited, twice in the same month, for operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of a scheduled substance. He enrolled one year later at Cass Academy, a military school in Minneapolis, from which he was later expelled for unknown reasons. After a misdemeanor marijuana arrest and a charge, later dropped, of sending threatening letters to the faded pop sensation Boy George, he joined the coast guard, was stationed in Sitka, Alaska, and died in the crash of a Sea King helicopter in February 1997 while evacuating a capsized Russian crab boat.
According to his recent writings on MyStory.com, the fraudulent composite who has since adopted Selkirk’s name also grew up in Minnesota and also attended Cass Academy. But according to a range of documents—some publicly available, many not, and a few of the most sensitive obtained through anonymous channels at Dad’s law firm—he shares little else with the original Selkirk, whose Social Security number he started using in the fall of 1999, first to obtain a Montana nonresident hunting license and then to complete an employment application for a “VIP personal security” post at Proton Protective Services of Chicago. The outfit fired him twenty-four days later for “violating professional decorum” while guarding the greenroom of
The Oprah Winfrey Show.
This pseudo-Selkirk, according to our data, is five inches taller than his namesake, blue-eyed not brown-eyed, sandy-haired not blond, and possessed of a nineteen-point IQ advantage that classifies him as a “low-mid near-genius.”
I’ve also seen and compared the two men’s photographs. In a CyberCupid online dating profile from 2001, your fellow posted a series of color snapshots (crudely and unconvincingly Photoshopped) depicting him in a poncho and Nike baseball cleats standing atop what he refers to as “the Six Sister Peaks of Old Bhutan.” This faux alpinist doesn’t resemble in the slightest the Selkirk in Cass’s sophomore memory book, who is shown accepting a framed citation for excellence in night reconnaissance. He does share, however, the X-creased forehead of another Cass student named Ormand Dorngren, who, after reneging on a commitment to army ROTC, went on to study dramatic arts at Furley Junior College in Spokane, Washington, but left after two semesters to play a seraph in South Dakota’s Black Hills Passion Play.
Dorngren, too, is dead, however. In the spring of 2001, during an Earth Liberation Front assault on a salmon-killing Canadian dam, he was sucked underwater by massive turbines that presumably pulverized his body, which was never recovered. Oddly, a picture that ran with the obituary in his hometown Minnesota newspaper shows a young man much leaner and sharper-featured than the sweet soldier boy of the memory book or the phony outdoorsman on CyberCupid. I can only suppose that Dorngren, the former acting student, enjoyed experimenting with his appearance, much as neo-Selkirk likes tinkering with digital-imaging software.
For the last six years or so, your
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