Joseph Firmage, a Silicon Valley pioneer, faces accusations of fraud and elder abuse after a series of failed ventures fueled by his obsession with antigravity technology and UFOs. Brent Crane traces Firmage's rise and fall, from founding successful tech companies to his increasingly erratic behavior and alleged business improprieties. Is he a visionary genius or a con artist who exploited people's desire to believe in the impossible?
What Marmer believes Firmage really wanted him to see was a check made out to him from the Mega Millions lottery for $500 million. Firmage claimed he’d been awarded the enormous sum after reverse-engineering the lottery’s random-number generator. Alarm bells were dinging loudly for Marmer by then. “When the scales fell from my eyes was when I finally met Joe in person,” he says.
Some physicists were happy to accept Firmage’s patronage. Others ridiculed him. In 1999 a newsletter published by the American Physical Society mentioned that Firmage had been awarded the satirical “Flying Pig Award” by a skeptics organization. He “gave up a two-billion-dollar computer business to spread the ‘truth,’ which is that humans aren’t smart enough to have invented the computer chip,” the newsletter read. “It was reverse-engineered from debris from crashed UFOs. The government is hiding the truth to preserve our self-esteem.”