Two Men Arrested In Plot To Develop Real-Life Death Ray

By Nick Venable | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

death rayI’m not going to lie to you. This a wonderful world we live in, but there are some very sad, fucked up people out there who don’t realize how good they have it, and they insist on bringing their own misery down upon others. While most of these people use guns or bombs as their instruments of destruction, every once in a while you get a guy that brings out the old death ray. (Not the Archimedes kind either, which Mythbusters proved inefficient.)

Forty-nine-year-old Glendon Scott Crawford of Galway, New York and 54-year-old Eric J. Feight of Hudson, New York were both arrested this past Tuesday after a months-long FBI investigation tracking Crawford’s highly motivated efforts to create “a radiation-emitting device that could be placed in the back of a an to covertly emit ionizing radiation strong enough to bring about radiation sickness or death against Crawford’s enemies,” according to one of the FBI agents involved. Does this guy think he’s Nikola Tesla or something? (Yes, I know Tesla never invented a death ray.)

Crawford was the “brains” behind the operation, and was the one responsible for actually building the device, while Feight devised a triggering mechanism that could operate the machine remotely. Luckily, Crawford’s big prejudiced mouth got the FBI’s attention immediately, and the X-ray equipment he intended to use for the radiation was all fabricated by the FBI, so there’s no chance this guy was every going to get a real death ray created. Which isn’t to say someone else couldn’t, but something tells me most hate-filled people don’t spend a lot of time cooking up harebrained schemes.

So who did Crawford want to harm with his silent-but-deadly radiation poisoning? Well, he wanted to help “Israel to defeat its enemies, specifically by killing Israel’s enemies while they slept.” He made a similar offer to an Albany Jewish organization. He claimed to be a member of the United Northers & Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the Tea Party group Americans Demanding Liberty and Freedom. He called Barack Obama a “bedwetting maggot in chief,” and said the POTUS “started bringing the scumbags wholesale as he got in charge. He directed the INS to start bringing the muzzies here without background checks.” He told the undercover FBI agent that his target was the Muslim community and that his device would be “Hiroshima on a light switch,” which is one of the most frightening images imaginable. I’m thinking this guy probably would have cut the paperboy’s throat if the newspaper landed on his precious begonias. A lot less is said about Feight, who met the General Electric-employed Crawford while working as a G.E. vendor for an electronics company. But I’m sure Feight had his own bigot stick shoved up his ass.

How long did it take the FBI to completely infiltrate Crawford’s scheme? Less than a month. How much jail time will the two men face if convicted of their crimes? Fifteen years. When considering one of Crawford’s more memorable and awkwardly worded questions — “How much sweeter could there be than a big stack of smelly bodies?” — that seems like too short a sentence. Hopefully he gets a taste of his own medicine.