We were operating in an area of Nevada where Gulf Minerals owned some property, looking for gold. Elemental gold itself is difficult to spot, but it is often found in association with mineral salts that have highly distinctive spectra, and are indicators for the paydirt. They are brought up by superheated water with the metals in solution along fractures in the rock, and then exposed and scattered around by erosion on the surface. Using multichannel airborne infrared spectrometers, our science weenies were able to come up with signatures to look for, and we coded up the multispectral algorithms to extract them from the noise. We had already sent field geologists into the area to pick up samples, and when we got back the assay reports from our labs and compared them to our mapping we had pinpointed gold. Real gold, in concentrations so low even a skilled field man could not see it, but still high enough for it to be mined profitably. I remember that night when the reports came in; our bosses snuck a magnum of champagne into the lab (against company regs) and we all got shitfaced.

But other factors were at work. In the political struggle going on due to the stock manipulations, Gulf Oil was maneuvering to self off Minerals Division. There was a recession going on and commodity prices were low, and Minerals was seen as a loser. A major gold strike on our own property was seen by our management as extremely embarassing, not a stroke of proifitable good fortune. Our bosses pressured the report to be witheld, at the threat of lawsuit, not even shown to Gulf upper management, and certainly not to the stockholders. The geochemists, who had spent their whole lives working in this field and now had an assured reputation, were told they could not publish the research in the literature, and could not even claim patents on the technique as was their right. They simply swept it under the rug.

The science staff quit en masse in protest, and the lab was closed. As far as I know, that gold is still out there, and all those 9″ data tapes are still in some Texas warehouse. I was the last guy to go into the Remote Sensing Lab before it was all dismantled and shipped to Houston. I remember going down the line of big (for those days) 400 Mb disk drives, throwing the breakers and listening to the mournful sound of them spinning down.

I also remember standing at the door and taking one last look before I turned off the lights. I wanted to make sure I remembered that moment for the rest of my life.

Second, the collapse of the company due to owners stock shenigans. Warrants no comment, sounds reasonable, creates no interest. Sort of a routine happening. How much of an outrage would there have been had there been a Union scandal in the process. I can hear the screams now. But nothing about management taking a company down.

Second, is there any real difference between working for the CIA or the oil companies? It just seems to me that one can work for the CIA or the oil companies directly. Not much difference, really.

Or go into the US military. Another way of working for the oil companies.

Anyway, thanks again.

(If you read the Aldrich Ames story, and others, the CIA’s insistence on avoiding drugs and a wild lifestyle and taking polygraph exams is wildly overstated, more image for the paying public than reality for the insiders.)

As the Pittsburgh Press wrote about the failed stock deal which sealed its fate; “Gulf Oil Corporation has managed to figure out a way to spend six billion dollars and not create a single job.”

I think I wrote a long essay about the debacle here once.

I can’t see a rock without turning it over, something I don’t know that doesn’t bug me, or an interesting-looking web link I can’t click on (there are some website link trails it takes me two hours to haul myself out of).

If I were a cat, I’d have used up 17,349 lives. This year.

A few fragments still exist, mostly at the retail level, that still use this livery. The Main offices were at the locations I mentioned, but the HQ was in downtown Pittsburgh, and the Research Labs where I worked in Harmarville, PA, right where the PA Turnpike crosses the Allegheny River. Madame Reclus is from Springdale (ancestral home of Rachel Carson), just up the river.

I worked there from late ’78 to late ’83, as a Senior Technical Analyst–the first three years in computer mapping of geological datasets and wellogs on an IBM mainframe, the last two as an image processing specialist on an HP minicomputer in the Remote Sensing Lab.

Now, two questions 4 U:

What does it explain?
Why are you curious?

What was the name of the Pittsburgh oil company (if you don’t mind, of course.)?