“WHOOPS! I BOUGHT A MUSTANG!”

The many-faceted drama at the trou­bled Los Alamos National Laboratory has pro­duced some strange moments. But this has to be the weird­est of them all:

Los Alamos equip­ment buyer Lillian Anaya thought she was order­ing $30,000 worth of trans­duc­ers. But she dialed a num­ber that had been changed from an indus­trial equip­ment dealer to an auto parts shop, and wound up buy­ing a Mustang with gov­ern­ment money instead.
That’s the asser­tion of Los Alamos and University of California inves­ti­ga­tors, who today cleared Anaya of any wrong­do­ing in a case that helped engulf the world’s most impor­tant nuclear research cen­ter in a fog of scan­dal.
It’s a move, lab crit­ics said, that shows that the birth­place of the atomic bomb still hasn’t come to terms with the prob­lems of mis­man­age­ment and wide­spread fraud that have plagued it for years.

My Wired News story has more on this sur­real moment.

June 27th, 2003 | Los Alamos and Labs | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.