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The Mysteries of Alcatraz

The new FOX Television series Alcatraz, from Bad Robot, the same company that brought us the very popular Lost, is a bizarre crime procedural that begins each episode with the following line from mysterious agent Emerson Hauser:

“On March 21, 1963, Alcatraz officially closed. All the prisoners were transferred off the island. Only that’s not what happened. Not at all.”

What actually happened is that all three hundred plus inmates, as well as forty guards and miscellaneous staff, disappeared from the island, and are now, nearly fifty years later, beginning to come back, having not aged nearly at all in the intervening time.

This being from the producers of Lost, the show is filled with mystery and intrigue, and it is not known who, beside the two main characters, Homicide Detective Rebecca Madsen and Dr. Diego Soto, can be trusted.

I don’t want to get into how, over time these mysteries will be be solved (if the series survives) because the Internet will buzz with theories (if the series is popular.)

I’d like to concentrate on the character of Dr. Soto for a moment, a character with two doctorates, one in criminal justice, the other in Civil War history. He is also a comic book writer/artist, and owns a comic book store in San Francisco. He also wrote a book on the prisoners of Alcatraz, and is an expert on the place.

Detective Rebecca Madsen and Dr. Diego Soto

Now, overqualified comic book store owners are a common enough trope in fiction these days. Owners of these stores are often portrayed as having impractical degrees (on The Simpsons the character Comic Book Guy has double majored in folklore and mythology, for instance) but even that is not the main point of why I am writing.

If, as the series suggests, all the prisoners and guards disappeared off Alcatraz in 1963, then a cover-up as large as those that surround both the Roswell UFO crash and the Kennedy assassination must have ensued.

The character of Emerson Hauser is at the center of the conspiracy, and the team of Madsen and Soto are our introduction into the mystery.

But if there is in fact such a coverup at Alcatraz, it is far from the only one.

John Patrick Mason

Sometime before March 21, 1963, an illegally detained prisoner, John Patrick Mason, escaped from Alcatraz through the elaborate and largely unexplored tunnel system beneath the prison. Mason was a former British special forces soldier and a MI-6 agent disavowed by his government after he stole a microfilm containing the secrets of both the Roswell crash and the details behind who really killed President Kennedy. Mason’s exploits are detailed in the 1996 film, The Rock.

The problem can be instantly appreciated by anyone paying attention to the dates.

Kennedy was assassinated in November of 1963, and Alcatraz was closed in March, six months earlier. Had Mason stolen a microfilm detailing a conspiracy to kill the President, he had details of the event before it took place. This means that the secret agent was probably trying to prevent the killing of the American President, and was prevented from doing so. Mason’s escape from Alcatraz took place before the mysterious disappearance of the inmates, and one wonders if the conspiracy surrounding Alcatraz was also detailed in the microfilm he stole.

Frank Morris

Of course, John Patrick Mason was not the first man to escape from Alcatraz. That title belongs to Frank Morris, a career criminal with a genius IQ who, along with brothers John and Clarence Anglin dug out of the backs of their cells, leaving dummies in their beds, and swam towards San Francisco on a homemade raft. It was their daring escape, detailed in the 1979 movie Escape from Alcatraz, that most people regard as the reason for closing the facility.

The escaped prisoners were never seen again. The FBI claimed that they all died while attempting to cross the water, but no bodies were ever recovered. Given the revelations in the new series Alcatraz, perhaps Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers knew something they weren’t supposed to know, and were able to parlay that knowledge into some sort of full pardon, or were summarily executed upon being recaptured.

I haven’t even gotten into the supernatural aspects of Alcatraz. There have been several paranormal investigations carried out in the former prison, which is now open to tourists. The ghost of at least one serial killer has been dealt with on the series Charmed, for instance, and The Ghost Hunters filmed an episode there.

Whether the mysteries surrounding Alcatraz are supernatural, super scientific or merely conspiratorial in nature, the great and terrible prison is large enough to contain them all.

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