They didn’t know what they were looking at. But the agents weren’t cultural property experts. “It was documented in some paperwork in the past as a passing note, like, Oh, by the way, he had this really cool collection of Native American stuff,” Carpenter said. But clearly, agents had been in Miller’s house. Carpenter says the DOE seized the uranium, which he described as “not something you’d want to handle,” but left the graphite after deeming it inert and harmless.
When the FBI, along with Department of Energy officials, visited Miller’s home, they didn’t find pits but discovered a chunk of depleted uranium and a large bar of graphite Miller claimed was from the U.S.’s first nuclear reactor. In 2008, agents had received a tip that Miller had two spheres that looked like pits, the cores of nuclear weapons. “HE WOULD GO ON THESE MISSION TRIPS AND UNCOVER SOMETHING, FIND SOMETHING.… I DON’T THINK ANYBODY THOUGHT THAT HE WAS STEALING THE STUFF.”Īt the Indianapolis field office, Carpenter ran Miller’s name through the FBI’s databases and discovered he’d been in touch with the agency five years earlier.