Rumors: A Historical Record of Mystery

[Avian]

...I have all of my private messages from June on SSC saved and am going to import them to a word file with times and dates and all.

I should do the same. I've never communicated with "June" or "Ryan" on LinkedIn - I just saw their posts through Rick's feed. But I have a lot of stuff from Rick that sounds very legit, including an offer to me for office space in one of his buildings.

[PhilmerPhil]

Rick owns buildings in Minneapolis?

[Munch'n]

Here is PM from Texas when I thought the use of Angry Boi's in Ryan's response was funny

You noticed that Ryan is not fond of the urbanmsp message board. LOL! Are you a member of that site? It seems like it's run by childish boy's. I've only checked the site a few times & never really cared for it. I would never join it. Too immature for my tastes.

[Avian]

Rick owns buildings in Minneapolis?

Yes, apparently. It was a casual offer from last May and I turned it down because I didn't need it and frankly couldn't afford it even if it was at a lowered cost. He didn't specify an address and in retrospect I probably should have asked about it. But as I said it was offered in passing and I didn't think much more about it at the time.

In the same message he also related some dealings with Blake Hastings at CBRE. Blake was new to the area and wasn't too familiar about the debacle regarding Barney's wanting to lease Renaissance Square. A couple of weeks later Rick followed up with a brief summary of his talk with Andrew Miele from the Four Seasons. This may have just been empty name-dropping on his part but the tone just didn't sound like it.

[Munch'n]

From 2002

http://archives.californiaaviation.org/ ... 23175.html

Rick Christenson, now a partner in a private investment group from
Minneapolis, is envisioning Rochester International as a minihub, a
place where several regional airlines might converge as part of their
systems.

He has been doing more than dreaming and drawing routes on maps. For
more than 1 1/2 years, Christenson has been using his own money to talk
up the idea with airport officials and airline executives. The investor
has been gathering statistics on travel patterns from secondary-sized
airports in the Upper Midwest since about November 2000, he says.

Christenson, 45, hasn't landed any commitments from the airlines that
would fly routes. But some airport managers, who also may have underused
runways, have expressed interest, he says.

[Nick]

Here is PM from Texas when I thought the use of Angry Boi's in Ryan's response was funny

You noticed that Ryan is not fond of the urbanmsp message board. LOL! Are you a member of that site? It seems like it's run by childish boy's. I've only checked the site a few times & never really cared for it. I would never join it. Too immature for my tastes.

http://southpark.cc.com/clips/152068/not-invited

[Avian]

From 2002

...Christenson, 45, hasn't landed any commitments from the airlines that
would fly routes....

Whoa. That doesn't seem to jive with what I expected. If the article is correct that means he's only 58 today at most. Not in his 70's!

Going to sleep now. Too weird.

[mulad]

One of the very few PMs I received from RetiredBanker referenced ideas of developing land near the Rochester airport for things like offices and hotels (I didn't think all that much of it, since RST is 8.5 miles from downtown, and there's plenty of room to develop stuff like that in more walk-/bike-/transitable areas elsewhere in the city). Must have been back in the late days of Minnescraper, since I don't see it in my inbox here. I have zero pull to accomplish anything in Rochester, of course -- I just happened to grow up nearby and liked talking about Zip Rail, etc.

[Munch'n]

well.....

Christenson says state objective is greater use of regional airports. He
said he is promoting the Rochester airport because he loves the town,
lived and worked here from 1980 to 1998 in both real estate and
investing.

In addition, "I have some development plans," he confides.

[mulad]

Someone with access to Rochester Post-Bulletin archives can probably dig up more mentions of him. I see a few airport-related posts on their Typepad blogs, but their normal newspaper articles disappear from the visible web after a week, so any of those would be forgotten by Google at this point.

[Chef]

This is one of the things that has me scratching my head: if retired banker is behind this and is in his 50s or 70s the question becomes "why"? I say this as someone in my 40s. In most cases, as people get older, they care less and less about what other people think. You become more focused on the things that matter to you in life - your work, your family, endeavors that you have a passion for and that you think matter. The amount of effort required to pull off this hoax doesn't really strike me as the work of an older person who is upset that their credibility is questioned.

What we have here strikes me as being more the sort of elaborate prank that would be the work of someone in college or early adulthood. Reddit types. If this is being done by a mature grown adult (or multiple), they are probably doing it because they see it as a way to achieve some sort of goal that is important to them. There may be a point to all of this. That notion is actually more creepy than the others.

[twincitizen]

If nothing else, the use of "1" instead of spelling out "one" and frequent "LOL!" in June's posts suggests it is a younger person.

[PhilmerPhil]

Keep in mind, Rick has been on the internet since the mid-aughts. He seems to understand the idea of creating multiple accounts, based on his non-hoax charity myspace/LinkedIn, his personal LinkedIn, his account here, on SSC, etc. Also, lots of older internet users love using 1 and LOL, so that shouldn't really be a factor.
EDIT: Also, he has multiple email addresses, the one he used for this site, the ones listed in articles about him, and any professional non-yahoo emails he has.

[Viktor Vaughn]

The amount of effort required to pull off this hoax doesn't really strike me as the work of an older person who is upset that their credibility is questioned.

The working assumption of the motive for this hoax seems to be a nasaesque quest for validation, credibility, and to look like an insider. I think that's the most likely motive as nobody has reported and money exchanged or requested.

But it's a possible that this was all background to offer investment opportunities in the future. I wonder if anyone got even a hint that'd they'd get any offer to invest, partner, or otherwise financially benefit from the consortium in the future.

I mean RB/June definitely talked of wanting to employ (who wouldn't hire Mulad?) and denying employment to forum members. but most here are in the demographic that are more likely to be looking for employment than investment opportunities. Avian said he got a gig through him and an offer of office space to rent, so that's something. But I wanna know, has there been any talk from these folks about investment opportunities?

[MN Fats]

But I wanna know, has there been any talk from these folks about investment opportunities?

Good point. That's when it goes from ridiculous online hoax to real-life fraud.

[DFPegg]

I agree with VV. Up to now we have only focused on the term "hoax" but this person/people seem quite serious in the midst of all this. (Of course mental illness also can keep people quite focused in their pursuits too.)

It's also hard to keep outright speculation separate from fact or reasonably grounded basis.

Like, what is the "private investment group" mentioned in the Post Bulletin article?

Or, what specific church or congregation does he belong to? (Assembly of God?)

Is he living with his mom in Wells as mentioned in the article on charitable work?

I'll get down some other questions later

[TTT]

I couldn't agree more with Nick's post along with what DFPegg said earlier as well - this has to be Rick Christenson.

- TexasRe was always propping him up about how wealthy he was, the contacts he has etc.

- He seems to be from Rochestor, and low and behold anything that TexasRE suggested DerekM (from Rochestor) would have some outlandishly supportive comment for and do the banana dance to.

- Everyone who endorsed Rick on LinkedIn also endorsed June and DerekM.

It's hard to believe at this point it isn't Rick Christensen.

[David Greene]

FYI I sent a couple of e-mails to Rick using the address Nick posted and one from the Rochester paper. I couched it in terms of concerns that someone was abusing his identity. Haven't heard anything.

[grant1simons2]

Would explain why Ryan used the term "luncheon," and why "Ryan" has a bit of a hate for Urban even though he hasn't even been on here. And why "June" told me to remove the thing about Steen & Strom and why "she" got heated a bit when the convention center hotel was leaked. And how "she" knew things that we found out later were really true we later discovered.

[mattaudio]

OK speaking of the convention center crazyhotel... that was NOT an urbanmsp-er trolling with a fake rendering? I wasn't even aware that there was a possibility that it wasn't a troll by one of us.