1. Joseph Richard Gutheinz was born on August 13,1955 and is an American attorney, college instructor, commissioner, writer, and former Army intelligence officer, Army aviator, and Federal law enforcement officer.
29 Facts About Joseph Gutheinz
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Joseph Gutheinz is known as the founder of the "Moon Rock Project" which aims to track down missing Apollo Moon rock samples.
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Joseph Gutheinz's father was a lieutenant colonel in the US Marines and a veteran of World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, and his mother, Rita O'Leary Gutheinz, was a Marine Corps enlisted woman.
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Joseph Gutheinz holds six college degrees from Monterey Peninsula College, California State University, Sacramento, the University of Southern California and South Texas College of Law, and eight teaching credentials and ten law licenses.
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Joseph Gutheinz has taught for Central Texas College, Alvin Community College, Thurgood Marshall Law School, and for the University of Phoenix from 2002 to present.
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Joseph Gutheinz is a former Commissioner on the Texas Commission on Fire Protection, having been appointed by Texas Governor Rick Perry.
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Joseph Gutheinz has served as a Member of the Texas Criminal Justice Advisory Committee on Medical and Mental Impairments.
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Joseph Gutheinz is a former advisor to the Coalition for an Airline Passenger Bill of Rights.
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Joseph Gutheinz led the Omniplan task force investigation, which determined that Omniplan, a NASA contractor, was submitting false claims to NASA.
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Joseph Gutheinz had claimed it was leasing through three companies that were in fact shell companies controlled by Omniplan's owner Ralph Montijo.
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Joseph Gutheinz created the task force with 25 agents, inspectors, auditors and a financial analyst from eight agencies.
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Joseph Gutheinz subsequently gave a speech to the International Business Forum about the Omniplan case, a speech attended by one of the principal defense attorneys in that case.
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Joseph Gutheinz led the Rockwell, United Space Alliance and Boeing North America task force investigation that resulted in a Federal civil lawsuit and an out of court settlement.
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Joseph Gutheinz investigated and arrested Jerry Alan Whittredge, an astronaut impersonator.
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Joseph Gutheinz investigated the Russian space program and a fire and collision on the Mir space station.
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Joseph Gutheinz led and went undercover in Operation Lunar Eclipse, a sting operation to recover the Honduras Apollo 17 Goodwill Moon Rock.
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Joseph Gutheinz has received awards from six Federal agencies and one state for his governmental service.
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Joseph Gutheinz has been on American news shows and been quoted in print publications about aviation safety and security.
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Joseph Gutheinz has been critical of the lack of policing for American air balloon pilots.
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Joseph Gutheinz has been a critic of the FAA's lack of scrutiny over the foreign registration of aircraft.
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Joseph Gutheinz created and led The Moon Rock Project at the University of Phoenix, a project where criminal justice graduate students investigated and tracked down missing Apollo 11 lunar samples and Apollo 17 Goodwill Moon Rocks.
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Joseph Gutheinz determined that both the Cyprus Apollo 11 lunar samples and Apollo 17 Goodwill Moon Rock, had both been taken or destroyed during Cyprus civil disturbances of 1973 and 1974, but later discovered that the Cyprus Apollo 17 Goodwill Moon Rock was in the possession of a deceased American diplomat's child whose father worked at the American Embassy in Cyprus.
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In 2002, Joseph Gutheinz first assigned his University of Phoenix students to track down Canada's Apollo 17 Moon Rock.
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Joseph Gutheinz's students tracked down the Moon rock to a storage facility at the Canadian Museum of Nature.
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In 2012 Joseph Gutheinz traveled to Buffalo, Texas, to look at an alleged Apollo era Moon rock being sold on EBay for $300,000.
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Joseph Gutheinz has been critical of NASA's handling of Moon rocks to include loaned Moon rocks and the lack of security some temporary recipients have provided to America's Apollo era lunar samples.
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In 2014 Joe Joseph Gutheinz appeared on Lost History with Brad Meltzer on the History Channel.
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From 2016 to 2019 Joseph Gutheinz appeared in fourteen episodes of NASA's Unexplained Files on the Science Channel.
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Joe Joseph Gutheinz is acting in a film entitled Operation Lunar Eclipse about his 1998 undercover sting operation of the same name.