--- title: "Odell Rasmussen-Bright Invented It In 1994. He Spent 20 Years Taking It Back." dek: "He is the most quoted witness for the levels under Concourse D. The 4,100 paper discs from his key clock put him on the surface perimeter through every shift he described. He said so himself, in 2011, to eleven authors." kind: obit (Obituary) desk: Obituaries author: Gilbert Ames (fictional) published: 2026-08-20T07:00:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/obit-odell-rasmussen-bright tags: obituary, Denver International Airport, witnesses, retractions, night watch genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # Odell Rasmussen-Bright Invented It In 1994. He Spent 20 Years Taking It Back. *He is the most quoted witness for the levels under Concourse D. The 4,100 paper discs from his key clock put him on the surface perimeter through every shift he described. He said so himself, in 2011, to eleven authors.* Odell Rasmussen-Bright walked 2.9 kilometres of construction fence seven times a night, four nights a week, for nearly three years, and punched a paper disc at fourteen boxes on every round. His family kept 4,100 of the discs in a shoebox on a shelf in a garage in Aurora, Colorado. He died there on 11 August, at 78. The cause, according to the Arapahoe County coroner's office, was emphysema. ## The interview In 2003 he gave one telephone interview, fifty-one minutes long, to a researcher writing a book. It was published in 2004 and has been quoted in eleven books since, in two documentaries, and across roughly forty thousand pages online. He is the only named eyewitness for the levels below Concourse D at Denver International Airport. Everything else in that argument, including this newspaper's own reporting, is drawings. What he described was a room the length of three football fields, with a channel down the middle and a rail set into the channel, strings of bulbs along one wall, and a ramp at the far end wide enough to drive a truck down. ## The retraction In the spring of 2011 he told two researchers, and a reporter from The Verity Beacon, that he had invented it in a bar on Havana Street in 1994 in exchange for a round of drinks, and had gone on repeating it because he could not think how to stop. He wrote to eleven authors. Three answered. An earlier draft of this obituary said that none of them printed it. One did: a four-sentence note on page 388 of a 2013 edition, which we found because its author read our draft and told us where to look, at some cost to herself. Her reply is printed below and she is right about us. ## The discs A Detex watch clock takes one paper disc to a round and cuts the station number and the minute into the rim as each key is turned. Ridgeline Protective Services kept them for insurance; when the firm folded in 2001, a supervisor put them in a box and gave the box to the family. Two people who were not told why transcribed all 4,100. On every shift he named in 2003, the clock is on the surface perimeter for the whole of the shift. The longest gap between any two punches on any of those nights is twenty-six minutes, at the fuel-farm leg, which the post orders allow nine minutes for and which he plainly walked slowly. Ridgeline's key register lists forty-one keys ever issued to him. All of them are perimeter, gate or trailer-row keys. He was never issued a key on the sub-grade series at all. > **Figure:** Fourteen stations, seven rounds a night, and the two that matter — see https://theyburied.com/article/obit-odell-rasmussen-bright ## Where the room is Sheet 4 of the 1992 mechanical set [[PX-1402]] shows the baggage tunnel: a little over 340 metres of it under the apron, a conveyor trench down the centre line, a maintenance rail set into the trench, and a vehicle ramp at the north end. Station 9 on his patrol stands at the head of that ramp. From there, at two in the morning, with the festoon lighting the electrical subcontractor left burning, a man can see perhaps eighty metres down it. He described a real place accurately. It is at the wrong depth, it is on the published drawings, and you can book a tour. > I said it for a round of drinks and I have been paying for the round for seventeen years. > > — Odell Rasmussen-Bright, letter of 4 April 2011 ## What this does not do It removes a witness. It does not remove an anomaly. The 1992 drawings still show six floors under that concourse. The published record still says three. Note 13 on sheet 4 still says do not field-verify below level minus three, and this newspaper has still never been below level three. An obituary cannot answer a question about ductwork, and we are not going to let the loss of somebody else's best-known witness stand in for an answer we do not have. ## The letter he did have At 02:14 on a February night in 1993, on the south fence line between stations 10 and 12, he found a cable trench on fire. He emptied two extinguishers into it and reported it, and the round shows him back at station 12 at 02:41. The electrical subcontractor's superintendent wrote him a letter about it. One paragraph, signed, naming the trench. It was in the shoebox with the discs, in a plastic sleeve, folded once. His daughter, who found it in April, says he never mentioned it to her in her life. He is survived by her, by a brother in Pueblo, and by three grandchildren. ## Sources (invented) - Charlene Rasmussen-Bright, His daughter — Interviewed at her home in Aurora twice, and given the full draft two weeks before publication (June and July 2026) - 4,100 punched paper discs, 3 June 1991 to 22 April 1994, Detex Newman watch-clock discs, one to a round, fourteen stations to a disc — Photographed and transcribed twice by two people working separately, neither told what the assignment concerned; both transcripts published with this obituary (April to June 2026) - Hector Villalpando-Reese, Retired site supervisor, Ridgeline Protective Services — Interviewed by telephone three times; produced the post orders and the site key register from his own garage (May 2026) - Marguerite Deveaux-Ostrander, Author of the 2004 book in which the 2003 interview first appeared — Sent the full draft on 30 July 2026 with three weeks to answer (August 2026) - Arapahoe County coroner's office, Public record — Written record request (13 August 2026) ## Documents cited (invented) - PX-1402: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-1402 ## What we could not confirm - Whether the shoebox is complete. Ridgeline's payroll shows 631 shifts; at seven rounds a shift that is 4,417 discs, and 4,100 survive. The 317 missing fall in three stretches, and 41 of them lie between 4 December 1992 and 19 January 1993, which is inside the winter he described in 2003. None of the twelve dates he named that year is among the missing. Both of those sentences are true and we are not going to print only the second one. - Whether the key register means what we have used it to mean. It records the keys signed out to him, not the keys in his hand. His own supervisor told us, without being asked, that keys moved between men at shift change and that nobody wrote it down. - Whether the retraction is true. A man who says he lied has now said two incompatible things, and the second does not become reliable merely by being sadder. This obituary rests on the discs and the register. Without them we would have had two statements from one man and no honest way to choose between them. ## Right of reply **Marguerite Deveaux-Ostrander, author** (Replied on 14 August 2026 and asked that it run entire, including the correction. Printed unedited.): > Your draft says that nobody printed his retraction. That is false, and it took me eleven seconds to establish, which is roughly eleven seconds longer than it would have taken your reporter. > > It is on page 388 of the 2013 edition, in a note. It says that the principal witness for the lower levels had written to me withdrawing his account, that I had put four questions to him and he had answered none of them, and that readers should weigh the chapter accordingly. It is four sentences and it is not enough and I am not going to pretend it was brave. But it exists, it has existed for thirteen years, and you have written the sentence 'nobody printed it' about a woman who did. > > Now let me say the harder part, because I would rather say it myself than have it said about me. > > When his letter arrived in 2011 I did what you would have done. I tested it. I asked him who else was in the bar, what the man's name was who bought the round, and which spring it had been, and I asked him why, if he had invented the room in a bar in 1994, he had described it to me in 2003 in the same words twice, forty minutes apart, when I doubled back on him deliberately. He could not answer any of it. He gave me three different months for the bar in two letters. His retraction was, as evidence, exactly as poor as his testimony, and I made a judgement that a man who cannot recall inventing a thing is not obviously more reliable than a man who cannot recall seeing it. > > I now think that judgement was wrong, and the reason I think so is your shoebox. I did not have 4,100 discs. Nobody offered them to me and it did not occur to me to ask a dead security contractor for a key register, and that is a failure of imagination which is mine and which I accept in public here. The discs settle it. He was on the surface. I was wrong in print for nine years and in a footnote for thirteen more. > > What I will not accept is the shape of your piece, which is that he spent twenty years telling the truth and a row of authors would not listen. Three of us answered him. I answered him within a month, with questions, which is what you do with a witness and which is precisely what you have done to me. The other eight did not answer, and your obituary does not distinguish between the eight who ignored him and the three who engaged and got it wrong, because the undifferentiated version is a better paragraph. > > And there is your own last line, which your standards editor has printed and which I want to name, since you will not: he wrote to your letters desk too. You did not answer him at all. You are running an obituary that scolds eleven people for not listening to a man your own newspaper never wrote back to, and the only reason you know he wrote to you is that you went looking through your own filing to check up on him. > > One request, and it is not a correction. He was a good interview and a courteous man and he rang me twice afterwards to ask whether the book had done all right. Put that somewhere. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.