Don C. Miller
Don C. Miller (May 25, 1923 - March 22, 2015) was an American engineer and grave robber from Rush County, Indiana. Miller led a long career in electrical engineering, but he is most well known for his sizable and controversial private collection of artifacts. In 2014, an investigation of his collection by the Federal Bureau of Investigation resulted in the "largest single recovery of cultural property in FBI history". Early life and career Don Miller was born on his family's farm in Orange Township, Rush County, where he lived for most of his life. He was raised an Evangelical Christian and continued in that faith throughout his life. During the 1940s, Don Miller worked in New Mexico at the Los Alamos National Laboratory on the Manhattan Project. He reportedly claimed that he fired the world's first atomic bomb. This claim has been disputed. Vanity Fair reported that Miller assisted William Higinbotham, the head of the Manhattan Project's electronics group, in constructing equipment for the Trinity Test. He also observed and gathered data on the Trinity Test. However, there is no record that Miller fired the first atomic bomb and Joe McKibben is broadly recognized as the person that did. Miller