The 'Lost Boy Larry' Broadcasts: Was this all a Hoax?

On August 12th 1973, one of the biggest and most expensive search and rescue operations ever witnessed in the United States at the time came to a close after four gruelling days.

A cry for help from a terrified 7-year-old known largely as Larry had first been picked up purely by chance on citizens band radio, and sparked immediate panic as the boy appeared to be trapped and fighting for his life in an upturned truck following a terrible accident in the remote wilderness.

The messages kept coming through on CB radio for several days, as the search for Lost Boy Larry evolved into a massive operation spread out across the state of New Mexico, involving hundreds of police officers, National Guardsmen, and civilian volunteers, along with the deployment of no less than 22 planes, although not all of them made it back to the ground in one piece.

But after four days of frenzied activity and international headlines, the search for Lost Boy Larry just ground to a halt. And this wasn’t because they’d found him. It’s because the police had decided that they were no longer entirely convinced that Lost Boy Larry ever existed.

It sounded more like somebody was just having a bit of a laugh at somebody else’s quite considerable expense.

Over fifty years later, we’ve yet to find any trace of either Lost Boy Larry or the perpetrators of an elaborate hoax which has since become the most widely accepted explanation.

But is there more to the story than that?

There were certainly plenty of suspicious elements in the saga which didn’t quite add up. But there are also plenty of questions which have never been satisfactorily resolved, and several troubling points that don’t appear to have been fully considered at the time.

Smokey Signals

The very first message from Larry was picked up by CB enthusiast Darlene Ross of Fontana in California, on Tuesday August 7th, 1973.

Whilst the CB Craze was already in full swing in the US during the 1970s by which time a CB radio was installed in trucks as standard, it took just a little while longer to get going in the UK where CB radio didn’t even become technically legal until 1981 – not that this had dissuaded earlier use of the land mobile radio system from rebellious UK citizens who had been watching too many ‘Smokey and the Bandit’ movies.

But Darlene Ross was probably more of a serious CB specialist than most. And Darlene became increasingly worried when she picked up a broadcast that she most definitely wasn’t expecting.

Buried deep within the usually incomprehensible CB conversations involving Bears with Ears, Checkpoint Charlies, Flying Doughnuts, Foxes in the Hen House, and Kojaks with a Kodak, Darlene accidentally stumbled upon the first message from a distressed young boy in need of immediate assistance from a grown-up.

We don’t appear to have access to a single recording of one of the boy’s many broadcasts heard over the next five days or so, and we’re entirely reliant on the word of the CB users who claim to have picked them up.

In this original case, the details picked up by Darlene Ross were scarce but cause for immediate concern.

The first four words she heard faintly coming through the receiver from a young male voice were “Help! Please help me!”

After engaging with the user, Darlene was able to ascertain that the boy had been travelling in a red pick-up truck with his father who had suddenly collapsed at the wheel and hadn’t moved since the truck crashed, leaving the boy alone and afraid.

The boy didn’t seem immediately keen to offer his name or his location, but after a little gentle prodding, Darlene encouraged him to reveal that his name was Larry, and that the truck had been travelling through the state of New Mexico – a fair old distance of around a thousand miles from where Darlene was picking up his messages in California. He also seemed to be under the impression that his father had suffered a fatal heart attack.

It was often difficult for Darlene to understand exactly what Larry was saying, as the signal was weak, and his words were punctuated by relentless sobbing.

At one point, she believes that she heard the boy exclaim to somebody else “Come on David, help me!”

It’s not clear whether Larry was talking to a third party in the vehicle, or addressing the man slumped at the wheel, although the latter would be a weird way to address your own dad, particularly if you thought he was dead.

It’s possible that he may have just been addressing somebody else in a separate conversation on the same CB channel, or even that he was just a bit confused about Darlene’s name. The kid had already revealed that he was only seven years old, and he wasn’t exactly in the best position for clear thinking and coherent conversation.

Darlene managed to calm the boy down slightly and promised that she would get help, before the signal gradually faded and Lost Boy Larry fell silent.

True to her word, she immediately alerted the authorities in New Mexico, and gave what limited information she had to the Albuquerque Journal. The newspaper – which serves the most populous city in the state – was the first to break the story the very next morning.

The Search Expands

Further reports of Larry’s transmissions were to come flooding into the authorities and the press throughout this following day from truck drivers and CB operators who were convinced that they had all spoken to the stranded boy in desperate need of help.

You might think that at least one of them should have been able to squeeze out more specific location details from Larry, but again you have to remember that he was a young boy in what may have been a completely unfamiliar place.

Larry wasn’t exactly helping matters by constantly changing channels on his dad’s CB radio in the truck. It’s not clear if he was doing this out of fumbling panic or if he felt it was the smart thing to do whenever he lost the signal.

But it was making fluid conversation very difficult for the other CB users attempting to connect with him as they were only gathering small fragments of information from Larry before he disappeared to try his luck on another channel.

Early suspicion had already been aroused in some quarters by just how far Larry’s transmissions were stretching.

Citizen Band Radio is meant to be used for short-distance radio communications with the local crowd, and you wouldn’t usually expect a broadcast to be picked up in an entirely different state.

It was already weird that Larry’s original message – presumed to have been broadcast somewhere near New Mexico – had travelled all the way to California, but it was about to get even weirder.

Reports were coming in that Larry had engaged with CB operators in New Mexico, California, Arizona, Wyoming, Mississippi, and even Canada.

Sceptics found it a bit fishy that one boy’s broadcasts could be travelling such a relatively huge distance, and suspected that something else may be going on here.

But it’s not out of the question that Larry was unwittingly broadcasting to a much wider audience than you would usually expect, although the idea of him reaching Canada is probably pushing credibility a little too far.

When the atmospheric conditions were absolutely right, CB enthusiasts back in the day could take advantage of a phenomenon known as “Ionospheric Skip” in which the radio impulses would hit the ionosphere and then get ricocheted back down to the Earth in broadly the same region, but often a surprisingly long distance from the original broadcast.

On such days, CB users would amuse themselves by seeing just how far they could “skip” their transmissions. And it’s reported that during these five days in August 1973, the weather conditions were indeed favourable for an Ionospheric Skip which could potentially have bounced back Larry’s broadcasts right across Southwestern America and a little beyond. The phenomenon may have been relatively rare but it certainly wasn’t unprecedented.

Another point which raised suspicion is that Lost Boy Larry didn’t always seem to stick to the exact same story.

The majority of reports from the people who claimed to have conversed with him now indicated that Larry was trapped in an upturned red pick-up truck from which he could not escape, whilst his dead father was slumped in the driver’s seat right next to him.

In other variations of the story, Larry was standing outside the same upturned red truck, whilst his father was trapped inside but still breathing.

Much later on, a rescue worker claimed to have made contact with the boy who gave his name as David rather than Larry, which is curious as it harks back to the mention of a ‘David’ during the original conversation with Darlene Ross.

Was there another child at the scene called David? Was the boy unsure about his own name or at least reluctant to give it out to strangers? Or was his full name Larry David?

This lack of consistency cast doubt over the authenticity of the distress call, although again it could be argued that the young boy was traumatised and confused, or even that his situation had changed over the passing hours. Maybe he managed to climb out of the truck and realised that his dad might not be quite so dead after all.

If anything can be described as a single definitive account of Larry’s situation, it probably stems from the regular conversations he had throughout Wednesday with a CB operator by the name of Linda King, better known by her handle of ‘Blue Eyes.’

Linda managed to keep Larry talking on the same channel for longer than most, and it appears that she managed to gain the boy’s trust to some degree.

According to Blue Eyes, Larry’s father had taken his young son on some kind of hunting trip through an area of wilderness somewhere near the New Mexico mountains, when he had suffered a heart attack at the wheel and crashed the truck which then flipped over into a ravine. The father was now almost certainly dead, whilst Larry was still trapped inside the upturned truck with no food or water.

Larry had also admitted to Blue Eyes that he didn’t really know how to properly operate the CB, which suggests that the constant channel hopping was down to fidgety panic rather than any calculated decision.

Yet although Blue Eyes had managed to build up trust with the boy, he still point-blank refused to give his last name which was making the case difficult for the authorities in terms of identifying a missing boy and figuring out where exactly his dad might have taken him to shoot at rabbits.

The long list of reported conversations had led the authorities to conclude that Larry was most likely somewhere in New Mexico.

But New Mexico is a pretty big state, and it had so far proved impossible to get any further details from Larry which might help pinpoint his precise location.

Still, they clearly just couldn’t just shrug this one off. At least not for another four days.

Needle in a Haystack

By the late Wednesday morning, three separate independent searches were already underway in New Mexico, overseen respectively by the New Mexico State Police, the New Mexico Wing Civil Air Patrol, and the Albuquerque Citizens Radio Association.

Dedicated listening stations were set up across New Mexico and neighbouring states to try and pick up further transmissions from Larry. The Civil Air Patrol flew planes equipped with direction finders over southern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona, whilst the State Police and the Citizens Radio Association prepared to search sections of remote mountainous terrain on foot.

The New York Times reported that three of the Civil Air Patrol pilots spotted an abandoned truck on the east face of the Manzano Mountains, but it seems that when a helicopter was later despatched to the same area to check it out, no trace of the truck could be found.

Later that afternoon, radio operators from Albuquerque, Moriarty and Cedar Crest reported that Larry’s radio signals appeared to be coming from somewhere just south of an old concrete plant in Tijeras Canyon.

Planes, helicopters, and ground searchers were quick on the scene to comb the area, whilst the New Mexico governor Bruce King managed to secure the services of two Iroquois helicopters and a U-21 aircraft from the Army National Guard.

The U-21 was flown by guard pilot Captain Rick Tweed who reported that he had picked up Larry’s voice from the cockpit radio whilst flying over the area, and had done his best to reassure the boy. He had told him: “We’re going to get you something to eat. We’re going to find you. I’m going to find you myself, and I’ll get you a Double Mac.”

Sadly, Captain Rick Tweed never made that order for a Double Mac.

When the search teams arrived at the location just south of the old concrete plant, they found a few abandoned trucks and cars which looked like they’d been there for years, along with several discarded fridge freezers, but there was no sign of Larry.

As darkness fell on Wednesday evening, Blue Eyes was still in regular communication with Larry who now mentioned that it had just started raining.

As rain had just started to fall near the Fourth of July Canyon in the Manzano Mountains, the search followed the rain for a while, this time including a Piper Cherokee which was being flown by a certain T.C. Ashby of the Las Cruces Civil Air Patrol.

Blue Eyes urged Larry to start yelling through his microphone if he caught sight of the landing lights of the Piper Cherokee which were being turned on purely for his benefit.

And sure enough, Larry began yelling excitedly that he could see the lights of the aircraft as it flew over the tiny town of Chilili.

But again, there was no trace whatsoever of Larry or a truck during the subsequent search of the area on foot.

Headlines and Doubts

As Wednesday 8th August rolled into Thursday 9th, the story was all over the morning headlines of the international press, with some papers noting that the State Police hadn’t ruled out the strong possibility of a hoax.

But pretty much every CB operator who had spoken to Larry remained convinced that his cry for help was utterly genuine.

One unnamed Army Sergeant told a reporter that he had personally spoken to the boy for well over three hours and was of the opinion that this was most definitely not just a silly prank, although the State Police later cast doubt over whether such a lengthy conversation had actually taken place.

Meanwhile, Sergeant W.A. Schmidt of the Civil Air Patrol made it clear that any doubters might have taken a different perspective if they’d heard the voice for themselves. He told the press: “I personally have never had any doubt that this is the real thing. I heard the kid crying. I just can’t believe it isn’t the real thing.”

Pranks and Chaos

As the search continued on Thursday morning, a fresh problem emerged which would seriously hamper the efforts. And that problem came in the form of pesky kids pissing about with their walkie talkies.

Since the story had been plastered all over the media, some little pranksters – and apparently some older pranksters who really should have known better – began flooding the airwaves with their own impressions of Larry’s voice.

On an even more disturbing note, some of the nastier kids were even attempting to speak to Larry directly to tell him that he was going to die.

It was not only making it difficult for radio operators to identify which, if any, of these new voices might be the genuine Larry, it also meant that the genuine Larry was potentially getting drowned out in all the racket.

At one point, Blue Eyes reported that she managed to briefly speak again with the real Larry before he fell silent after crying: “I can’t hear you, Blue Eyes! It’s too noisy!”

It’s perhaps not too surprising that the search teams were getting pretty frustrated and desperate by this point, and they were now following up some frankly ridiculous leads.

A woman from Maryland requested that the searchers in New Mexico investigate a certain road near Sandia Park as she could remember getting briefly lost there once.

A call was received from a psychic in a phone booth who passed on the vital information that her psychic powers had tracked the boy down to a road twenty miles south of Moriarty.

And a church group in Wichita, Kansas got in touch with the search teams to announce that the truck was almost certain to be found beside a lake in Alamogordo. Their reasoning? The church group had been holding a night-and-day vigil for Larry, during which one of them had received a message from God.

All three leads were quite surprisingly investigated in full, and all three leads were quite unsurprisingly found to be utterly useless.

Yet another problem reared its ugly head by the time we get to the morning of Friday August 9th.

With hope fading fast, and Larry’s messages becoming far less frequent – possibly down to the battery in the truck’s portable CB finally running out of juice – the different ground search teams were now beginning to turn on each other.

Hundreds of unauthorised civilian volunteers were now participating in the search, but as there didn’t seem to be anyone properly coordinating all of this, some of the teams were choosing to search in places that had literally only just been comprehensively checked over by other groups, whilst certain areas had been left completely untouched by anybody.

It sounds as if the frustration had really begun to boil over into suspicion and resentment under the baking heat, as the different groups began clashing with each other.

A student from the University of New Mexico decided to do his own thing and fly solo when he rented a private plane worth around $18,000 to conduct an airborne search. Unfortunately, it turned out that he wasn’t very good at flying planes, and he ended up having to make a crash landing when he completely lost control of the craft.

That might usually have been considered a pretty expensive mistake to make. But he was only charged $500 for wrecking the plane – and whilst he originally paid up with money taken from his student tuition funds, he got most of it back after the Albuquerque Citizens Radio Association set up a fundraising campaign on his behalf.

One half-promising new lead emerged on that Friday when a war veteran by the name of Frank Loughin picked up messages from a young boy who gave the name of David, again prompting speculation that this may have been the real name of the child in need of urgent help, or that there was a second young boy at the scene.

This ‘David’ claimed that he was standing outside the upturned red truck which now had a white camper in tow. He also claimed that his father was badly hurt but still very much alive and trapped in the vehicle.

The police actually got to the bottom of this one, but it sadly wasn’t going to be of much help in tracking down the real Larry.

They traced this particular signal to a kid in Phoenix who was just mucking about on his walkie talkie.

False Leads and Lingering Questions

There were to be a couple of further notable developments before the month was out.

A 12-year-old child called Larry Zmudzinski from Ohio was reported missing to Santa Fe Deputy Police by his older brother. In fact, the older brother told police that he hadn’t heard a peep from several other members of his family since they moved from Ohio to Washington over a month earlier.

The Zmudzinski family had indeed gone missing, and of course the police were quick to latch onto the ‘Larry’ connection.

But whilst the first name was a match, there was a pretty big difference in the age, and it seems improbable that a boy of twelve would pretend to be seven years old. When you’re that age, you’re more likely to proudly draw yourself up to your full height and add on an extra year or two, rather than take five off.

Sure enough, it became clear that we were talking about two completely different Larrys when the Zmudzinski family were found safe and well just two days later, having embarked upon a long camping trip without bothering to tell any of their relatives.

A little later on in August, CB operators in Colorado suspected that they might be onto something when they picked up the voice of a man who was boasting to his buddies that he had recently pulled off a major CB radio hoax which had completely fooled the New Mexico State Police.

Although it’s not clear if he explicitly referenced The Lost Boy Larry incident and was admitting responsibility, a service station operator named Robert Vetter felt compelled to intervene and directly challenge the man over the radio.

In response, the disgruntled boaster threatened to track down and kill Robert Vetter, and just for good measure, declared that he also was planning to kill President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew whilst he was at it.

Those latter two targets aroused the immediate interest of the FBI, but the channel-hopping man was never traced before he fell totally silent.

For his part, Robert Vetter believes that the man he spoke to was not responsible for fabricating the Lost Boy Larry story, although his reasoning was somewhat questionable: the guy who was sending him death threats on the CB radio had a Mexican accent, and Larry didn’t.

There’s also the slight issue that the man had a man’s voice whereas Larry was supposed to be a young child, but any prankster worth his salt would have taken small details like that into account before staging the hoax, and maybe considered roping in a young recruit.

The more compelling reason for doubting the boasts of this guy is that he sounds a bit too nutty to have pulled off such a long-running gag, and it seems unlikely that he would have had the time to spare for such small-fry stuff when he was planning the assassinations of the President and Vice President.

But we’ll never know for certain if the anonymous guy with a Mexican accent was responsible or not, and nobody else has ever been linked to staging a possible hoax.

The Search Called Off

The situation was looking pretty hopeless as night fell on Sunday 12th August. The search parties had come no closer to locating a real boy named Larry who had now become worryingly quiet. Whilst there was some speculation that this may have been because the CB radio battery had died, there was also natural concern that Larry himself had died.

Although four listening stations were left operating in New Mexico for several more weeks, the actual physical search was officially called off on Sunday night after four days of fruitless hunting which had evolved into one of the biggest search and rescue missions ever seen in the US at the time.

The total cost for all the hours of work undertaken by military and law enforcement personnel, along with all the planes and helicopters, was estimated to be in the region of around $120,000 – which would be knocking on for nearly $850,000 in today’s money. And that’s not even counting the hundreds of unpaid volunteers or the student who crashed the private airplane.

That’s a pretty hefty amount of money, resources and time invested into a search that led precisely nowhere.

And the police had now clearly had enough, as they called off the physical search on the grounds that the whole situation was probably just a hoax.

State Police Chief Martin Vigil told a pack of assembled reporters: “We have not come up with any real definite information to establish that the situation is valid. We have not come up with any information that is definite enough to say that there actually is someone out there and where this person might be.”

The incident was formally declared a hoax by federal and state officials in November as Chief Martin Vigil explained: “We have exhausted all efforts. I think we would have found him if he had been there because all the areas that were indicated were searched extensively.”

Whilst it’s true that the authorities were never able to come up with any information to establish that the situation was valid, it’s equally troubling that they were never able to come up with any information to establish that the situation was definitely a hoax.

Games Without Frontiers

On the face of it, a whole bunch of dodgy elements appear to point to a hoax.

If Larry really wanted to be rescued, why on Earth was he so stubbornly evasive about providing genuinely useful information such as his surname, and why was he making it as difficult as possible to be traced by constantly switching channels?

How did the batteries of a portable CB radio manage to last for so long? And how come nobody has ever found either Larry or his father’s upside-down red truck at any point over the subsequent fifty years?

There are potential explanations for some of the more dubious parts of the story.

Whilst some still doubt that Larry’s signal could have travelled anywhere near as far as it did, the weather conditions over those five days were perfect for ionospheric skipping which could feasibly have bounced the message much further than usual.

And Larry’s constant channel-hopping may have been explained by his admission to Blue Eyes that he didn’t really know how to use a CB radio. After all, the kid was only seven years old.

As for the surprisingly long length of the batteries, it does seem incredibly unlikely – some would say downright impossible – that the batteries in a portable CB radio would last the full course over the five days that Larry was allegedly broadcasting his messages. But that question may have a more complex answer.

First, it’s worth considering what breed of individual would have been up to the job of staging what seems to be a pretty intense hoax.

Just about everyone who spoke to Larry was convinced that they were talking to a genuine young child. We obviously can’t rule out the possibility that the voice belonged to an incredibly talented adult impersonator, but the general consensus seems to be that the voice belonged to a very young child, regardless of whether the actual situation was real or fictional.

We already know that the police identified some of the later messages as pranks from school kids, and this may have led many to naturally conclude that the same school kids were behind the whole thing from start to finish.

But there’s a notable difference in the messages that were quickly identified as pranks, and the messages that several CB operators believed to be the real Larry.

The confirmed pranks were usually over and done with in ten minutes, and they were carried out by kids on walkie talkies who had a bit of time to spare and who probably started giggling towards the end.

But the potentially genuine messages were of a completely different depth. They involved a hysterical child’s voice regularly sobbing and wailing in sheer distress over five days without ever once breaking out of character.

This can’t have been entertaining on any level, and it would have taken remarkable levels of commitment and endurance for a very young child to keep it up for so long. Most normal kids would have grown bored very quickly and turned their attention to something more enjoyable.

It also feels a bit weird that such a young child would have been left unattended with a CB radio for so long, to engage in conversations with strangers that in some cases are reported to have lasted for hours at a time.

It perhaps seems more likely that a screwed-up adult would have been the mastermind behind the operation, but this does beg the question as to why they would bother, unless they really had it in for the New Mexico State Police, or they enjoyed getting a kick out of all the drama they were secretly creating.

It could have been the handiwork of someone who was aware of the rare opportunity to take advantage of the Ionospheric Skip, and initially just wanted to see how far they could bounce their broadcasts, but they ended up getting a bit carried away.

Of course, it would have helped the police identify a genuine missing boy if Larry had ever bothered to give his surname – and this again may point to a hoax, as the prankster would have been aware that providing a surname would probably be game over. The situation was more likely to be dragged out for far longer if the details were kept as vague as possible to perpetuate the mystery hanging over a missing boy.

However, it could be the case that Larry had been taught by his parents never to give his real full name to a stranger when using a CB radio. It may well be that his first name wasn’t even Larry, and this was just a part of the CB handle that he had been taught to use at all times.

It’s also quite intriguing how frequently the name ‘David’ popped up in some of his reported conversations. Whilst some have viewed this as a reference to a third person on the scene, could these have been the moments when his guard slipped and he was inadvertently giving out his real first name instead of his CB handle?

It’s also possible that Larry or David may indeed have tried to give his full name at some point, along with a bunch of other vital details which would have helped the search, but his voice was getting lost in the cacophony of noise made by all those kids on walkie talkies which swamped the airwaves from Thursday onwards.

One point that bears consideration occurred during the very first day of the search, when those three Civil Air Patrol pilots were reported to have spotted an abandoned pick-up truck near the Manzano Mountains, yet it had completely disappeared when helicopters were dispatched to take a closer look.

The only source for this comes from The New York Times, and it’s not covered in much detail. It might not have happened at all, or the Civil Air Patrol Pilots might have made an error.

But if it did happen, it does strike as strange that three pilots initially appeared to find exactly what they were looking for in the broad region that they were hoping to find it.

And later that same day, Larry’s reference to rain falling had led searchers to conclude that he must have been broadcasting somewhere near the same Manzano Mountains.

Could there have been a breakdown in communication here, or could the helicopters have failed to pick up what was glimpsed by the Civil Air Patrol pilots?

Questions About the Investigation

If we were going to take a tentative step into the conspiracy theorist rabbit hole, it could be argued that the authorities only wanted to wrap up the search and officially declare a hoax – without any evidence that it was a hoax – to quash any speculation that they had failed miserably in their search for a real missing child.

The general public might feel a bit more reassured if they were led to believe that somebody had just been playing a practical joke rather than accept that a child had been ultimately left to die alone after the main search was called off.

It’s certainly quite alarming that the search appeared to descend into chaos towards the end, as hundreds of volunteers started bickering amongst themselves whilst wandering around and reportedly leaving whole sections of the region unexplored in the confusion.

Whilst some areas were getting searched for a second or third time, it’s possible that Lost Boy Larry may have been waiting in a stretch of wilderness that had been completely ignored.

To be fair to the authorities who took the decision to abort the physical search, it must have been difficult to figure out what else they could realistically do after the broadcasts from Larry had ceased transmission and the leads had dried up.

But it might not have been unreasonable for the State Police to take the chaotic conditions of the last few days of the search into account, and perhaps consider making one last big coordinated effort rather than just shrugging and assuming that somebody out there was probably just winding them up.

Still, a couple of even shadier elements of the story might lead you to conclude that the authorities made exactly the right decision in calling off the search when they did and wasting no further time and money on mischief and buffoonery.

For example, when Larry told Blue Eyes that he could see the landing lights of the Piper Cherokee, you’d really think that this would have narrowed down the search significantly. Yet a comprehensive search of the whole area from which the lights would have been visible yielded absolutely nothing.

And here’s the real sucker-punch: in most of the broadcasts, Larry claimed that he was trapped in an upturned truck. The antenna for the CB radio would have been positioned on top of the vehicle. So if the truck really had flipped right over, the antenna would surely have been completely flattened, rendering the CB radio useless. Even if by some miracle it hadn’t been totally destroyed, it would have been heavily damaged to the point where it would have been impossible to make any kind of broadcast, never mind a whole series of broadcasts that merrily skipped across a whole bunch of different states.

So that’s got to be the clincher when proving this whole story is nothing more than a whole bucket of jibber-jabber, right?

Well, maybe…

Hippy Hippy Shake

The difficult thing here is that we don’t know for sure how many of Larry’s broadcasts were deemed to be potentially genuine, and how many were instantly dismissed as pranks.

For all we know, just a tiny percentage of the earliest broadcasts were genuine, whilst everything that followed was just other people pretending to be the real Larry.

It may even have been that even Blue Eyes was only ever talking at length to a prankster, and that the only genuine broadcasts were the ones originally picked up by CB enthusiast Darlene Ross in California on the Tuesday night.

If that were true, a bunch of bored clowns may have been partially responsible for the death of a child after leading the searchers down a series of blind alleys, not to mention the near-miss experienced by the student in the private plane.

But it would also explain quite a few of the more baffling parts of the saga, such as the later inconsistencies in Larry’s claims.

It might explain the puzzle over how the batteries of the portable CB radio managed to last for such an unfeasibly long time. Maybe they didn’t – the batteries could have died as early as Tuesday night, after which we never heard from the real Larry ever again.

And it might just explain how Larry was managing to broadcast radio messages using a crushed antenna on an upturned truck.

As far as it’s been possible to make out, Darlene Ross made no mention of an upturned vehicle when she originally reported her conversation with Larry.

She learned that he had been travelling in a red pick-up truck when his father had apparently suffered a fatal heart attack, and she gathered that he was now trapped in the same vehicle. But he didn’t appear to say anything at all to Darlene about the vehicle having flipped over.

Perhaps many of the points which regularly get wheeled out as compelling proof that the whole story is bogus only actually relate to the later hoax messages and not the original potentially genuine broadcasts.

The David Joseph Miera Connection

If Larry had indeed been a real boy trapped in a real vehicle, then surely the truck and the corpses would have been found at some point over the next fifty years? And how come a connection was never made with an officially missing 7-year-old boy and his dad?

It is a bit sketchy that a red pick-up truck was never found, although some have argued that it could still be out there somewhere in the remote wilderness of the New Mexico mountains, buried under silt or hidden away in an inaccessible ditch or ravine.

As for making a connection with a boy and father listed as missing, we should remember that we never really gathered much reliable information about either of them.

We’re not sure of Larry’s real name or even whether he was really seven years old – he could potentially have been even younger but had lied about his age. Very young kids have a tendency to add on a year or two when asked about their age.

And it’s quite possible that the father and son may have dropped completely off the grid before the accident. It may have been that the authorities weren’t even aware that they were in the country, or that the father was a fugitive from justice.

One popular theory is that the father may have been carrying out a parental kidnapping, and that the whole ‘hunting trip’ idea was just a cover story he told his son to explain why they were embarking upon an epic journey across several US states.

But whilst the police have never officially made a connection with a genuine missing person’s case, there is a true story which doesn’t get reported very often at all.

Back in the 1960s, a young couple by the names of Leon Zerfas and Genie Miera moved to the town of Dixon in New Mexico with their very young son.

Sadly, this on-off relationship was anything but a happy one. Leon Zerfas also had on-off relationships with other women, including one with whom he’d also had a child at roughly the same time, and he often used to move around when the mood took him, hopping between Genie and the mother of his other child.

Both Leon and Genie were reported to be heavy drug users and often frequented a local hippy enclave to stock up on supplies. On a far more disturbing note, Genie later claimed that Leon was a violent and abusive man.

Despite this, Genie and Leon later conceived a second child. Genie gave birth to their new daughter Eelia in January 1970, but she was forced to stay in the Embudo Hospital in Dixon for several days following complications from the birth, and so the older son was left in the sole care of Leon Zerfas.

During her stay in the hospital, Leon came to visit with their son. But it was to be the very last time that Genie Miera ever saw her first child.

When she finally returned home with her new-born daughter, she discovered that Leon had packed all his belongings and fled the family home with their son who was never seen again.

This missing boy had been living in New Mexico. He would have been seven years old in 1973 when the Lost Boy messages were broadcast. And his name was David.

This is not the name usually associated with the cry for help, but it’s still a name that was referenced quite frequently in the messages, including that original broadcast picked up by Darlene Ross when Larry appeared to be demanding help from somebody else on the scene with that name.

Unfortunately, any details relating to the case of David Joseph Miera who was last seen alive in 1970 are pretty hazy, a situation not helped by the fact that it took Genie Miera a whole year before she reported her son missing. But it seems that the police extended little effort in locating the son of a couple of drug-using hippies.

Genie later moved to California and had five more children. But she claims that she returned to New Mexico in 1986 and tracked down Leon Zerfas who gave several conflicting accounts of what exactly he’d done with David.

At one point, he claimed that he gave him to his sister, whilst another time he claimed that he’d given David away to a group of hippies who lived in a bus.

Several of Genie’s relatives believe it’s more likely that David was either deliberately killed or died under Leon’s dubious care. Or the child may just have been swapped for a massive bag of weed.

But it doesn’t seem as if Leon Zerfas was ever charged with anything, and David Joseph Miera was never found. Genie died suddenly in 1989, whilst Leon Zerfas died in 2005 without ever revealing the true fate of David.

It’s quite bizarre that nobody at any point seemed to make any kind of connection with a 7-year-old boy who occasionally used the name David and who was crying out for help in New Mexico, with a 7-year-old boy called David who had gone missing from New Mexico just three years earlier.

And it’s a connection that very few people even seem to make today.

It might just be a pretty big coincidence, but it’s one that is largely ignored.

Legacy and Lasting Questions

It’s good to hear that at least something productive emerged from a huge search and rescue operation which dragged on for four days at vast expense without yielding a single result.

Thanks in part to those 1973 broadcasts, the Federal Communications Commission introduced tougher rules and regulations designed to make it harder for pranksters to hide away under false names, and launched new regional CB investigation teams to handle such matters.

More significantly, the case led directly to the forming of the New Mexico Search and Rescue Council the following year which has done a fine job in ensuring that subsequent searches were less likely to descend into mayhem.

According to Madge Harrah from the Albuquerque Journal Magazine in 1983: “Larry was never found, but because of that search, numerous lives since have been saved. Search-and-rescue volunteers, when questioned about their dedication, say that saving a life is what makes all the long, hard hours of training worthwhile.”

But the jury is still out on who exactly was behind the ‘Lost Boy Larry’ broadcasts.

On the face of it, there are still too many elements that don’t quite fit together to dismiss the hoax theory entirely. Yet if there was a betting man, they would probably reluctantly conclude that the whole story was nothing more than a hoax.

Having said that, it cannot conclusively be dismissed as a prank.

There remain concerns about how the search and rescue operation was handled, how quickly it was called off, and the unexplored potential connection with the missing boy David Joseph Miera.

And it’s unfortunate that we can’t hear any recordings of the messages to judge for ourselves, but it’s worth remembering again the words of Sergeant W.A. Schmidt from the Civil Air Patrol who expressed the opinion that if you’d heard the voice for yourself, you would be left with no doubt that it was a genuine cry for help.

If this was a hoax, it seems unlikely that the culprit will ever come forward after all this time to claim responsibility.

So, are we ever likely to get a definitive answer to the mystery of the ‘Lost Boy Larry’ broadcasts?

That would be a negatory, good buddy.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the ‘Lost Boy Larry’ incident?

The ‘Lost Boy Larry’ incident was a series of distress calls received on citizens band (CB) radio in August 1973, reportedly from a 7-year-old boy named Larry who was trapped in an upturned truck in the wilderness of New Mexico after his father suffered a heart attack.

How long did the search for Lost Boy Larry last?

The search for Lost Boy Larry lasted for four days, from August 7th to August 12th, 1973.

What was the scale of the search operation?

The search operation involved hundreds of police officers, National Guardsmen, civilian volunteers, and the deployment of 22 planes. It was one of the biggest and most expensive search and rescue operations in the United States at the time.

Why did the search for Lost Boy Larry end?

The search ended because the police became unconvinced that Lost Boy Larry ever existed, suspecting it might have been a hoax.

Who first picked up the distress calls from Larry?

Darlene Ross, a CB enthusiast from Fontana, California, first picked up the distress calls from Larry on August 7th, 1973.

What was the initial information provided by Larry?

Larry initially said he was trapped in a red pick-up truck with his father, who had suffered a heart attack. He mentioned that the truck was in New Mexico and that he was alone and afraid.

What were some of the suspicious elements in the ‘Lost Boy Larry’ story?

Some suspicious elements included Larry’s reluctance to provide specific location details, the wide range of his broadcasts (reportedly picked up in multiple states), inconsistencies in his story, and the lack of any physical evidence or trace of Larry or his father’s truck.

What was the role of the Civil Air Patrol in the search?

The Civil Air Patrol flew planes equipped with direction finders over southern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona to try and locate Larry. They also reported spotting an abandoned truck, but it could not be found when helicopters were sent to investigate.

What impact did the ‘Lost Boy Larry’ incident have on CB radio regulations?

The incident led the Federal Communications Commission to introduce tougher rules and regulations to make it harder for pranksters to hide under false names and launched new regional CB investigation teams.

What was the outcome of the search for Lost Boy Larry?

The search was officially called off on August 12th, 1973, after four days of fruitless hunting. The incident was formally declared a hoax by federal and state officials in November 1973.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The ‘Lost Boy Larry’ Broadcasts: Was this all a Hoax?
• Hero image source by Brandon Zhang / openverse, cc0.