The Rockstar Who Knew To Much- Phillip Taylor Krammer IRON BUTTERFLYS

The man named Philip Taylor Kramer was probably most famous as the bass player for the rock group, Iron Butterfly during the years between 1974 and 1980, helping them to make their studio albums Scorching Beauty and Sun and Steel in 1975, and continuing to play with the groups Magic and Gold between 1977 and 1980 after Iron Butterfly broke up. Although he had joined Iron Butterfly in the years past their prime, Kramer was still considered to be a successful musician, and even though he dropped off the musical radar in later years, he became successful in a completely different world well removed from the rock scene. Kramer went on to get a degree in aerospace engineering, getting involved with all manner of research and development with the US Department of Defence, such as working on the MX missile system, and he would also become heavily involved in computer engineering, carving out a reputation for himself as a bit of a math and computer whiz. In 1990 he co-founded the company Total Multimedia Inc., which was involved in pioneering work in video compression technology, as well as the company SoftVideo Inc., and he also dabbled in his own theoretical research into such far-out concepts as faster-than-light communication speeds and warp travel. With his success, wife, and two beloved kids, his life seemed to have had a sort of reawakening, but dark clouds were ahead.

Things started to unravel for Kramer in 1994, when both of his companies went bankrupt in quick succession and were reorganized. This was very dismaying to him, because he would relate to his wife that he had been at work on a major groundbreaking development in data compression technology. He excitedly explained that with this technology a computer could be shown just a fragment of a photo of a missing child’s face and within seconds find that child in a sea of thousands of people, something he proclaimed had never been done before and which had countless possible applications. In the months after the bankruptcy, Kramer’s behaviour began to veer off into the odd. He became withdrawn and would shift from morose to high spirits at a moment’s notice. He began blurting out all manner of strange statements, such as telling his business partners, “God's a scientist, a perfect scientist! Chaos is perfect order,” saying to his sister “You've got to be cantered. If you're cantered, you'll be saved when the supernova happens and they come,” and proclaiming to a friend “Learn from the beauty of the eye that beholds all the wonders of the world and yet is blind unto itself. The difference is between day and night.” He had also gotten heavily into a popular New Age book called The Celestine Prophecy, by James Redfield, which deals with various psychological and spiritual ideas, harnessing mystical energy, energy fields, and vibrations to change one’s life and move to a higher plane of existence, and he claimed that he had actually channelled the sequel to the book before it had even been written. He also began finding little hidden mystical meanings in everyday situations, and his wife would later explain a hike she had had with him in February of 1995, of which she says:We went on a hike to the top of the hill by our house and we looked across and you can see the whole valley where we live. And there’s a cross up on the hill that belongs to one of the colleges nearby. And he turned around and he pointed to the cross and he said, ‘Look, honey, our house is right in the path of this cross.’ He started to see sacredness in everything. The very next day, on February 12, 1995, Kramer went to visit his father-in-law, after which he went to go pick up a business associate and investor by the name of Greg Martini and Martini's wife at Los Angeles International Airport. He apparently arrived early, waited for around 45 minutes, and then left for unknown reasons. After this he made a flurry of 17 calls to various people, including his wife, business associates, and the former Iron Butterfly drummer and good friend, Ron Bushy, who said he sounded “stressed and scared, like maybe he’d even been crying.” He also told Martini over the phone that something had come up, and that he and his wife should go directly to a hotel, where he would meet up with them later, and then he told his own wife that he had “a big surprise” for her. His last call was to 911, during which he said he was going to kill himself, giving the cryptic message “I'm going to kill myself. And I want everyone to know O.J. Simpson is innocent. They did it.” After this, he seemed to have just driven off the face of the earth. He never did arrive at the hotel, there were no further calls to anyone, his credit cards were never used again, nothing.