Since the glitches were few and far between, no official investigation was launched, until the unexplained crash of an Alpha Veritech on October 9th, 2025. The Veritech was with the TASC Cobra Squadron stationed at Fokker Aerospace Base, and piloted by twenty-five year old ex-RDF Lt. Amy Pollard. Pollard, an accomplished mechamorph, was on a routine low altitude training hop when she suddenly radioed that her mecha’s mode-transformation controls had malfunctioned and that she couldn’t control the ship. Seconds later, her thrusters gave out, and the ship crashed, instantly killing her. The investigating JAG team concluded in a questionable investigation that the crash was a result of pilot error. This tore the heart out of Pollard’s fiancee, Terry Weston, a young ex-RDF pilot who was also mechamorph in Cobra Squadron. Week’s after Pollard’s mysterious crash, Weston found himself in a similar situation while out on a training mission. Without any prompting from him, his Alpha suddenly reconfigured to Battloid mode, forcing him to crash land in downtown Monument City causing extensive damage. The event received an enormous amount of negative press for the ex-RDF Alpha pilots of the TASC. Despite his claims that the mecha suddenly got a mind of it’s own and it’s system were possibly jacked into, JAG investigators once again labeled the crash as pilot error, and Weston was suspended from active duty.

Weston became obsessed with finding the reason for his crash and his fiancee’s death. His personal investigations led him to Rolf Emerson, the Minister of Terrestrial Defense, who had been involved with an investigation into the incidents of unexplainable Alpha malfunctions. Emerson accepted his theory of remote jacking and over-riding of the Alpha’s mode-transformation controls. Emerson suspected that the events coincided somehow with the opening of the Giles Academy, which was being secretly funded by Leonard and who’s co-founder, Petrie, was Leonard’s former ASC adjutant. With some political and public manipulations, Emerson managed to insert Weston as a teacher into the Academy to work with another operative the ministry had already inserted as a student, the thirteen year old Dana Sterling.

Weston managed to convince a disgruntled cadet to furnish him with a computer disk stolen from the mysterious simulator system network referred to as, ‘the black box.’ The ‘black box’ was a flight simulator used by only the top cadets of each class, which demonstrated an enormous capacity for mecha control. Using encrypted codes from the stolen disk, Weston and his associates were able to penetrate Dr. Gile’s computer system and unravel the secret motives behind the Giles Academy. The cadets who piloted the ‘black box’, duped into believing they were only flying a simulator, where actually creating impulses which were capable of over-riding the fail-safes on an Alpha Veritech’s Central Computer Unit, causing it to malfunction. The system had been the result of glitches in Alphas for the past three years, and was also responsible for Weston’s crash and Pollard’s death. With evidence confirming Gile’s involvement, Military Police units stormed the Academy only to find Giles dead body, and the ‘black box’ disassembled with it’s computer files wiped clean.

A connection was never made between the crimes of Henry Giles and Leonard or Petrie, and it was concluded that Giles was killed by means of a self inflicted gunshot wound to the head. The records of Pollard and Weston were cleared of any guilt in connection with their crashes. At the heart of the plot however, was Leonard, who masterminded the entire operation to use the crashes of ex-RDF pilots and their RDF/REF issued Alphas to discredit them and remove any trace of RDF personnel and mecha from the ranks of the EDF. In the wake of the investigation, the Giles Academy was permanently closed in early 2026. The exposure of the Giles Academy created a sharp rise in the Anti-RDF movement of the time, which escalated into an brief RDF/ASC civil war which ended in 2029.