[3] In 1971, Kaczynski moved to a remote cabin without electricity or running water near Lincoln, Montana, where he lived as a recluse while learning survival skills to become self-sufficient.

Kaczynski later described this as a pivotal event: previously he had socialized with his peers and was even seen as a leader, but after skipping ahead of them he felt he did not fit in with the older children, who bullied him.

[24] For a period of several weeks in 1966, Kaczynski experienced intense sexual fantasies of being female and decided to undergo gender transition.

He arranged to meet with a psychiatrist but changed his mind in the waiting room and discussed other things instead, without disclosing his original reason for making the appointment.

[13] Allen Shields, his doctoral advisor, called it "the best I have ever directed",[24] and Maxwell Reade, a member of his dissertation committee, said, "I would guess that maybe 10 or 12 men in the country understood or appreciated it.

Two years later, in 1971, he moved to a remote cabin he had built outside Lincoln, Montana, where he could live a simple life with little money and without electricity or running water,[40] working odd jobs and receiving significant financial support from his family.

'"[25] In an interview after his arrest, Kaczynski recalled being shocked on a hike to one of his favorite wild spots:[44] It's kind of rolling country, not flat, and when you get to the edge of it you find these ravines that cut very steeply in to cliff-like drop-offs and there was even a waterfall there.

While the bombing devices varied widely through the years, many contained the initials "FC", which Kaczynski later said stood for "Freedom Club",[49] inscribed on parts inside.

The bomb, concealed inside a cigar box and left on a table, caused minor injuries to graduate student John Harris when he opened it.

[53] "Kaczynski had used a barometer-triggered device, and it had succeeded only in setting some mailbags on fire and forcing an emergency landing; in a letter written years later, the Unabomber expressed relief that the airline bomb had failed since its target had been too indiscriminate.

[53] Nearly three years later, in May 1985, John Hauser, a graduate student and captain in the United States Air Force, lost four fingers and the vision in one eye.

[68] Active Defunct Publications Works In 1995, Kaczynski mailed several letters[70] to media outlets outlining his goals and demanding a major newspaper print his 35,000-word essay Industrial Society and Its Future (dubbed the "Unabomber manifesto" by the FBI) verbatim.

Donald Wayne Foster analyzed the writing at the request of Kaczynski's defense team in 1996 and noted that it contained irregular spelling and hyphenation, along with other linguistic idiosyncrasies.

[82] He called for a revolution to force the collapse of the worldwide technological system,[83] and held a life close to nature, in particular primitivist lifestyles, as an ultimate ideal.

[89] Kaczynski added that the type of movement he envisioned must be anti-leftist and refrain from collaboration with leftists as, in his view, "leftism is in the long run inconsistent with wild nature, with human freedom and with the elimination of modern technology".

[89] James Q. Wilson, in a 1998 New York Times op-ed, wrote: "If it is the work of a madman, then the writings of many political philosophers—Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, Karl Marx—are scarcely more sane.

[98] Kaczynski also wrote a second book in 2016 titled, Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How, that does not include the manifesto, but delves deeply into an analysis of why technological society cannot be reformed and the dynamics of revolutionary movements.

[99][100][101] According to a 2021 study, Kaczynski's manifesto "is a synthesis of ideas from three well-known academics: French philosopher Jacques Ellul, British zoologist Desmond Morris, and American psychologist Martin Seligman".

[106] The UNABOM Task Force set up a toll-free telephone hotline to take calls related to the investigation, with a $1 million reward for anyone who could provide information leading to the Unabomber's capture.

He searched through old family papers and found letters dating to the 1970s that Ted had sent to newspapers to protest the abuses of technology using phrasing similar to that in the manifesto.

FBI profiler James R. Fitzgerald[115][116] recognized similarities in the writings using linguistic analysis and determined that the author of the essays and the manifesto was almost certainly the same person.

Combined with facts gleaned from the bombings and Kaczynski's life, the analysis provided the basis for an affidavit signed by Terry Turchie, the head of the entire investigation, in support of the application for a search warrant.

[118] He had received assurances from the FBI that he would remain anonymous and that his brother would not learn who had turned him in, but his identity was leaked to CBS News in early April 1996.

[134] On January 21, 1998, Kaczynski was declared competent to stand trial by federal prison psychiatrist Johnson "despite the psychiatric diagnoses" and prosecutors sought the death penalty.

"[149] In October 2005, Kaczynski offered to donate two rare books to the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University's campus in Evanston, Illinois, the location of his first two attacks.

[152][154] In 2012, Kaczynski responded to the Harvard Alumni Association's directory inquiry for the fiftieth reunion of the class of 1962; he listed his occupation as "prisoner" and eight life sentences as "awards.

[159][7] Kaczynski was receiving biweekly chemotherapy until March 2023, when he began to decline all treatment due to unpleasant side effects and his poor prognosis.

[167] In his book The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), futurist Ray Kurzweil quoted a passage from Kaczynski's manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future.

[49] Anders Behring Breivik, the far-right perpetrator of the 2011 Norway attacks,[172] published a manifesto which copied large portions from Industrial Society and Its Future, with certain terms substituted (e.g., replacing "leftists" with "cultural Marxists" and "multiculturalists").

[175] Another explanation is that a new generation has adopted Kaczynski's anti-tech philosophy because they believe his reasoning is sound and his "observations about technology and the environment have proven to be prescient".