Michael Blake

Michael Blake was a professor of linguistics and psychology at Vault-Tec University.

Background
As the Vault-Tec Corporation turned the university into a trade school for its companies, the curriculum shifted to focus on vaults. Although other professors were dismissed, Blake was retained. As a tenured professor, he had the flexibility to split his time between teaching classes and working on his own personal project, finding and studying artifacts from the earliest human settlement in North America.

He was deeply interested in his research, involving the study of the Horse Creek petroglyphs. To him, the idea that Europeans landed in North America and traveled that far inland during the sixth or seventh century was truly fascinating. As for translations, he preferred Basque translation of the artwork, depicting a vivid picture of a great bison hunt.

Shortly before the Great War, he and a student named Jacquelyn were devoted to studying petroglyphs that had no real equivalent among old European runes, or Native American petroglyphs in West Virginia. According to BADTFL Agent Curtis Wilson, the petroglyphs were important, Jacquelyn alleging them to have an extraterrestrial origin. Although Blake disagreed, he nonetheless kept his notes on the guidestone in offline storage, just in case the data was corrupted, rather than out of paranoia.

Appearances
Michael Blake is mentioned only in Fallout 76.

Behind the scenes
The Horse Creek petroglyphs exist in real life, located south of Oceana, West Virginia, in Wyoming County. Their origins have been the topic of speculation, ranging from being extraterrestrial or carved by Irish monks in an ancient alphabet known as ogham before Colombus' arrival to North America. Scientists, however, have documented that the petroglyphs' origins are most likely the indigenous peoples who inhabited the region until the mid-17th century.