CAVEAT LECTOR

The story over at www.forestsofmystery.com is getting increasingly entertaining. Of course its fiction, but it is very well done and entertaining fiction. But the thing that is important isn't its entertainment value, it is the way that it is being promulgated that interests me.

There is an entire network of websites that have been posted, each with their own URLs, and none of them even hinting that the main story is fiction. If you google any of the main characters they seem to exist and have a substantial backstory. From an artistic point of view this is fantastic, but from a scientific one, the implications are very dodgy indeed.

About ten years ago I wrote a "novel" called The Blackdown Mystery in which I lampooned various worthies within the UFO community. I put the word "novel" into quotation marks because I was playing games with form at the time. I had read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and was fascinated with the concept of novelising `real` events, and I was also fascinated by the concept of what was `real` and what was not.

So, I wrote a book in which 75% of the characters were real, (including me, Richard, Graham, Nick Redfern etc), all the places were real, and most of the things that I said happened actually did happen, though not necessarily in the order which I said, or to the people that I said they did. Was it fiction? Yes, of course it was, and from 2001 when the second edition was published I said as much.

However people refused to believe me, and even now, ten years after the events in the book, I have telephone calls and e-mails asking for more details about the events in the book. The latest edition (the 3rd) even says "This is a Novel" in Times New Roman 10pt type. But people still refuse to believe it.

If people are so intransigent in their belief that The Blackdown Mystery is a true account of events that actually happened when - let's face it - it is nothing but a not terribly good novel that I wrote because my then publisher paid me to, then imagine how difficult it will be to persuade people that the events in Forests of Mystery, which is a far more complex and well executed affair, are fiction.

In the previous paragraph I nearly wrote "which is a far more complex and well executed hoax"
but then I stopped myself. A work of fiction is not a hoax. There is not a caveat in the opening pages of Pride and Prejudice saying "WARNING: Mr Darcy does not exist" nor should there be. But Jane Austen readers are not known to be overly credulous, and as I know from some of the more ridiculous e-mails that appear in my in-box on almost a daily basis, a large proportion of people who are interested in the subjects with which we deal are ridiculously gullible.

I am just waiting for the first e-mail warning me about the strange events happening in a forest in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, and telling me that I should contact a Mr D Lansing without delay....

"For our Video Case File #5 in the 'Forests of Mystery' web series, Jeff and I return to Pacific Cascade University after receiving an urgent message from Dr. Susan Melbourne. As you will see from the video, Dr. Melbourne may have made a horrible decision regarding her laboratory testing...

Video Case File #5 is available online at http://www.forestsofmystery.com/vcf5.htm
Again, thank you all for your continued support and emails, and please do remember to spread the word about our website!

Dewey Lansing"

www.forestsofmystery.com"