slate.msn.com/id/2123673/?nav=ais
A tip for all of you aspiring investigative reporters: When you expose an Internet sex hoax, there are going to be consequences. My sleuthing got me an unplanned role in a piece of erotic fiction that starred Chewbacca as a Wookiee Casanova.
of sexually promi scuous teenagers" had started wearing green shirts with the collar poppe d up. When a greenlighter spotted a fellow traveler, he yanked his or he r collar down, triggering anonymous sexual escapades.
WookieFetish, a site that, true to its name, sports a photo of Han S olo's big hairy sidekick, Chewbacca. The page that linked to my site was locked up in WookieFetish's members-only discussion boards. I signed up for an account using my real name and the handle "cfarivar."
phony forum laying out gree nlighting etiquette ("What do I do after I get collared? Simply go into a secluded place and begin the act you wish to engage in"), backdated bl og entries, and hot tales of green-shirt sex told to gullible reporters ("A well known soap star was seen greenlighting for ladies after live8") .
The plan was to crea te a video compilation of green-shirt-wearing pickup artists and distrib ute it to blogs and peer-to-peer networks. The ultimate goal: "to spread the rumor until it reaches some national attention ... the Oprah show, Good Morning America, or some crappy national news channel."
greenlighting (which has since been delet ed) with a terse, "This is a hoax." When some additional skeptics posted screen shots from the Something Awful forum, the jig was up. The Wookie Fetishists closed down their message board that night.
"You seem like the kind of person that would go to a child's birthday party uninvited, and then proceed to exp lain loudly how the magician does all his tricks." "If this hoax had gotten big and you were the one to bust it, then maybe you could've found an e-girlfriend," one said . By midafternoon, my cell pho ne had a voice mail when I hadn't heard it ring. "This is the nicest pho ne call you're going to get," intoned a measured, even voice that Anthon y Hopkins would envy, "asking you to remove your blog from the Internet. " Checking my site's traffic numbers again, I saw a surge since the night b efore.
British tabloid page marked up to depict me as a terror ist. As he went on about how cool it would be if I posted to their site, I realized that a) this was almost certainly the guy who threaten ed me earlier, and b) I was staring at his caller ID. My mysterious caller hadn't gotten the memogreenligh ting was so over.
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