The Diary — Old Hoax or New or Not a Hoax at All?​

[Lombro2]

Caz asked for examples of people who created a hoax and then peddled it themselves. How about Rick Dyer?

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I would never do that publicly unless it was encased in ice. I usually just throw my hoaxes out the car window as I'm driving by, hit the gas, and let someone else deal with them.

There's a seamless narrative with those guys and with me. If Michael spoke of UFOs and Mindspeak and implants, I would find it more believable than what we have so far. That's one mention of James visiting his doctor in London in 1889 in Tales of Liverpool. What a Eureka moment!

[rjpalmer]

If Michael spoke of UFOs and Mindspeak and implants, I would find it more believable than what we have so far.

I have no doubt you would, Markus. Of course, there's always Anne Graham telling Feldman she was a member of MI-5, so that's a start...

Hoax hunting in Liverpool is a lot like tracking Sasquatch...just follow the scat...

[Lombro2]

Now we just have to differentiate if the spoor leads to a Rick Dyer forger or a Fritz Stiefel fence.

Michael Barrett can't really be compared to Mark Hoffman. He can be compared to Rick Dyer if he was a Hoaxer but Dyer's story makes sense in the context of his Hoax and so does his motive. He wanted to make people happy. That's one possible motive here. It doesn't work for the Diary. Is forging a Ripper Diary the best way to make money?

But some forgers make hoaxes to try to "prove" a theory they believe in. The Piltdown guy believe in missing links and Pierre Plantard believed he was the King of France. Maybe a serial killer diary IS the best thing to fake since it's virtually unknown territory.

It's the start of a seamless narrative. To compete with Caz's Patsy Theory which is very seamless, so seamless that the only arguments, thrown at her, work for a fence as much as a forger, if not more so. That's when the scat hits the fan.

PS That's Patsy not Patty.