For well over twenty years now, we have lived in the information age. Every day, it seems, our ways of communication are getting broader and more simplified. With that, we are running the risk of wrong information and out right lies being spread more easily. With social media platforms like Facebook, and Twitter (sorry, MySpace, not looking at you), it is easier to share a hoax with a friend on the other side of the world you will never meet than it is to visit a friend down the road. Even TV news shows can fall short when it comes to reporting correct information. One that comes to mind is MTV News reporting on Marilyn Manson changing his name to the mercury symbol, and never leaving his attic again. Even we paranormal fans are having trouble with falsehoods.
You may recall seeing a website, thisman.org, all over the internet about a man people from all over the place are saying have seen him in their dreams. He’s balding and looks like actor Jason Alexander got hit in the face with a shovel. The story goes that a patient of a well-known psychiatrist doodles this hobbit-ass looking dude over and over again that keeps popping up in their dreams, and giving them words of wisdom. The portrait is then left on the desk of Dr. McDoesn’t-Care-About-Doctor/Patient-Confidentiality for someone else to see. And they do, and they have also seen him their dreams. I have never once seen this elven man in my dreams, and guess what? Neither have you, or anyone else. He is a hoax created by sociologist and marketer, Andrea Natella.
Andrea runs a company called Guerriglia Marketing. This company stages “subversive hoaxes” and creates pornographic, political, and advertising art projects. The problem with this is that the paranormal community already has trouble getting anyone to believe anything we say. A lot of us feel like we have to preface any paranormal experience we have with something like “I could be wrong..” or “I was probably just seeing things, but..” when telling our stories. For someone to make a story like this, and have it go viral is damaging because it causes people to second guess us, say we’re dumb, call us liars, and etc. It also makes paranormal fans look dumb, and reinforces skeptics opinions about us when the paranormal community accidentally shares an article meant to trick everyone. Even a respectable news site like Vice got duped by this. They had to publish a second article talking about it. For the first article, they even conducted an interview with Andrea and he duped them even further by telling them he saw the guy in his dreams, too, prompting him to make the website!
After reading what I have to say in this article, I hope at least some of you will share paranormal information with a little more caution. No, this mole man has never invaded our dreams, but he has invaded our conversations and media tricking most of us by the way of people spreading anything they read.
