Word count: 947 | Reading time: 4 min read
Pretzel Logic
At least once a week since I first wrote about him some seven years ago, I get an e-mail or phone call about my old friend SOLLOG, the porn purveyor cum psycho psychic who claims to have predicted every disaster, ecological and man-made, since about 1995.
Not everyone has a sense of humor about the guy. In fact, lots of people are scared of him, something I learned just days after Sept. 11. While the world was struggling to cope, I received an e-mail from Frank Patalong, an on-line reporter from the German news magazine Der Spiegel (www.speigel.de).
“Just by scanning the archives, I learned that you in the past more than once had the debatable fun of encounters” with SOLLOG, wrote Patalong. “This self-named prophet of the Internet seems at the moment, in one of his incarnations, to spread the rumour that he ‘successfully’ predicted the atrocity of New York, Tuesday. This rumour is spreading fast: It is all over Germany at the moment.”
Patalong asked me a series of questions about who SOLLOG was and why he was carrying on so. In subsequent conversations, both via phone and the Internet, Patalong told me that people all over Germany who were receiving floods of SOLLOG-related e-mails were wondering whether, indeed, SOLLOG had mysterious powers and if his predictions of worldwide nuclear conflagration would come true.
A few days after I heard from Patalong, I received an e-mail from Erik Larsen, a reporter for Information (www.information.dk), a Danish newspaper first started as the voice of opposition to Nazi occupation. Like Patalong, Larsen said that his countrymen were also receiving waves of e-mails about SOLLOG and his so-called predictions and that Danes were shaken and upset.
“SOLLOG claims to be the biggest prophet of our times and foresees nuclear terrorism in Israel and the U.S.… Does he really — as he claims — have a large group of believers behind him, and is he, as one could expect, making a fortune on his prophecy business?”
I told both Patalong and Larsen pretty much the same thing. That SOLLOG was, essentially, a loon whose “predictions” were little more than post-disaster rantings, albeit with news about disaster delivered faster than even CNN. As for any money SOLLOG might have amassed, SOLLOG’s many websites sell, among other things, “Britney Spears sex videos” and “BAD e-mail” domain names like J-E-S-U-S.com, F*CK-God.com, F*CKAllah.com, Kike.bz, Nigger.bz and dozens of other equally tasteful word combos.
A few days after Larsen contacted me, I got a phone call from CNN. They, too, were interested in SOLLOG, though, as far as I know, that network never did anything, which is no surprise, considering how much real news was taking place around the end of September.
For a while, news from the SOLLOG circles died down. Until about a week ago, when I received a phone call from one David Alexander, purporting to be an “Internet investigative reporter.”
Alexander had two very interesting things to tell me.
The first was that, among the thousands of pages of documents the FBI failed to turn over to Timothy McVeigh’s attorneys, was information pertaining to SOLLOG’s claims that he predicted the bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City.
The second was that a number of SOLLOGistas were upset with my mocking the man-god and were talking in Internet newsgroups of “erasing” me and a gentleman named Bob Carroll, who runs Skeptics Dictionary (www.skepdic.com), a conspiracy-debunking website that has hoisted SOLLOG on his own petard. Alexander also said that the SOLLOGistas were plotting to “bomb” both of our e-mail accounts as a way of protesting our blasphemy and our failure to tell the world, in advance, that SOLLOG had predicted Sept. 11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks.
I spent more than an hour on the phone with Alexander, whose voice, after a while, had a familiar ring to it. His story about McVeigh sounded fantastic, but certainly worth checking out with a couple of sources he suggested, the first and foremost being Rob Nigh, one of the attorneys representing McVeigh.
But first I did a little checking on Alexander.
I found no stories with his byline on the Internet. I called the number he gave and learned that it belongs to a Florida-based answering service, whose client was something called AIS Publishing. AIS, said the woman on the phone, stood for “Alpha Internet Services.” Type that into a Web search and, amazingly enough, you get a SOLLOG website.
Perhaps the reason why David Alexander’s voice sounded so familiar was that, in reality, he’s not an “Internet investigative reporter,” but John Ennis, a.k.a. SOLLOG.
Given that information, I was quite shocked when, over the weekend, I received a return phone call from Rob Nigh saying that yes, he had some vague recollection of SOLLOG, even though he could not say exactly why.
Cate McCauley, a private investigator who worked for McVeigh and watched him die from the lethal injection, told me on Tuesday that she too had heard of SOLLOG. But she has her own theories about our man with the plan.
“I recognize his name from what I call the ‘asteroid belt,’” McCauley said with a hearty chuckle, referring to the vast Internet conspiracy wasteland. “If the FBI did question people about him, so what? People like SOLLOG are all over the place. These people are looney; they crave attention. SOLLOG is the least of the crap that has been thrown at this case.”
Somehow, I just know that SOLLOG and his followers will beg to differ.
