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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I remember reading this when I was a teenager. I'm embarrassed that I ever found it credible.

There's a category I have for this sort of thing, which I don't have a good word for. The stories from the Daily WTF also generally get slotted in here. It's "crazy stuff really does sometimes happen in the real world, but you'll never be able to verify this specific story either way".

Did this specific story happen? I'll never know. But there's equally crazy stories that have happened. Not necessarily a lot, but non-zero. Much moreso for the Daily WTF; every story is obviously not pristine, unvarnished truth, but I've seen dozens of people pile on to how impossible a particular story is when I've witnessed the moral equivalent in my own experience, so....

(Fortunately the truth value of this story doesn't matter.)

This category overlaps (possibly completely) with a similar category: stories that can't be told, but since you don't need the damaging-if-revealed details and won't pursue them, a sufficiently fictionalized account is released - it gets the "truthy" story across without putting anyone at risk. Favorite example is Richard Marcinko's Red Cell.

I think we can be pretty confident that nobody called "The President's Secret Bomb Shelter" from a pay phone, and nobody's uncle got in trouble for asking about a phone number.

Its a good way to check if your bullshit meter is working properly...

> It's "crazy stuff really does sometimes happen in the real world, but you'll never be able to verify this specific story either way".

Not necessarily..

804-840-0000 804-840-0001 804-840-0002

So it wasn't always impossible to confirm, just time consuming. Except now you would need a time machine to confirm this, since I'm sure they have changed the phone number since this story started making its rounds.

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