Ficcione Poem by Matthew Buchwald

Perhaps the most outrageous fraud ever perpetrated upon a believing public with near total acceptance, was the notorious Alternative Cosmos Swindle which appeared in a news story published in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1905. The article claimed to be based on the previously unpublished findings of the renowned Dr. Norton Armstrong recounting certain laboratory researches alleged to have been conducted in the ruins of Macchu Picchu high in the Andes Mountains, using the instrumentality of an 'Ionic Ether Inverter, ' whose power plant consumed over 200 tons of coal during the course of the experiment. The observations and theoretical conclusions were taken from the diary of Dr. Armstrong, although no copy of the diary has ever been found by any of the investigators who have looked into the matter. In lurid detail, and with a great deal of sensationalistic commentary, the grotesqueries of the Alternative Cosmos as witnessed by the famed physicist and his laboratory aides were recounted. A 'monstrous habitation' was discovered alongside the ancient ruined city: 'fouler streets were never trod since the time of the black plague in Europe.' Its boulevards overflowed 'with disease infested refuse surrounded by slimy, decaying dwellings impossibly constructed out of rubbish, each rising to a height of several stories, thronging the byways of the obscene megalopolis for endless miles, with rotting mounds of animal and vegetable matter crept and crawled over by a menagerie of devolved mutants.' There were piles of entrails 'of a gangrenous sheen'; heaps of effluvia with 'poisonous halos'; swarms of blood colored vermin resembling giant leeches with articulated necks and heads 'as if they were in the process of metamorphosing into human form'; profane hybrid creatures — a cross between hyena and serpent; reptilian skinned rodents with the heads of birds, queer six legged herd animals, and a repulsive cat-sized oyster without a shell. The latter was described in much the same terms as the aquatic invertebrate except that it had one mammalian eye with lid and lashes, and teeth inside its cloaca orifice. It ate its own young whenever they came near, and its pseudopods were stronger and more deadly than those of any shellfish; from the malicious gleam in its one eye, there could be little doubt that it would prey upon a human being.
But even these malign freaks of nature paled by comparison with the slime-sac men 'six feet in breadth, inflated, except for the limbs, with a toxic foul-smelling gas, and with combustible grease continually oozing out of their anuses.... In general appearance they exaggerated all the fabled characteristics of a troglodyte or ogre' — which characterization could easily have been regarded as understatement; because, though depicted as 'natural beings acting only in accordance with their instinct, ' the scientifically non-judgmental valuation was arguably undermined by passages that described sexual practices 'more bestial and repugnant than any others known to modern medical science.' In the 'Slough of Oozing Filth, ' with execrable monuments built of hardened mucous, the upper class of slime-sac men were discovered, 'miserably free of toil and barely alive, ' vomiting up their own excreta and eating it again; and within the same precincts a kindred species of inside-out man, or skinless scum monkey, were seen through the jaded eye of the Ether Inverter 'so abhorrent in their hideousness that they were a good deal more ugly than the most repellent religious depictions of the tortured inmates of hell's innermost circle.'
Such and more were the carnival midway attractions of the Alternative Cosmos Swindle; and, however ludicrous and incredible the story may seem today, in spite of its adroit use of narrative technique and its punctiliously assembled collection of scientific data, when the article appeared no questions were raised as to its veracity, for the readers of the Chronicle, even those living on Nob Hill, were inured to the idea of daily ground breaking new theories in the natural sciences as heralded in the Chronicle's reporting, for instance, of the published ideas of Eduard Suess, distinguished member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and discoverer of the lost continent of Gondwanaland. Using the newspaper as their platform, the swindlers, it is said much more cleverly than Charles Ponzi, were able to sell large numbers of exorbitantly priced tickets to San Franciscans willing to travel to Macchu Picchu to witness the Alternative Cosmos freak show who would discover when they arrived that no Ionic Ether Inverter had ever existed. Luckily, however, the innocent victims of the scheme were all on their way to Peru the very same day in 1906 when the great earthquake destroyed large parts of San Francisco.