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A New Elena Story 253

Posted by michael from the old-trees-full-of-iron dept.
SwiftBoy writes "Elena, of motorcycling through Chernobyl fame has gone riding again, this time to dig up the history of Kiev's fortifications. Interesting that after 60 years all that stuff is still there."
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A New Elena Story More

A New Elena Story

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  • Wasn't she the one (Score:5, Interesting)

    by superpenguin ( 595439 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @03:07AM (#10873083)
    about whom there was much doubt as to the veracity of her story?

    • Re:Wasn't she the one (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bersl2 ( 689221 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @03:21AM (#10873134) Journal
      If this is all fake, this is one damn good fake.

      What was supposedly fake about it anyway?

      • Re:Wasn't she the one (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 20, 2004 @03:24AM (#10873146)
        What was supposedly fake about it anyway?
        Supposedly the areas that she was motorcycling in and out of aren't actually open to the public. What was allegedly fake about it was that she'd just taken some pictures of herself on a motorcycle on the highway and then interspersed them with file photos of Cheronobyl's abandoned areas, then presented them as a photo diary of a trip that never happened.

        • No, that's not accurate (Score:5, Interesting)

          by JoeBuck ( 7947 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @04:19AM (#10873309) Homepage
          There really are tours of the area, and she evidently went on a tour, so the pictures are real. What's fake are her claims that she rides her motorcycle alone in the radioactive zone.
          • How was that known to be fake?

            • Re:No, that's not accurate (Score:5, Informative)

              by aWalrus ( 239802 ) <sergio&overcaffeinated,net> on Saturday November 20, 2004 @07:35AM (#10873829) Homepage Journal
              The area is heavily guarded, apparently. Someone stirred up a ruckus when they saw her story on the net and took it up against the guards. Eventually it turned out that she had taken a helmet with her on one of the usual (legal) tours and took pictures with that. She also changed her story after the allegations of fraud surfaced (at first, she claimed that her dad was a worker in the zone, and that she routinely biked there)

              • Re:No, that's not accurate (Score:5, Interesting)

                by nukeindia.com ( 463153 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @09:09AM (#10874063)
                Reading through her pages years back, I remember somewhere she said that she was stopped at the entrance and being told no bikes allowed. Then she referred about her connections and also gave an indication of bribing them. And she was allowed in.

                If anyone has still doubt on how easy it is to bribe the Russian guards, please google for a few news coverage on the Chechen rebels and school incidence this year. The most top wanted rebel claimed he bribed his way all through Russia up to Mosko and only stoped when his 30,000 dollars were exhausted.

                She had been telling from day one that tourists do visit this place in bus. And the only people that denied she was permitted in with her bike are the guards at Cheronobyle.

                I trust Elina and her story more than I trust these guards. At least, she was offered a lot of money after her fame (for hosting her site), she declined. She even hated her new found fame. She didn't have anything to gain. Compare it with the gains and losses of the guards and decide.

                The good news is that its not only the USA administration that lies.

            • How was that known to be fake?

              Since she herself appears in several of the photographs.. all taken at head level and mostly in open areas where its unlikely there were 5 1/2 foot high stable structures to place the camera on for a timer shot. Looking at the photos makes it plainly obvious there was at least one other person there taking photos while she was looking through binoculars and looking at her geiger counter.

        • Re:Wasn't she the one (Score:5, Insightful)

          by mm0mm ( 687212 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @06:24AM (#10873637)
          ... she'd just taken some pictures of herself on a motorcycle on the highway and then interspersed them with file photos of Cheronobyl's abandoned areas, then presented them as a photo diary of a trip that never happened.
          and what's the big deal about it? Maybe she fooled us, maybe not. Even if her roadtrip was a lie, that won't change other facts. If this is a fake story I wish Chernobyl's accident was the one "that never happened."

          Even if her story was fake and she made herself a journalist by doing so, she did a darn good job convincing the readers. Anything presented on the web as the truth can be fake or real. It is viewer's responsibility to examine credibility and authenticity of each story and make most out of it. If you can't provide facts to back up your claims to discredit her story, then your allegation, without any valid proof, can be fake as well.

          Her story being fake doesn't change the history of Chernobyl or the fact the area has been, and will be, abandoned for years. If she's told us lies, it is her stupidity and lack of integrity that made her a lier. Big deal. Maybe she just wanted to be in a spotlight. We believed in her story just like we believed in the allegations of Iraq's WMD programs. I believe there are more dangerous lies than hers, even if her story turned out fake. Her "trip," whether fake or not, revealed very significant and important information about the doomed area, and that's all matters to me.

          • Her "trip," whether fake or not, revealed very significant and important information about the doomed area, and that's all matters to me.


            What information? If she's a liar, how can you trust anything she writes? There's a big difference between reenacting some part to make a story easier to understand and faking the whole essence of the story.

        • There are tours [tourkiev.com] starting from Kiev. They're not even that expensive. Tours go to within 100m of the damaged reactor site.

          The area isn't totally deserted, nor is it that hazardous for short vists with suitable precautions. Some old residents moved back into the area. Two of the Chernoybl power reactors were operated until 2000. Hundreds of cleanup workers still go in and out. A few vehicles are driven in the area.

          So it's not that tightly closed an area.

          It's not clear exactly how far Elena was able to

    • Yeah, the Ukraine Government (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      was the first to say "she was not allowed to be there, so she wasn't there...".
    • She could be a reporter for the New York Times.

  • Elena was debunked a while ago. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jason Scott ( 18815 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @03:10AM (#10873096) Homepage
    Here [www.uer.ca] is one of a good number of debunkings. Naughty, Naughty!

    • Um, this is interesting (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 20, 2004 @03:27AM (#10873155)
      There's a 4MB panoramic image on the debunking site mentioned in the parent post: http://www.web-axis.net/~pulse/chernobyl/prypyat-p anoramic.jpg [web-axis.net]

      That's one hell of a case of deja vu for those of us who just spent all day immersed in Half-Life 2.
      • Damn shame his site marked on the picture only has one shot on it. I'd love to see the pictures he's got. I don't care if Elena's story isn't true, the disaster and the Ghost Town is, and I haven't seen any documentuaries on it, so the more picures the better. (More accuracy is nice though.)
    • So she is a 30 year old wife of a con-man, not a 26 year old daughter of a nuclear physicist?

      That sucks.
    • In a reply to the post in your link:

      Is this coming from a confirmed source? It would explain why all of a sudden the site and its content completely disapeared...

      I think thousands of slashbots pounding on the server explain it better :)

  • Hot chick (Score:3, Funny)

    by Frogbert ( 589961 ) <frogbert@gmail . c om> on Saturday November 20, 2004 @03:14AM (#10873113)
    Hot chick riding a motorcycle around in a post-apocalyptic wasteland!

    Now thats some porn I would like to get addicted to.

  • c'mon really (Score:5, Funny)

    by syynnapse ( 781681 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @03:20AM (#10873130) Homepage
    let's all just admit it. this article is only here because 90% of readers love pretty european women.
    war schmore.

  • Here's the earlier Slashdot story on her (Score:5, Informative)

    by xmas2003 ( 739875 ) * on Saturday November 20, 2004 @03:21AM (#10873133) Homepage
    Previousely discussed back in March/2004 [slashdot.org]

  • What's really amazing... (Score:3, Funny)

    by stretch0611 ( 603238 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @03:28AM (#10873157) Journal
    What's really amazing is that Elena, after motorcycling through Chernobyl, is still there."

  • Coral link (Score:4, Informative)

    by Bill_Royle ( 639563 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @03:28AM (#10873160)
    Shame that can't be done automatically for all postings...

    Now watch - someone else will probably have posted this link at the same time...

    Coral Link [nyud.net]

  • Echo (Score:3, Funny)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @03:30AM (#10873165) Journal
    We just did to the server what the Chyrnobol reactor did to that Russian town.

  • Next photo story request (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 20, 2004 @03:53AM (#10873236)
    Elena goes to visit Junis in Afghanistan to photograph the Commodore-64s running Linux.

  • Stuff on the ground (Score:5, Interesting)

    by architimmy ( 727047 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @04:12AM (#10873285) Homepage
    Actually there really is stuff just lying around all over the place in Europe (probably depending on exactly where you are). I know my old landlord in Germany had a museum quality collection (I say this because he loaned it to a museum in Speyer on a couple occasions) of pre-historic artifacts and fossils sitting in the garage. This was all stuff he collected while cutting wood up in the forest. The house I lived in was over 200 years old. He also had a collection of late 19th century farming equipment and a bunch of world war one artifacts which were actually passed down through his family.

    You can still find bullets, shell fragments, peices of old weapons, helmets, and various other things on the ground up around the Maginot Line and also in the countryside around Bastogne (where the Battle of the Bulge took place). Other areas, like Normandy, are more "cleaned up" but still show rather evident signs of historical events of note. Hard to take two steps without bumping your head on something historically relevant.

    Of course that's without even mentioning all of the other "important" historical periods that took place around Europe. With so much history to so little square footage, it's no surprise you can hop on a motorcycle and find cool stuff all over the place.

    I imagine the same amount of history is lying about the americas as well. It's just that there's far more surface area to human history that took place here. So the stuff is all piled up on itself.

    BTW, my eagle project was a food and clothing drive for people living in Belarus (current country where Cherbnobyl is located). They still can't drink milk or eat meat from cows in the area or eat certain foods grown in the soil close to the accident. But people do still live there. I remember having passive radiation detectors in our classrooms in the late 80s... Although that might have been more a product of the cold war, since the military base I lived near was actually a short range nuclear(that's an assumption) missle site(this isn't).

    • Re:Stuff on the ground (Score:4, Interesting)

      by _Sprocket_ ( 42527 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @04:49AM (#10873376)
      I was always rather amazed with the amount of history available in Europe. A few of the things I saw while stationed just inside the Western border of Germany...

      There was Trier - Northern gate to the Roman Empire. Colusium, bath houses (complete with underground tunnels for slaves to burn fires and heat the in-ground baths).

      Trier also had some base housing for US military personnel. It was located on the side of a rather steep hill. Ironically, all housing units had notices warning residents not to climb down the hill in the woods. The hill overlooks a major railway nexus. During WWII, it was a prime target for allied bombers who, faced with constantly bad weather conditions, had to dump a huge amount of ordinance. Much of it ended up embeded in the hill and remains there today as Unexploded Ordinance.

      These are just two examples of the random bits of history that was everyday life in Germany. One just doesn't see that kind of depth of history Stateside.
      • The area that is now the US didn't have much by the way of empires before the 1500's, but it did have a great many indiginous tribes and cultures, much of which is lost to time or legend because they didn't tend to build massive structures.

        The US didn't have any world wars fought on its soil either.

      • Re:Stuff on the ground (Score:3, Interesting)

        by pVoid ( 607584 )
        Yeah, this also explains a certain amount of the 'arrogance' that is felt by Europe towards America. When you live in a city, such as Rome, or Istanbul or Vienna, and you have monuments that date back *thousands* of years, you can't help but find even New York dull at times.

        I lived in Istanbul for a long time, and a lot of the historical 'relics' are still in use in modern days. Cable pulled "subway" carts from the turn of the century, ferry boats from the 20s. You take it for granted when you're there,

        • Re:Stuff on the ground (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Reziac ( 43301 ) *
          There's an old saying about this:

          In England, they think 200 miles is a long ways.
          In America, they think 200 years is a long time.

          It gets worse in America as you go west. Here in California, a 20 year old house may be "too old" for a bank to consider it loanworthy!! In fact, a lot of why California has the issues it does is a total lack of any sense of history. I don't mean of old places (we have that) but of a sense of continuity back through places and events. A lot of that is because most of the populat
          • Here in California, a 20 year old house may be "too old" for a bank to consider it loanworthy!!

            Doesn't that have more to do with updates to the building codes and insurance, to account for earthquakes? It doesn't seem "due to rampant commercialism" or "the cult of 'new is better'", I think.

            • You'd think so, but it has more to do with resale value in a market where there is a high incidence of defaults on home loans. Banks don't want to get stuck with an older home that may need updating before it's salable. And there is practically a cult of "we only want a NEW house that NO ONE ELSE has EVER lived in" among the yuppie set. Nice older homes, fully remodeled, updated, with real yards and mature trees, typically sell for half what a cheaply-built new house does. :(

              Of course, this is rabidly enco
      • Yep - My father was born in southern France - in a section of town that was even then called "the antiquities" (Dad is over 80) - for good reason - the house my Grandparents lived in was built by the Romans. Dad went back for the first time in over 60 years about 10 years back - houses were still there, and still lived in

        As one of my friends is fond of saying:

        The difference between England and the US is that in the US 100 years is a LONG time, and in England 100 miles is a LONG way

        The 100 years/100 mile

    • Re:Stuff on the ground (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Yes! You are right on! I live in Idaho. Its a low population, large area state. There are very few places in this state that don't have history to them. You can drive through the mountians in centeral Idaho and see all of the indian war sites. You can drive out and see the site of the Teton damn burst. You can see plane crashes all throught the state (I know of over 400 personally). Very little of this is linked to a big event that you learn about in school (or play a game that is based on it) so people jus

    • Re:Stuff on the ground (Score:2, Informative)

      by daniil ( 775990 ) *
      Belarus (current country where Cherbnobyl is located).

      Meh? Last i heard, Chernobyl was in Ukraine. What happepened, did they move it to another country or sell it or something?

    • Re:Stuff on the ground (Score:4, Informative)

      by jedrek ( 79264 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @05:33AM (#10873492) Homepage
      I totally agree with you, and this is especially prevalent in the eastern and central, post-Soviet Bloc, parts of Europe. To this day - and it's been almost 60 years since the end of hostilities in Europe - you can find bullet holes in buildings in the poorer parts of Warsaw. It's also not uncommon to see bomb squads called in when a construction crew finds an unexploded bomb or artillery shell buried in the ground. Or to hear about some kid getting their hand blown off after finding an unexploded grenade while playing in the woods.

      World War II also left us with a lot of burial grounds and mass graves, both the Nazis and the Soviets were fast and lose with mass murders. In 1940 the Soviets slaughtered 25 thousand members of Poland's intelectual elite, then blamed it on the Nazis. Their remains weren't exhumed until the mid 1990s, and if it hadn't been for people actively working to find out the truth and getting the bodies exhumed and properly buried, they remains would still be in the ground, buried under a couple of feed of dirt in the middle of a forest.

      There is one factual error in your post - while Belarus did recieve a huge part of the fallout from the Chernobyl disaster, the reactor itself is in the Ukraine.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Actually there really is stuff just lying around all over the place in Europe (probably depending on exactly where you are).

      There are old pill-boxes (machine gun emplacements protected by circular/octagonal concrete walls) all over the UK. These were supposed to defend roads leading to cities and villages, should there be an invasion. A few were even built in public parks (the idea being that the enemy would find it easier to travel across the open space of the park, and therefore be an easy target for th

    • Re:Stuff on the ground (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Actually there really is stuff just lying around all over the place in Europe (probably depending on exactly where you are).

      Goddamnit, how I hate it when some people speak of "Europe" and "Europeans" as if it were a city or something, with a common culture or people or language.
      It's a rather vast continent, with many countries, many cultures, many languages, and diverse history. "We" generally don't refer to ourselves like I just did: "we Europeans". "We" are Swedes, Ukrainians, German, French, Greek...

      I
    • Your correct about history lying around, at least in New England.

      There are many places where you can just randomly start walking through woods and suddenly come upon a rock wall. Most of these are well over 200 years old (old farm markers) and it's not uncommon to find arrowheads and other such "knick-knacks" lying around.

      ~X~

  • Who (Score:5, Funny)

    by Konster ( 252488 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @04:14AM (#10873291)
    Who cares if she faked it? Who ever really cares if a hot woman fakes it?
    • "Why do women fake their orgasms?"

      "Because they think that men care."

      Which is kind of harsh if you think about it.

    • Re:Who (Score:3, Funny)

      by mikael ( 484 )
      Who cares if she faked it? Who ever really cares if a hot woman fakes it?

      But how can you reach international/olympic standards, if you don't get honest and truthful feedback on your performance?
  • So therefore I will attract her with my castle in the swamp [kiddofspeed.com] and save you poor sods the heartache.

  • Fool me once... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Txiasaeia ( 581598 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @04:29AM (#10873331)
    The first Elena story was interesting, moving and touching. Much of the comments on slashdot on the original story said much the same thing. There's something very powerful about a photoblog about a lone woman motorbiking through a deserted (sorta) post-apocalpytic town.

    HOWEVER, once I found out it was faked, I was extremely upset. The original impact of the story was immediately gone, and I felt like I was cheated out of those emotions of awe and wonder. There's no way I'm going to go out on a limb again and trust anything that woman says.

    There was a story here previously about the journalistic quality of blogs on the Internet and how they couldn't touch real journalism. I now understand what that's all about. IMHO, /. shouldn't be giving any credence to Elena after her previous scam was unearthed.

    • Re:Fool me once... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jsebrech ( 525647 )
      There was a story here previously about the journalistic quality of blogs on the Internet and how they couldn't touch real journalism. I now understand what that's all about.

      Bah, real journalism. Real journalists don't have any special kind of knowledge or ability to be factually accurate. They just have more oversight. But even so, imho the editorial oversight in the mainstream press is severely lacking as well because of the slow death of independent investigative journalism. Mainstream press stories ge

    • Re:Fool me once... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by danila ( 69889 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @07:39AM (#10873838) Homepage
      Faked is a wrong term. She just made a personal photo gallery for friends, she didn't submit the /. story for publicity. So she has absolutely no responsibility for being factual, just like I don't have that for my LJ diary. I mean, I can write there about my fantasies of having sex with Natalie Portman without adding disclaimers that "this is a work of fiction". I can even intersperse these stories with real facts. There would be nothing wrong with it, and if that diary was featured on Slashdot, I would not be responsible for people thinking it is 100% true. And I would not deserve the "liar" label for that.

      Internet doesn't have a single standard for integrity, truthfulness and lack of fantasies. NEWS.BBC.CO.UK has one standard for truthfulness, WIKIPEDIA.ORG has another, SLASHDOT.ORG yet another, THEONION.COM has another standard too and my personal blog (if I had one) would have yet another. And there is nothing wrong with that, it's not like The Onion is somehow "worse" than The Economist. So it is silly to approach Elena's story with the same standards you have for Reuters. You don't have the right to be upset about anything other than your own gullibility.

      • Re:Fool me once... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by SharkJumper ( 651652 ) <sharkjumper @ g m a i l.com> on Saturday November 20, 2004 @12:17PM (#10874788)
        And that would all be fine and good up to the point where she milked the publicity for her own gain: going on the talkshow circuit, getting into magazines, trying to cut movie deals, and now trying to present her new project as some kind of documentary. She may not have presented herself as a journalist in the first place, but when she was mistaken for one, she made no attempt to correct the perception. In fact, she milked it and tried to cover up when her story was shown to be false. For that, she deserves the label "liar" and more. By not immediately admitting that the story was a fantasy, she's romanticizing dangerous and illegal activities that could lead others - more gullible than even your standard /. readers - to harm.

        SharkJumper
      • You don't have the right to be upset about anything other than your own gullibility.

        So there's nothing wrong with me cheating you out of money as long as I use the Internet to do so?

    • It seems that the biggest problem people have is that they beleived it too readily in the first place, despite it being just some random person's personal webpage, so felt let down when they found out the story was "sexed up", as Alistair Campbell would say. But go back and look at it again. Elena has taken a bunch of otherwise fairly boring photos, and made them interesting by wrapping them in a made up story about riding her bike through the off-limits areas around Chernobyl. She doesn't seem to have inve

  • She better learn her history (Score:4, Informative)

    by S3D ( 745318 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @05:18AM (#10873449)
    About Makhno army:
    "The anarchists on the photo, they kept in terror all this region" (Makhno [wikipedia.org] in the center) It was other way around. Makhno anarhist army was composed of local peasants and small core of anarchists. Makhno was hugely pouplar among the locals, mostly because he defended them again devastating communists "food tax". Later soviet propaganda tried to make a common bandit out of Mahno, but havn't succeded much.

  • They have that stuff in Germany, too (Score:5, Insightful)

    by goon america ( 536413 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @05:24AM (#10873470) Homepage Journal
    Interesting that after 60 years all that stuff is still there

    It's that way in Germany, too. I know that in Hamburg, some of the major bomb shelters were so incredibly massive that they simply never tore them down. They put nightclubs in there now. You can see them pretty easily, they're these huge masses of concrete... one of the most touching things, besides the bombed-out cathedrals left unrestored, and the occasional Kennedyplatze or Eisenhowerstrasse you run into...

    We don't really have a parallel here. This is one of the reasons that I believe that when Americans and Europeans think about war, they actually conceptualize very different things.
    • of the distribution of new and old buildings in the city centres. In many places you'll find lots of old buildings, and then suddenly 3 or 5 houses in fifties/sixties style. That's a WWII Ground zero.

      Elsewhere downtown is mostly newer houses dotted with small clusters of stuff looking like 1880-1930. That's the hard hit places. I've also walked the wooded hills around Kaiserslautern where you'll often find those little round waterholes size ~4m. (10-15 ft). That's bomb craters - according to an old guy wh

    • Re:They have that stuff in Germany, too (Score:4, Interesting)

      by plopez ( 54068 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @12:13PM (#10874775) Journal
      All over Europe they still find bodies, unexploded munitions; including mustard gas from WWI; wreckage etc.

      After 2 horrendous wasteful wars most of Europe has learned the futility of Nationalism.

      I liked the qoute in the article "Soldiers graves are the greatest preachers for peace".
    • I think part of that is because in Europe (indeed, in most of the settled world) you've had war literally falling on your heads within living memory, and there has seldom been a time when the older generation could not remember having had to personally defend their country, within its own borders. In America, we don't have that -- we've not suffered war on our home soil in modern times.

      So yes, I think you're right -- in Europe it's still a lot more up-close and personal.

  • dude this is old news; she already had pictures of kiev ww2 battle ruins the last time /. posted about the woman.

  • Photos remind me of Ozymandias (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mc6809e ( 214243 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @06:18AM (#10873616)
    Ozymandias

    I met a traveler from an antique land
    Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
    Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
    Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
    And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
    Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
    Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
    The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
    And on the pedestal these words appear:
    "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
    Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
    Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
    Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
    The lone and level sands stretch far away.

    -Percy Bysshe Shelley
    1792-1822

  • Fascinating (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ewe2 ( 47163 ) <ewetoo@gmail . c om> on Saturday November 20, 2004 @08:15AM (#10873923) Homepage Journal
    I don't really care about the Chernobyl issue. Serpent's Wall was far more educational and entertaining, particularly "Elena's" sardonic sense of humour. Probably more honest also. Bring back fertility festivals!!
  • Yo. Link with this instead.

    [CORAL-LINK]/serpents-wall/ [nyud.net]

    Perfect time for CORAL [nyu.edu]

  • the people debunking the original story (Score:3, Insightful)

    by XO ( 250276 ) <blade,eric&gmail,com> on Saturday November 20, 2004 @10:40AM (#10874381) Homepage Journal
    There are no credible debunkings of this story. All debunkings are potentially just as filled with garbage as the original Elena writings are.

    In any case, she is one hot chick that I would love to go on a motorcycle ride with.
  • I hear the extra eye she sprouted really helps her frame the photos.

  • They're fake. So what? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by PiGuy ( 531424 ) <squirrel@@@wpi...edu> on Saturday November 20, 2004 @11:57AM (#10874717) Homepage

    There seems to be a lot of anti-Elena sentiment here, mostly due to the fact that she didn't really take those pictures on a motorcycle.

    Who cares? I sure don't.

    Her stories, fact or fiction, are a great read, and provide a wonderful thread connecting the photographs. The photographs themselves (which certainly are real) are a great record of the past that tell a story on their own.

    If someone posted a "space log" with lots of beautiful pictures of the planets, and linked the pictures together using a story about flying in a spaceship from one to the next, no-one would think the story was real, but many would still enjoy it. Elena's made-up story just happend to be a lot more down-to-earth and believable.

    She mentioned at one time that she was planning on turning the Chernobyl story into a chapter of a book she was working on (I can only presume that the Serpent Wall story will be another chapter). If such a thing comes about, you can bet I'm buying it! Why pass up such a great collection of photographs and enjoyable stories?

    • Exactly right. And she has a wonderful sense of how to maximize impact from the materials she has. Remember Charles Kuralt's "On The Road" segments? That's what she reminds me of.

      If it's not totally factual... well, it's not a history class. It's a travelogue. Its importance lies in "look and feel", not "source code".

  • Another good story (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gone.fishing ( 213219 ) on Saturday November 20, 2004 @12:54PM (#10875002) Journal
    Elana,

    Thank you for another good story from your homeland. These are things that Americans (like me) never really get to see. When we read one of your stories, it humanizes you and your people far more than any history book could.

    I've read your stories, and am impressed - I hope you keep up your work and that the skeptics don't stop you. In your own way, you have done more to help relations between your people and the rest of the world than your government has. After reading your stories, I feel like I know a bit more about you and your people than I ever have before. It is now easier to understand some of the things about you and your people than before - because I can see some of your roots.

    As a student I studied these wars, but they were abstract. Now they are real. The numbers still astound me, probably even more now.

    Thank you,
  • captured by Israel.

    And I have photos [virtual-estates.net] too -- can I get to frontpage now?


  • Excellent article, very interesting. This girl certainly has an interest in anthropology, history, and alcohol!

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