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A New Elena Story
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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about whom there was much doubt as to the veracity of her story?
Here is one of a good number of debunkings. Naughty, Naughty!
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
That's one hell of a case of deja vu for those of us who just spent all day immersed in Half-Life 2.
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).
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.
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