David Emery, of About.com's Urban Legends and Folklore department, tells BoingBoing, "Wanted to let you know that Alex Boese of the Museum of Hoaxes may well have solved the Rance mystery with some good, old-fashioned Net detective work, or at any rate is damn close to solving it."
Here's a snip from the Museum of Hoaxes post, which — true or not — evidences some very thorough sleuthing indeed:
I think Rance is a cartoonist/filmmaker/screenwriter named Keith Thomson. Here's my reasoning. What immediately struck me about Rance's weblog was that it attracted a very high number of comments from very early on. Within two hours after Rance posted his first entry on December 29, 2003, four people had left comments on his site. Most weblogs, by contrast, struggle to get anyone to read them, let alone leave comments. So how was he attracting so many visitors to his site straight off the bat? What I discovered was that immediately after Rance posted his first entry on Dec. 29 at 4:49 EST, someone going by the screen name 'InvaderFromPluto' began posting messages about his weblog on various fan discussion groups. For instance, at 5:52, about one hour after Rance had posted his first entry, a message from InvaderFromPluto appears on Yahoo's thematthewperryplace message board. It reads:
i read slate reported a famous tv actor keeping a weblog under pseudonym "rance" at http://captainhoof.tripod.com/blog/ it's hard to know if it is him, but it might be as it is funny and seems witty in his sort of way
Obviously Slate hadn't written anything about Rance's weblog. Rance's weblog, at that time, was only an hour old. So how did InvaderFromPluto know about Rance's weblog so quickly, and why was he so interested in promoting it? Perhaps InvaderFromPluto was Rance himself. Makes sense to me.
