Paranoid PKD fans wonder about viral marketing

A scanner Darkly is going to be released...ehm..soon. A Trailer remix contest on the web is recutting those same three minutes of footage into more or less successful trailers, some thinks the contest is producing better trailers than the official one.

But leave it to the paranoid Philip K. Dick fans to create viral marketing hype, where there is none... Or is there..? And what does Morgellons disease have to do with it? (read more)

Slashdotters think they see a connection between the recent media
chatter about a new illness and the movie. The mystery of Morgellons disease: infection or delusion - or viral marketing?
The Halting Point thinks it's a VM campaign.

* The website claims that a "national news broadcast" will occur in June or July. The release date for the film is July 7.

* Morgellons.org and Morgellonusa.com (currently down) are both registered by a proxy company and contain no contact info.

* The first Morgellon's article on Wikipedia was created in February as a link to one of the above websites.

Slashdotters were rumbling it might be an ad campaign based on the aphids in the opening chapter of the PKD novel in this thread here.

Adrants posted on the hoopla here, and was promptly getting comments from mogellan sufferers who didn't think it was the least bit funny. Other commenters thought the responses were too prompt.

Paranoia-cha-cha-cha!

OSU Health Scientists studies strange skin disease blasts a a headline at the comanchecountychronicle.com and the article carries the perfect quote:
"It really has the makings of a horror movie in every way,". Boy does it ever sound creepy.
I don't think this is a VM campaign. Partly because anything registered by Godadddy like the morgellon.com website is anonymous by default these days (thank spammers for that), so anon registrations prove nothing really, and partly because I just don't think - or perhaps I just hope - that viral marketers can get that cynical. Would they really go that far?

Maybe. There was once a campaign that was about to launch on a famous music channels internal email networks, where employees would learn that headquarters had been seized by feminist terrorists. That VM campaign was that close to actually be approved and launch as if it were for real but then one bomb too many blew up somewhere and someone halted the project. In hindsight the wisest thing to do. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that they are not out to get you.

The prize of best internet sleuth so far goes to Eliot at "follow me here" who posted a thouroughly link-laden post here about 'Morgellons Disease', and all he found on it.

Circumspect practitioners report that the nonhealing skin lesions go away if the affected area is casted for several weeks, preventing sufferers from scratching and picking at their sores, as our mothers taught us not to do when we were children. And what of the bizarre core symptom of the spinous or filamentous extrusions from the skin lesions? One Morgellons debunker found the photomicrographs touted by proponents to be almost identical to pictures at the same magnification of kleenex fibers stained with blood. It seems likely to me that most people would dab a weeping or oozing lesion with kleenex at least intermittently. I am tempted to elaborate that the absorptive properties of the fibers of kleenex would draw blood or serous secretions up and, as they dried, the fibers would stiffen. Probably the strands and fibers sufferers report are heterogeneous; perhaps some are fungal hyphae too, others clothing fibers and other adherent fiber fragments. The vehemence and histrionics with which the debunker's explanation is dismissed in the comments by Morgellons proponents unwilling to entertain any suggestion contradicting their fervent convictions is quite telling.

What do you think?