Virtual Reality

And the parson made it his text that week, and he said likewise,

That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies,

That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright,

But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight. - Alfred, Lord Tennyson in The Grandmother (1864)

One of the worst mistakes that can be done by scientific and engineering fraudsters is creating stories that are too far detached from scientific and engineering principles. After all, if you claim to create something so preposterous that violates the fundamentals of physics — such as Siti Nurmala et al.’s ‘free energy spin-magnet generator’ or Dicky Zainal Arifin’s ‘fuel-less electricity generator’ — the public will not call you an inspirational figure; instead, qualified experts will see through your facade and dismiss you as a lunatic. While you should still have the support of some exceptionally gullible people with infinitesimal critical thinking abilities, most people, especially the experts, will turn against you, torpedoing any chances of you ever progressing further and benefitting through your deception.

The key to maintaining the believability of one’s deception is to make sure that the narratives are still grounded to reality. In concept, this is not exactly difficult for the person to do; in a 2013 study, when a group of people were told to deliberately lie, the majority of them resorted to telling a lie that are based on their actual experience rather than fabricating a story from the ground up⁴. In reality, however, the liar might become too greedy and try to create a false narrative that is self-aggrandising, yet contains not even a modicum of reality. This type of deception is generally easy to take down, especially by people who actually know and understand the fundamentals.

In fact, this is exactly what thwarted Joko Suprapto’s attempt to convince a group of professors at Gajah Mada University (UGM) to formally recognise his ‘magic electricity generator box’ back in 2005. In the presentation, Suprapto’s team stated that the box is able to generate electricity ‘eternally’, which quickly became the laughing stock of the professors during the presentation. One of them even suspected in jest that the box was ‘Djinn-powered’. Needless to say, Suprapto’s attempt to convince the professors ended in vain, becoming a mere data point in the set of baseless, laughable attempts at science-based deceptions.

In order for Hartanto to avoid becoming another statistic, he had to hold back on the claims and inject enough reality in his narrative; not only to make it seem real, but also to make people who read it live in the ‘reality’ he crafted. A ‘virtual reality’, as one might say⁵.

Compared to outright fabrications, reality-infused lies — commonly called half-truths — are harder to take down. The reason is, besides making people doubt the story less due to the realistic components , when people doubt and try to challenge the claims, the fabricator could just present some sort of factual evidence that is in line with the narrative, regardless of the actual relevance of the evidence to the doubters’ rebuttal. Even if it doesn’t manage to convince the sceptics, other people who observe the debate might be convinced due to the evidence presentation. Since a part of the story is factual, it might be interpreted that the rest of the story is also true, making it a great way to deceive people.

Injections of reality in a false narrative come in two forms. The first form is the one stated in the aforementioned 2013 study: as the basis of the story. These stories are akin to Disney’s 1995 animated film Pocahontas in the way that they are based on real events, but have many of their details — or even progression — distorted, omitted, or added by varying degrees, sometimes entirely. In Hartanto’s case, he used this bottom-up tactic to create one half of his narratives. In one of his earliest lies, Hartanto claimed to engineer and launch an orbital rocket to a low-Earth orbit with his team as an ESA personnel. While the part that he engineered and launched a rocket with his team was factual, he and his team were affiliated with DARE, which operations are nowhere near the scale of ESA. Besides, the rocket they launched was a sub-orbital sounding rocket, CanSat Launcher V7S; not even close to what Hartanto described. Furthermore, Hartanto put a special emphasis on the control systems of the rocket, which is understandable, since during his time in DARE he was a member of the Advanced Control Team, who were in charge of developing active rocket stabilisation technology.

In addition, he used a similar tactic when lying about his meeting with B.J. Habibie, Indonesia’s third president, as described in the previous part. He also used it when he falsely claimed that he won an inter-space agency competition with his ‘hybrid air-breathing rocket engine’, as described earlier. To made things seems more legitimate, Hartanto also had a photo ‘evidence’ of him holding a €15,000 prize check from DLR for winning the competition. In fact, the only truth about this story was that he joined a competition at all; the rest of the details were completely fabricated. As described in the previous part, rather than a technological competition, it was just a student coding competition, and he and his team did not win. Furthermore, the photo evidence that he provided was digitally altered from his actual photo of him holding the check template from the event.

While basing the writing from real events helps with keeping the narrative plausible, one can still add too much hyperbolic embellishments that diminish the ‘realness’ of the lies. How did Hartanto restrained himself from doing this? The restraint came from his usage of the second form of reality injection: adding enough real, realistic, or realistic-sounding details to the narratives (top-down). As an illustration for this point, consider the 2014 science fiction film Interstellar. While ultimately a work of fiction with signs of artistic freedom, the amount of attention Nolan et al. put into its scientific detail⁶ made it become considered as one of the most realistic science fiction films of all time, which makes the premise and theme of the film sound plausible.

Another fitting example would be Multatuli’s 1860 fictional novel Max Havelaar, in which the titular protagonist — a Dutch colonial official stationed in Java during the cultuurstelsel period—fights against the corrupt agricultural system imposed by the colonial government. In writing Max Havelaar, Multatuli depicted the setting of the story based on his experience as a colonial official in Java himself. When the novel was published in the Netherlands, it created a political storm, which contributed to the growth of the Dutch liberal movement. The movement ultimately led to the birth of the Dutch Ethical Policy, which was an attempt to ‘pay back’ their colonial subjects. Simply put, using realistic details allows the narrative to not only sound plausible, but also persuade the audience that the narrative might actually be ‘real’.

This is where Hartanto’s experience in rocketry and satellite engineering shone the brightest. He used the aerospace engineering knowledge that he accumulated during his time engineering rocket subsystems in DARE and designing Delfi-n3Xt’s telemetry system in his master’s thesis research to season the narrative with realistic-sounding details. Revisiting the TARAV7s example, the comparison of the known specifications of TARAV7s (according to Hartanto) to the smallest orbital rocket, SS-520-5 (JAXA) and two actual DARE rockets reveals the extent of realistic detail Hartanto put in his narrative (Table 1).

Table 1. Known specifications of TARAV7s (according to Hartanto) compared to the SS-520-5 (smallest orbital rocket) and two DARE rockets, Cansat Launcher V7 and Stratos II+.

There are several things to note about Hartanto’s details about TARAV7s. First, the peak thrust of TARAV7s is way closer to the orbital SS-520-5's than the peak thrust of the two sub-orbital DARE rockets active around the time period the TARAV7s was ‘launched’. Second, the orbit altitude Hartanto mentioned in his first media publications, 347 km, is within the historical range of the orbit altitude of the International Space Station (ISS) (330 km at the lowest), where he claimed his system carried a ‘scientific payload’ to in the Mata Najwa interview. Both of these details are realistic and wouldn’t be out of place in actual rockets.

Hartanto did not stop there, however. Recall that, in order to increase the legitimacy of the narrative, the added details don’t have to be actually scientifically accurate. Instead, they only have to sound realistic or scientifically accurate to most people to convince them. One way to do this is to simply properly use scientific or engineering terms and principles in the narrative. This tactic was most famously used by the perpetrators of the Dihydrogen Monoxide hoax⁷ (and similarly, the oxidane hoax⁸).

In Hartanto’s case, he used it countless times during the two-year period of his actions. To name a few, in the TARAV7s Detik article alone, he detailed the control systems of the rocket (including the specifications of the flight module computer, down to its operating system and processor) as well as its record-breaking capabilities (capable of ‘reaching a higher apogee’ and ‘supersonic lift-off’). Similarly, in the ‘sixth-generation fighter jet’ Liputan6.com article, he mentioned that his ‘hybrid air-breathing rocket engine’ is able to do ‘near-space hypersonic flights’ and superior to SABRE (which, ironically, is actually funded and validated by ESA) and conventional scramjets, which he claimed to be ‘plagued with thrust-to-weight ratio and energy control issues’.

The combination of the bottom-up and the top-down approach is one of the cruxes of Hartanto’s success. This way, Hartanto took the audience’s reality, weaved his own narrative into it, then added enough detail work so that it fits the audience’s experience and worldview. Every time Hartanto did a release to either the mainstream or the social media, he repeated the same process over and over again, with each story built on the previous. After several iterations, without them knowing, the audience have been manipulated to live in Hartanto’s ‘virtual reality’ instead of the real world. Persuasive, yet subtle.

A ‘virtual reality’ gives a lot of power to the creator over the people who lives in it. This is especially useful when the creator has to deal with an adversary threatening to compromise the integrity of the creator’s story. In Hartanto’s case, it is his less-than-flattering incident shortly after he got his Bachelor’s degree (class of 2005) from AKPRIND Institute of Science and Technology (IST AKPRIND), Yogyakarta.

There are several contradicting accounts about the incident, but the general story goes like this. Around 2006 or 2007, after his studies in IST AKPRIND, Hartanto either forged a lecturer’s signature or stole and falsified an official document from the university (Fig. 3) in order to fulfill the requirements for his application to a scholarship-funded master’s degree programme in UGM. Unfortunately for Hartanto, it did not go very far; the Yogyakartan chapter of the Private Higher Education Institution Coordination (Kopertis)⁹ caught the suspicious document after coordinating with IST AKPRIND. Whether Hartanto got formally punished by the university is unclear; while IST AKPRIND stated that Hartanto wasn’t meted out over his misconduct, the lecturer Hartanto purloined his documents from stated the opposite.

Figure 3. A former IST AKPRIND lecturer’s testimony about Hartanto’s misconduct. Name and profile photo redacted.

Regardless of whether Hartanto got punished for his transgression or not, the lecturer — who used to consider Hartanto as his favourite student prior to the misconduct — said sternly to Hartanto that ‘his career in Yogyakarta is over’ and, if Hartanto insisted, he wouldn’t hesitate to ‘annihilate his career by blackmailing Hartanto’s workplace with his account of the incident’. To top it off, he said to Hartanto to scram from Yogyakarta to rebuild his career and report back to him once he is a successful man.

Understandably, this shameful incident marred Hartanto’s decorated academic past — he graduated cum laude with 3.88 GPA and represented IST AKPRIND in a regional competition — which had all the potential to ruin Hartanto’s future career at any point. Any mention of the fact that Hartanto was an IST AKPRIND alumnus could lead to the revelation of his transgression, especially with someone on his tail who is more than pleased to completely obliterate his reputation. To prevent this from happening, Hartanto had to sweep any knowledge of his time in IST AKPRIND under the rug from anyone who matters. How did he do it?

Figure 4. Hartanto’s curriculum vitae in the old version of his master’s thesis (2009).

What Hartanto did to avoid professional death is actually one of his oldest chicaneries. Way before Hartanto started lying about TARAV7s in 2015, Hartanto already faked aspects of his identity during his master’s studies in TU Delft (2007–2009). In May 2009, just months from his graduation from the programme, Hartanto was introduced in a PPI Delft’s routine talk and discussion event, KoPI Delft, as an UGM alumnus — instead of IST AKPRIND — who also spent some time in Tokyo Institute of Technology (TITech) as an intern. This pretense did not last long, however. Strangely enough, in the earlier version of his master’s thesis (which can still be found in CiteSeerX) (Fig. 4), which was published two months later, the institutions were practically reversed: Hartanto graduated from TITech in 2005, then worked as a lecturer in UGM until 2007. Later articles about Hartanto dropped any mentions of UGM altogether, leaving only the ‘TITech graduate’ as a part of his ‘virtual reality’. Just like this, Hartanto wrote his shameful time in IST AKPRIND out of his personal history, just like Japan wrote the Nanjing Massacre out of its history books.

An enigma remains, however: why did Hartanto revise his true educational history out of the narrative differently multiple times? While the true reason is still unknown, it can be suspected that this was due to UGM’s larger and more extensive alumni network (KAGAMA) in Indonesia compared to TITech’s, as well as its more accessible location for Indonesian journalists to visit. Both of this means that the task of verifying Hartanto’s true alumni or former staff status would be much more trivial if he claimed to be a former student or lecturer in UGM compared to if he claimed to be either in TITech (which might require a physical visit to Tōkyō to verify Hartanto’s alumni status; not to mention the language barrier problem). By switching alma mater from UGM to TITech, Hartanto’s ‘reality’ is much harder to be toppled down by a suspecting ‘fellow’ UGM alumnus’ call-out.

By carefully timing the releases, tying his narrative to real events, and exerting manipulative power over his audience, Hartanto has fabricated and imposed a self-aggrandising ‘virtual reality’ that is a gargantuan task to disillusion — compared to his predecessors’ — upon millions of unsuspecting Indonesians. However, while these factors explained why his narrative seemed real to a lot of people, it did not explain why his lies were so alluring to many Indonesians from all layers of society. It did not explain how his narrative worked so well that it served as the basis for his invitation to one of the most respected talk show in Indonesia, as well as the bestowal of his VWCP travel fund and embassy award. After all, any random person could have followed any of the strategies laid out so far to deceive a lot of people about his or her own identity, but that doesn’t mean that the deceiver would receive the same scale of recognition that Hartanto got.

If you want to reap the benefits and recognition with your ‘reality’, the narrative has to pull the heartstrings — the deepest collective desires — of the society.