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In four weeks and 3,000 miles of traveling, Detective Clifford Burgess and his pretty girl assistant turned up enough to make Tuesday Lobsang long for a lamasery. For, announced Burgess, his name is neither Rampa nor Kuan Suo but plain Cyril Henry Hoskin, and he is the son of a Devon plumber.
Ghost's Ghost. Hoskin had "gone Eastern" while working for a career-counseling firm in London. He shaved his head, grew a beard, changed his name and wrote a rhyme to his managing director: "You may wonder why I go on so But will you please remember I am Kuan Suo." When he was sacked some time later, he took to "spivving it" and writing occasional magazine articles. To Literary Agent Cyrus Brooks he brought a manuscript on corsets and such a high, wide and fancy load of Himalayan snow that
Brooks suggested he forget corsets and set to work on The Third Eye instead.
As a result, Hoskin, 47, was nearly $50,000 richer last week as he lay ill in his Irish cottage. Outside, flocks of tourists, alerted by front-page treatment of the expose in the British press, trampled the lawn. The embarrassed publishing firm of Seeker & Warburg suspended plans for publication of Hoskin's next book, Medical Lama. Said a U.S. spokesman for Doubleday: "We expected that people would think it was good reading, but not necessarily true." "I am surprised," said Agent Brooks. "He possesses extraordinary powers of telepathy." Ailing Hoaxer Hoskin (he says he has both heart disease and cancer) insisted, in a tape recording made for a British commercial TV program, that his book was all true—he had merely ghosted it for a ghost.
"Some time ago," he said, "I had the strangest premonition, the strangest urges, and even against my will I was compelled to change my name ... I had a slight accident. I had concussion. And my body was actually taken over by the spirit of an Easterner."