As you might imagine, Don Harper Mills has been queried thoroughly and frequently regarding the Opus case since the story broke on the Internet in 1994. In a March 1997 statement to the press he came clean about it:
"I made up the story in 1987 to present at the meeting," he told Sunday Telegraph reporter James Gallivan, "for entertainment and to illustrate how if you alter a few small facts you greatly alter the legal consequences. In 1994 someone copied it onto the Internet."
Anticlimactic, eh? Unfortunately, that's as much reality as there is to be found behind the Opus story. Seven years after it was made up, the text of Mills' speech, sans disclaimer and with the date revised, found its way onto the greatest rumor mill ever invented and continues to circulate there to this day. How many thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of people have read it and believed it, we have no way of knowing. At least you and I have the advantage of knowing it's not true... for whatever that may be worth.
Sources and further reading:
Did He Jump or Was He Plugged?
Sunday Telegraph, 2 March 1997
World Wild Web: The Craziest Rumors Fall Through the Net
Washington Post, 21 February 1996
Last updated 12/12/11
