Pants on fire. Never. Good. Thing. (Can Cameron movie option survive implosion of Pellegrino's Hiroshima book?)

Baby Jesus and I cry a little every time this happens. A little over a year ago, I had this to say about a bogus Holocaust memoir that made a fool out of Oprah and editors at Berkley. Now, apparently the story told by an elderly WWII vet who claimed to have witnessed the destruction of Hiroshima turns out to be fake, and the mushroom cloud is rising over a book that received a starred review from PW, was lauded by the NYT as "sober and authoritative," and optioned by James Cameron for the big screen.

Last Train From Hiroshima, out from Henry Holt in January, is Charles Pellegrino's deep dive into the personal stories behind this pivotal moment in history, including gut-wrenching stories from survivors and eyewitness accounts from those who flew the mission. From the article that appeared in the NYT Saturday:

Mr. Fuoco, who died in 2008 at age 84 and lived in Westbury, N.Y., never flew on the bombing run, and he never substituted for James R. Corliss, the plane’s regular flight engineer, Mr. Corliss’s family says. They, along with angry ranks of scientists, historians and veterans, are denouncing the book and calling Mr. Fuoco an impostor.

Facing a national outcry and the Corliss family’s evidence, the author, Charles Pellegrino, now concedes that he was probably duped. In an interview on Friday, he said he would rewrite sections of the book for paperback and foreign editions.

“I’m stunned,” Mr. Pellegrino said. “I liked and admired the guy. He had loads and loads of papers, and photographs of everything.”

The public record has to be repaired, he added. “You can’t have wrong history going out,” he said. “It’s got to be corrected.”

But that's a lot easier said than done. I can't speculate on strain to Pellegrino's relationship with Cameron (he served as sci advisor on Cameron's current smash Avatar), but they seem to go back quite a way, and frankly, Cameron must know that when you do interview-based research, you never know if that great story you're being told is platinum mine or tar pit.

As a memoir guru, I lecture my clients within an inch of their lives about the importance of telling the truth and the futility of thinking one can get away with lying. All oral history is subjective and, to a certain extent, malleable, but I think everybody's mama taught them the blatant difference between being on an airplane over Hiroshima and not being on an airplane over Hiroshima. Obviously, we have to work hard to back everything up with vigilant research, but I'm not sure what an author can do to protect him/herself from someone who'd go so far as to fake documentation.

Meanwhile, I hate the doubt cast on all oral histories every time this happens. At best, I guess it's another cautionary tale.