PRIPYAT, Ukraine — Kate Brown began thinking about visiting this high-rise ghost town in the mid-1990s, when she was researching a book about the region before it was evacuated after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
Then she saw a website about a young woman's lone motorcycle rides through Chernobyl's exclusion zone. The site, www.kiddofspeed.com, attracted tens of millions of viewers and became the most-visited site on Angelfire.com, a Web page hosting service.
"I was intrigued," said Brown, an assistant professor of history at the University of Maryland-Baltimore. She spoke while strolling along the vegetation-choked sidewalks and cracked roadways of Pripyat, about a mile from the nuclear power plant where the 1986 accident took place.
"Elena," whom several Internet sources identified as Lena Filatova of Kiev, has been described as "fearless," "heroic" and "seriously whacked" in the virtual chatter the website generated.
When asked by e-mail why the story of a raven-haired beauty roaring through a radioactive wasteland attracted so much attention, cyberpunk author and futurist Bruce Sterling responded: "It's a post-apocalyptic adventure story. Very 'Mad Max.' "
And it is, evidently, equally fictional.
"That story is not true! She did not ride a motorcycle alone in the zone! She came with her husband and a friend on a regular tour," insisted Rimma Kyselytsia, who was the group's official guide. She identified the woman in the images on the website as Filatova and has the documents to show that Filatova's tour was organized by a Kiev travel agency and that her party traveled in a car provided by Chernobylinterinform, the agency that ushers all visitors to the exclusion zone.
The visit took place March 16, about two weeks after the website appeared. Since then, the curious have made their way to Chernobyl inquiring about Elena's adventure -- among them two Norwegian biology teachers who arrived on bicycle hoping to retrace the journey. A guard turned them away.
"Whoever put this together was never actually here," said Kyselytsia, leafing through a printout of the images on the website. Although it has been updated several times, the site's original contents survive in duplicates elsewhere on the Internet, and on the computers of people who downloaded them.
