This is an absolutely wild one: an academic found a book that seemed to have plagiarised his blog, and um it now turns out that possibly the entire research body that produced it may not have existed?
Three blogposts here giving an idea of how bizarre this all is:
Pt 1, the original plagiarism allegations:
https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2022/12/nobody-cares-about-your-blog.html
Pt 2, the nonexistent staff:
https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-receptio-rossi-affair-part-i-staff.html
Pt 3, the nonexistent offices...
https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-receptio-rossi-affair-part-ii.html
There are further blog posts:
Part 1 (the staff) got deleted and reposted: https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-receptio-rossi-affair-part-i-staff.html (https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-receptio-rossi-affair-part-i-staff.html)
Part 3 ("vendetta"): https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-receptio-rossi-affair-iii-my.html (https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-receptio-rossi-affair-iii-my.html)
Part 4 ("accusations"): https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-receptio-rossi-affair-iv-my.html (https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-receptio-rossi-affair-iv-my.html)
Part 5: https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-receptio-rossi-affair-part-v.html (https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-receptio-rossi-affair-part-v.html)
Part 6: https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-receptio-rossi-affair-vi-backstory.html (https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-receptio-rossi-affair-vi-backstory.html)
Part 7: https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-receptio-rossi-affair-vii-more.html (https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-receptio-rossi-affair-vii-more.html)
Not many scandals combine my interests in academic misconduct and the bad behaviour of giant US corporations as web hosts (but see also Dirk Obbink and the Gospel of Jesus' Wife)
Huh, I hadn't read about that one before (Obbink, that is). Academic scandals are weird.
I posted updates in 2021 under History Yays (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=3456.msg144316;topicseen#msg144316).
In which case I'm sure I have seen it before and it's somehow blocked itself out of my mind in the meantime. My apologies!
To be fair I didn't go into all the gory details!
A few links in my browser history are:
https://rogueclassicism.com/2020/04/16/dirk-obbink-and-stolen-p-oxy-allegations-some-food-for-thought/
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/museum-of-the-bible-obbink-gospel-of-mark/610576/
https://brentnongbri.com/2020/10/30/more-on-dirk-obbink-and-the-provenance-of-the-sappho-papyrus/
https://rogueclassicism.com/2021/02/16/conversation-classics-c-michael-sampson-on-p-sapph-obbink/
This is apparently somehow still rumbling, at least in the form of weird vendetta posts against Peter Kidd:
https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2024/02/shes-still-at-it.html