I had just finished watching Preston Sturges’s Hail the Conquering Hero on Sunday (damn you, TCM, for keeping me from my appointed rounds with entrenched political blowhards on Sunday talk shows!) when I heard the first suggestion that the California man in the out-of-control Toyota Prius might have faked the whole incident.

The original story, which broke in the wake of all of Toyota’s other stuck-accelerator problems, was that James Sikes was behind the wheel on a freeway near San Diego when the Prius — a top-of-the-line Toyota model with no previous problems reported — took off at speeds exceeding 90 mph. Sounds like normal driving in CA but it took several frantic 911 calls and a savvy Highway Patrol driver to steer the untamed beast to safety.

Maybe.

Since then Toyota technicians have not been able to reproduce the malfunction and are openly questioning Sikes’s story. And reports have surfaced about the man’s sketchy business dealings (he’s $700K in debt!), followed by speculation that he was just hoping to sue the car company, or maybe just wanted publicity. Recordings of the 911 calls are riveting — perhaps more so if the whole thing was a hoax.

But why? In the Sturges film, Eddie Bracken pretends to be a war hero to get his fellow Marines a free meal or two, and things go wildly out of control (he ends up running for mayor). But people want to be war heroes, or certainly did after WWII. Who wants to be celebrated as a victim? Some people thought of the balloon boy hoax but that guy wanted a TV show. This reminds me more of the James Frey imbroglio; as one wag remarked, “Remember when people used to get in trouble for lying about having not gone to jail?”

Or maybe it was something other than a publicity stunt. In a fascinating OpEd in the NY Times a few weeks ago it was revealed that accelerator problems claimed by Audi drivers in the eighties arose from people stomping on the gas when they were convinced it was the brake. The mind is a dangerous thing, and stubborn as hell. Perhaps Sikes, who sounds like kind of a sap in his public pronouncements (“I’ve had things happen in my life, but I’m not making up this story!”), was just obeying his unconscious mind which said: hey, the rest of your life is out of control, pal! Enjoy the ride. What, I wonder, what Sturges have said?