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In the autumn of 2008, a website appeared with nothing on it but a pencil sketch and a question. The sketch showed a balding man with heavy brows, a long nose, and a stare that landed somewhere between concerned and vacant. The question was simple: have you seen this man in your dreams?
Within two years, forums in a dozen languages were swapping stories about him. People described waking up certain they'd met his eyes the night before. A psychiatrist in Brazil claimed patients had drawn the same face without prompting. Newspapers ran the story straight. And then, in 2010, the man behind the site said the whole thing had never been real to begin with — not as a shared dream, anyway.
How It Started
The site was called ThisMan.org, and it was built by Andrea Natella, an Italian marketer and self-described “communication guerrilla” with a background in advertising stunts. According to Natella's own account, later confirmed in interviews, he didn't commission an artist or run a survey. He opened a free app called Ultimate Flash Face — the kind of cartoonish police-sketch tool anyone could download — and built the face himself.
The source material was closer to home than anyone guessed: Natella based the sketch on an old photograph of his own father.
He posted the image with a short, deliberately vague premise — that an unknown number of people around the world had reported the same recurring face in their dreams since 2006 — and invited visitors to submit their own sightings. No survey data backed the claim. There was no patient zero, no research paper, no psychiatrist's file. There was a drawing and an assertion.
How It Spread
What happened next is the part that makes This Man worth studying rather than dismissing. The site didn't spread because people were tricked by a single viral post — it spread because it kept getting re-hosted, translated, and re-told by people who believed they were passing along something real.
- Dream-interpretation and paranormal forums picked up the image and ran their own “have you seen him too” threads, generating hundreds of independent testimonials.
- The story crossed into mainstream tabloid coverage in Italy, Spain, and later the UK and US, often reported without any attempt to trace the original site or its creator.
- A wave of secondary blogs added invented details — specific dates, specific cities, a supposed psychiatric case study — that had no connection to Natella's original page and were never sourced.
- Chain emails and, later, social media posts recirculated the face detached from any context at all, so that by the time most people encountered it, it looked less like a marketing stunt and more like an established, ongoing phenomenon.
By 2009, “This Man” sightings were reportedly being logged by the tens of thousands. None of them could be verified against each other, because there was nothing to verify — just a widely circulated face and a growing pile of people convinced they recognized it.
The 2010 Reveal
Natella eventually confirmed what a handful of skeptics had already suspected: the entire project was a social experiment built to demonstrate how easily an unverified claim could travel once it had an image attached to it. In interviews given after the reveal, including one with Vice, he described it as an exercise in guerrilla marketing rather than a supernatural hoax with malicious intent — a way of testing how fast a manufactured legend could outrun its own origin story.
The confession didn't kill the legend. It just added a second, equally durable story on top of the first: the tale of the hoax itself, which is now the version most people encounter when they search for This Man today.
If you're curious how manufactured beliefs like this one take hold and refuse to die even after the truth comes out, You Are Not So Smart is a good next read — Learn More about the psychology of self-deception that made a stock sketch feel like a shared nightmare.
Why the Trick Worked
This Man wasn't a good drawing. That was the point. Ultimate Flash Face produced a generic, low-detail composite — no distinguishing scars, no unusual features, nothing that would anchor it to one specific person's memory. Researchers who study face recognition have a name for this: the more average and feature-poor a face is, the more people report a vague sense of familiarity when they see it, because it doesn't clash with anyone's own store of half-remembered faces.
Add a leading question — “have you dreamed of this man?” — asked before the face is even seen, and you've primed the viewer to search their own memory for a match rather than judge the image cold. That's a textbook setup for a false memory: people don't lie about seeing the face so much as genuinely convince themselves, after the fact, that a fuzzy recollection fits.
Natella didn't need thousands of real sightings. He needed a face bland enough to almost fit anyone's dream, and a headline confident enough that nobody thought to ask for proof first.
FAQ
Was This Man ever a real person?
No. Andrea Natella has stated the sketch was generated with a free face-building app and based loosely on an old photo of his father — it was never a portrait of an actual dream figure.
Did Andrea Natella ever explain why he did it?
Yes. In post-reveal interviews he described ThisMan.org as a guerrilla marketing and social experiment meant to show how quickly an unverified image and claim could spread once people started sharing it as fact.
Are the reported “sightings” of This Man fake?
The sightings themselves were genuine reports from real people — the deception was in the premise, not the reporters. Vague composite faces combined with a leading question are known to produce sincere false memories, which is likely why so many submissions felt authentic to the people making them.
Is This Man still circulating online?
Yes, though now it usually appears alongside its own debunking. The original image still resurfaces on social media and dream forums, often stripped of context, decades after the hoax was confirmed.
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