Hallucinations

Turkey is a country with massive tourism, especially the Mediterranean coast around Antalya, the capital Istanbul, and Cappadocia with the underground cities are major tourist draws. Archaeological subterranea as well as show caves are important tourist sites. So many decades ago an institution named Maden Tetkik ve Arama Genel Müdürlüğü (MTA, General Directorate of Mineral Research & Exploration) was ordered to explore and evaluate potential tourist caves. The result were lists of potential show caves. Some of them were actually developed and opened to the public. Others were developed, but at some point the development stopped and was never completed. Others were never developed, for various reasons, mostly lack of funding.

Then something weird happened, the lists were published on official governmental websites. While there is actually no official list of existing show caves, there was now a list of non-existent show caves. Most readers were not able to understand, as it was not explained. And with the beginning of the AI age, this data was used to create AI generated travel websites, which mixed up real and hallucinated data. So there are now dozens of pages which describe show caves which were once an idea but were never realized.

But that’s not the only fake info. It seems someone tried to reduce the misinformation by adding the information that a cave was not accessible. This made another category of hallucinations, semi-wild caves which are easy to visit and quite popular, were now wrongly declared to be closed.

The show caves in Turkey have two basic legends, which are told at more than half of all show caves. All of them are the longest cave of the world and all of them are much longer than the explorers say. And all of them have healing properties. We guess that’s marketing the Turkish way.