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Are you sure this column is real?

Passengers went on board and then British Airways staff outside would run past the windows holding cardboard clouds and smaller toy planes, while bashing the sides of the fuselage with logs to simulate turbulence.

At 'touch down', the passengers would be shepherded out through the back kitchens of a busy pizzeria to make them think they had arrived somewhere warm and then taken to a staff member's house plastered with Spanish wallpaper. 'I really didn't know any of this was going on,' said the chairman, 'so imagine how I feel.'

Returning home, I turned on the television to watch a documentary called Watch a Man Die for Real, in which filmed footage of a man dying is shown to moving music written by composer Bill Bailey. But as the programme progressed, I grew suspicious. At what was advertised as the 'actual point of actual death, really', the camera started moving closer to the man and I could see it had clearly cut to actor James Bolam going: 'Woooagh!'

I was puzzled. There was nothing in the TV listings about this being a film of the death of James Bolam and when I rang the ITV switchboard for clarification, they went all quiet. Eventually, they rang back and said: 'No, it was definitely footage of someone dying. You must have got signal interference at that point, which maybe made the picture look like it was just James Bolam...' A long pause. 'Yes, quite a lot of people got that, apparently,' she said. She then said: 'James Bolam's very popular' and put the phone down.

I didn't know what to do. Who to turn to? My perception of reality was questionable. Was I mad? I went out for a walk in the park. That's when the incident with the bird noises started. I could see a tree full of pigeons and heard cooing noises come from the branches. Then a dog barked and the pigeons all took off. Yet I was sure the cooing still came from the branches a full half-second after the birds had all flown.

Later, I mentioned it to the park keeper and he went quiet. I asked him why and he pulled me inside his hut and said: 'Promise me you'll tell no one, but we transmit the bird noises from tiny speakers sewn into the leaves. We have a computerised network of speakers dotted all over the country controlled from a centralised bunker underneath Jodrell Bank. We follow flocks of birds around and then co-ordinate squawking, cooing and tweets from designated leaf-hailers nearby. The birds are silent; always have been. Everybody who works in park keeping has known that for years. No bird has ever been heard to make a noise. But the public wants bird noises, so we give it to them. The Jodrell Bank bunker is paid for by fines we collect from people dropping litter. Please don't let on. The media would have a field day.'

I went home and rang the media. I asked to get put through to their reality correspondent. I said to her: 'Everything's made up. Reality is all a con. We're being edited to make it look like we're far more interesting than we actually are.' She said: 'I know.' I asked her to explain and she said: 'Don't tell anyone, but we ran out of stories five years ago. So now we encourage other people to make things up and falsify reality so people can report them to us and we can use it as a story.' I asked her if she was making this up and she said: 'I don't know.'

I put the phone down and ran out of the house. I wanted to report this story but didn't know who to report it to. Instead, I decided to withdraw from the real world until I was completely satisfied it was no longer false. I found the location of a sensory-deprivation tank somewhere on the outskirts of the city and I booked myself in for a 24-hour session.

Soon, I was half-submerged in a heavily salted tank of water, seeing and feeling nothing and hearing only the sound of my thoughts and the noise of my breathing. However, in a return of suspicion, I suddenly removed my eye mask and looked across. I noted that there were two tubes connected to my ears that ran back to a small window in the tank.

Behind it were two men with some electronic equipment. One of the men was playing a tape marked 'Breathing sounds'. The other man loaded a CD from a box marked 'More thoughts' and gave me the thumbs up. I suddenly thought everything was all right.

The Observer