"It was getting ludicrous," Lowell says.
Then several CUE Guide staffers dashed offe-mail messages to friends who were physicsconcentrators.
Hahs received a reply first, and learned thetruth: Doyle's class had conned the College.
William Kaminsky '98, who took Physics 125 lastfall, told Hahs that Doyle was the initiator ofthe CUE gag, and had duped The Crimson intoprinting Fireloins' opinions on campus issues inthe past.
According to Kaminsky, Doyle told his studentsabout his Crimson jokes as they were filling outtheir CUE guide evaluations, and some decided tohelp the tradition live on.
According to Hahs, Eva Milofsky, anadministrator in the office of the Dean forUndergraduate Education, had already sent off theprocessed evaluations of Physics 125 to thephysics department and the Derek Bok Center forTeaching and Learning when she learned about thegag.
Fireloins had not received enough comments towarrant extensive mention in the CUE Guide, buthis name was listed as one of the course heads andhad to be removed before publication, Lowell says.
Though a bit stung after being tricked, the CUEGuide staff says the Fireloins search was the mostamusing part of a summer filled with computations.
Hahs thanks Doyle and Fireloins in this year'sCUE Guide acknowledgment section.
"Any break from tallying is nice, but lookingfor Ulf was especially fun because it became sucha manhunt," Davis says. "Granted it wasembarrassing that we had been fooled, but it wasthe worst to find out that there wasn't someonewho had spent his life with the name UlfFireloins."
The staff also made sure there were no othererrors.
"We were so bothered by the fact that we almostmissed Ulf Fireloins that [Hahs] had us double andtriple check every name in the Cue Guide,including TFs and CAs," Davis says. "If there's afake person in there, he or she has fooled theentire University too."
Meanwhile, Doyle insists Fireloins--orFuerloins, as Doyle spells the elusive professor'sname--exists.
Doyle told Hahs that Fuerloins was an adjunctprofessor joint appointed in the department ofphysics at Phantasm University.
Fuerloins was a physics graduate student atHarvard, who may have written his thesis on highenergy physics, "but it could have been higherenergy metaphysics," Doyle says.
"I do not recall not seeing Prof. Fuerloins onmany occasions. I do not recall him not teachingany lectures," Doyle writes in an e-mail messageto The Crimson. "If he did, he was quite bad. Ithink that had something to do with his low CUEguide scores."
Doyle, incidentally, received a 4.9 out of 5.0in the CUE.
"One half of those polled are impressed byProfessor John M. Doyle's expertise, and aslightly smaller number appreciate his sense ofhumor," the CUE Guide reads.
Fireloins could not be reached for comment.