What Was The Experiment About?
We attempted to validate the Six Degrees of Separation hypothesis that any two people on the planet are connected through a chain of intermediaries numbering no more than five acquaintances.

To do this we e-mailed individuals in the electronic address book of one of our authors, DL Tolleson. We asked these individuals to forward our e-mail to people with whom they were acquainted and who they thought were likely to personally know any of the target people identified in our e-mail. The friends/acquaintances receiving those forwarded e-mail messages were to do the same, and so on, until the message was delivered to the target people. (Read more about the Six Degrees of Separation Hypothesis in the Wikipedia Encyclopedia link situated to your right on this page.)

Succesful chains of acquaintances numbering five to nine intermediaries were to receive free copies of Tolleson's novel, The Gray Stopgap and Stuart Tower's The Wayfarers.

Why Did The Lighthouse Press, Inc. Do This?
Once upon a time The Lighthouse Press, Inc. was new to publishing. That, coupled with our desire to publish The Gray Stopgap, contributed to a naive publishing agreement. Author DL Tolleson wanted readers who liked the novel to promote it by word of mouth, and so we published it without so much as a whimper of promotion or advertising. That's right, we stuck it on the website and that was about it. (Naive debut authors and new, small press publishers can do suicidal things like that.)

Despite our marketing misgivings, the novel garnered three Barnes & Nobel staff recommendations (not just ONE or TWO, but THREE). And while we still have occasional nibbles from Hollywood, The Gray Stopgap is an unusual novel that's never received the circulation or attention that it should.

And that is the context in which arose a conversation that gave birth to our experiment.

In a casual e-mail between our Publisher and Tolleson, the two men were discussing the legitimacy of the Six Degrees of Separation hypothesis. In closing, our publisher scoffed at the hypothesis that alledged any two people were linked through a chain of five acquaintances.

"If that were the case," our publisher wrote to Tolleson, "your book and name should be household words by now. Not even Stuart (Tower) can claim that, and Spielberg even endorses his novel! Besides, the theory was devised by a WRITER, failed confirmation by mathematicians and was debunked after each of the two experiments trying to validate it."

To which Tolleson wrote back: "It wasn't debunked, it was nitpicked to death. And as for being a 'household name,' statistically speaking we're all only five people away from anybody on the planet!"

And thus the experiment.

Who Were The Target People?
There were five target people originally listed only in the e-mail we initially sent. These target people were:

Matt Damon
He has acted in roughly 40 movies, produced 12 (some with his friend Affleck) and has two writing credits. Unless you've lived under a rock, you've seen this guy. We liked him and his work.

Leslee Dart
Similar to the movie Jerry Maguire, Ms. Dart started the Dart Group three weeks after being dumped by Pat Kingsley from the Hollywood super PR firm PMK/HBH. Within a year she formed alliances with studio expert Amanda Lundberg, Miramax Oscar winner Cynthia Swartz, and PMK's Robert Garlock. This partnership attracted a client list that included some of New York's biggest movie institutions: Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Jonathan Demme, Mike Nichols, Sydney Pollack, Wes Anderson, Scott Rudin, Meryl Streep, and Ron Howard. We were impressed and liked Leslee Dart.

Sessalee Hensley
Lead fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble (out of New York). Reportedly, Hensley decides the fates of many books through promotion and advertising. Hensley's word allegedly carries the kind of weight that can alter the course of obscurity. Sara Nelson, the editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly described Hensley as, "being right up there with Oprah."

Berry Kaye
A "power broker" who parlayed his insurance/estate planning business into a billion dollar empire and is now retired in Boca Raton. He is involved in myriad projects and reportedly has far reaching influences in the business world at large.

J.J. Abrams (sometimes credited as Jeffrey Abrams)
Producer, Writer, Director, Composer. One of the executive producers of the TV series, "Six Degrees", as well as executive producer of the TV series Lost and Alias among others. After reportedly shutting down the original production of Mission Impossible III Tom Cruise later brought in Abrams who helped re-write, produce and direct the movie. Given the name of our experiment, Abrams connection to the show Six Degrees seemed kind of appropriate.

Experiment Results
Our server logs indicated light interest even though we received confirmation that the messages were forwarded in large numbers. At one point during the experiment we suffered an unrelated server issue and were intermittently on-line during a four-day period while losing 8 days of traffic reports.

However, no chain of intermediaries linked our author to a target person and we were unable to validate the Six Degrees of Separation Hypothesis.

To the hundreds, possibly thousands, who participated in our experiment we express our gratitude.