The photo on the Bridge 43 site is credited to The St. Petersburg Times. Checking their archive produces exactly one article about “Bubba” Nicholson. Quote:
"In another time, Ross "Bubba" Nicholson might not be taken
seriously. He's a 48-year-old guy with no real job. On the
Internet, he claims to have inspired the film E.T., and he writes
scientific papers about the connection between pheremones
and crime."
The site is called “Bridge 43” because Nicholson has proposed that a new bridge be located at the site where he is standing in the photograph. That is all the article is about: some out-of-work guy made an interesting suggestion about where a new bridge should be placed.
In his biography Nicholson refers to “Fischer’s estrification”. A Google search finds zero entries for this term, although there is a real chemical process called “Fischer estrification”. Nicholson also states that there is yellow and blue blood in the human body.
I am unsure what Nicholson means by claiming to be Spielberg’s “lost child”. If he means he is actually Spielberg’s offspring, there is a problem. Spielberg was born on December 16, 1946. This means he was 8 years old when Nicholson was born.
It is not unusual for movie studios, book publishers, etc., to receive complaints from cranks who claim they are “really” responsible for a successful work with which they had no involvement. Cartoonist Mort Walker once received a letter from a man who claimed to have served in the army with him and who said he was sure that Walker would remember that he had given him the idea for Beetle Bailey. He had been ill for a while, but he was now ready to take over the comic strip. Among other problems, Walker had not served in the country where he said they met.
It is also not unheard of for schizophrenics and other unfortunates to claim that they are the child of someone to whom they bear no relation. Some years ago Johnny Carson published a book consisting of his odder fan mail. It included a polite letter from a man who said that the nice people at the hospital in which he was confined had explained to him that Carson was not his father, and so he would stop saying so.
To hazard a guess, Nicholson is a compulsive liar with delusions of grandeur. A medical professional could doubtless give a more precise diagnosis.
Such people are unfortunately common. In graduate school it fell to me to interview the personnel director of a local factory for a term paper. He spent a good deal of his time telling about how he knew who Deep Throat was. When I asked him how he knew, he merely said that it was “common knowledge” within the oil industry–a field in which he had never actually been employed. While living in Canada he had started a company which was going to revolutionize the plastics industry, using an extremely common mineral which he personally discovered. The business was shut down, however, when he refused a request for a bribe sent him in a signed letter by a cabinet minister. Although the Canadian Broadcasting Company and other news outlets came to a press conference he called and took photos of the letter, no reports were made because of fear of the Queen of England. He also showed me documents relating to his plans to start a privately funded space program and launch a manned rocket to Alpha Centauri.
I once worked with a man who, when sent to a training seminar, told classmates that he owned several hundred thousand acres of (nonexistent) undeveloped forest in St. Louis County, Missouri, where he staged war games with live ammunition. His son was being “secretly groomed” to become the Surgeon General, and he was dead certain that he was under surveillance by “black helicopters”.
