NEW YORK (AP) -- A posting that briefly appeared on a CBS Web site Wednesday may have inadvertently revealed which contestant was kicked off "Survivor," six hours before TV viewers learned the secret.
A writer who was checking the www.cbs.com Web site for news of "Survivor" on Wednesday afternoon said he was startled to see a headline revealing which of the nine remaining island inhabitants would be voted off. The show airs on CBS at 8 p.m. EDT.
The writer, Richard Foster, said he clicked on to the Web site and saw a full story of what happened in the episode -- similar to what CBS usually posts after the episode airs. He said that he began downloading the article, but that it disappeared from the Web site before he could complete the job.
Foster immediately posted his own article about what he saw on the Web site he works for, www.richmond.com, which is devoted to news about Richmond, Va.
The posting said that Greg Buis, the wacky Colorado resident best known for pretending a coconut was a cell phone, was sent home.
Officials at CBS would not comment on the substance of what was posted. The network has been trying hard to keep secret who stays and who goes on the island, knowing the mystery is key to the appeal of the enormously successful summer series.
"We continue to decline comment on all rumors and speculation pertaining to `Survivor,' except to note that there has been hacking into our system in the past," said Gil Schwartz, a CBS spokesman.
There are several possibilities: A computer hacker may have gained access to CBS' site and posted either erroneous information or a story that CBS had prepared. A CBS employee may have made a mistake. Or perhaps the network was letting out false information to throw theorists off.
Foster said he believed the information was legitimate.
"It was too obviously a goof-up," he said. "If they were trying to throw people off, it would have been a hell of a lot of work to do."
Fans of the show were already buzzing about another computer user's discovery that CBS Web designers, in material supposedly unavailable to the public, had placed a red X over pictures of all 16 "Survivor" contestants except for one -- youth basketball coach Gervase Peterson.
That has led many fans to conclude that Peterson will be the million-dollar winner on the show's final episode, which airs Aug. 23.
Foster said he checks the CBS Web site frequently for "Survivor" news because one of the contestants, former Navy SEAL Rudy Boesch, lives in the area.
