IN the world of hard-core Lostophiles — also known as obsessed television fans who try to decipher the ABC series Lost — there is one Lostologist who is revered for his intelligently reasoned mega-theory that the show is, in fact, an intricately and knowingly constructed allegory for the Patriot Act age and the war in Iraq.Meet Bermudian Sean Dunleavy. By day he works as a probation officer, but by night he spends hours unravelling the mysteries of the show through his web site — www.lostbutfound.typepad.com — dedicated to proving that Los> is, in fact, a recreation of post-9/11 politics.

His theories are so thought-provoking, that he was recently featured inI> Entertainment Weekly <$>report on the more intelligent fan theories about the show’s multiple layers of meaning.

Feeling a little “lost” about what all this hype is about?

L<$> is an Emmy and Golden Globe Award-winning serial drama television series that follows the lives of a group of plane crash survivors on a mysterious tropical island, somewhere in the South Pacific.

Thanks to its devoted fan base, the show has become a staple of popular culture with references to the story and its elements appearing in other television shows, commercials, comic books, webcomics, humour magazines and song lyrics .

At the heart of the series is a complex and cryptic story line which spawns numerous unresolved questions and encouraged by LostRs<$> writers and stars, who often interact with fans online, viewers and TV critics alike have taken to widespread theorisation in an attempt to unravel the mysteries.

Theories mainly concern the nature of the island, the origins of the “monster” that roams its jungles and the “Others” already living on the island when the plane crashed, the meaning of mysterious number sequences found at various sites around the island and the reasons for both the crash and the survival of some passengers.

Mr. Dunleavy says he changes his mind every time he watches a new episode, or stumbles upon some potentially revealing information.

But it wasn’t until the show was in its second year in 2005 that he decided to launch the web site, allowing him to throw his theories into the world wide web and see what came back.

And he has picked up quite a following since then, with tens of thousands of hits to his web site. He feels the interpretations he has posted online have evolved from simple observations to serious, in-depth analyses of the show based around modern history and politics.

While his family think he’s just a little obsessed, Mr. Dunleavy believes that even if the show ended tomorrow and his theories were debunked, he would still have gained a valuable experience.

“I don’t feel like I’ve solved the show, I feel like I’ve got twice as many mysteries because it’s causing me to do endless research about political questions, psychology and religion and it’s become so much more interesting for me this way.

“It’s helped me to understand how to properly investigate what is going on in the world. It’s hard work.

“You realise the more you look into current events, the more you realise it’s very mucky, there are multiple interpretation and enormous histories behind everything . . . exactly what the producers are showing on the show; questions aren’t easily answered and the things you see right in front of you often have long, long histories behind them.”

Mr. Dunleavy has always been a big fan of science fiction, and when the show first aired, like millions of other fans, he thought it would simply be another prime-time sci-fi show.

“I think most of the audience, when they watched the first episode, realised it would be something different because it was almost movie-scale in the way they had set it up, but it was also very evocative of the 9/11 attacks that had happened,” he says.

Right from the start, he said the buzz was that the show was not only well produced, but also seemed to be slightly topical.

Over time, however, this faded as the show became more peculiar.

“At the end of that first year I felt that I was strangely intrigued by the show also but confused as the information seemed to get more and more complex,” he said.

“Funnily enough, I was also trying to understand world politics, something I never paid much attention to before 9/11.”

Over time, he discovered certain similarities between people and events in politics to characters and events in the show.

“At first, I thought it was just coincidence . . . but over time it turned out that they consistently kept making the same choices and having the same stories in their histories.

“It reached a point where you could guess what would happen to these characters next if you referred to post-9/11 politics.”

For example, on his web site, Mr. Dunleavy points out certain similarities between one of the characters, Jack, and President Bush, and the character called Hurley, who represents The Department of Homeland Security.

However, he said with a laugh that he was by no means an expert on either the show or politics, but found himself having a knack of connecting incidents occurring on Lost to events taking place in contemporary US politics.

He believed the producers were using the show to highlight how complicated current world affairs were and inspired conversations, not just at Lost<$>, but about the everyday events that shape our world.

“In many ways, I’m finding my way through both of those areas, so I encourage the readers not to take political guidance from me,” he added with a chuckle.