In Bali, so much of what visitors find alluring is a creation of the tourist industry. Balinese don't meditate in spas, dine in elegant tropical restaurants, vacation in luxury villas or wear crisp white handmade Balinese lace. Logically we know this, but we enjoy the fiction.

Trying to uncover the true Bali while holding on to all the fictions that make Bali such a paradise is difficult. Yet confusing Bali's marketing image with reality ends up reducing the people of Bali to stereotypes of gentle smiling servants or guides to the New Age. Balinese are of course neither more nor less insightful or virtuous than any other people in the world, and crimes committed in Bali, by Balinese, are of the same type and frequency as anywhere else in Indonesia.

There is a great and complex mystery behind the Uluwatu cases, but even accepting Bali as part of the real world, the events, personalities, and behaviors behind the Uluwatu story are so extreme, and so at odds with what visitors would like to believe about Bali, that most people react with disbelief.

Fortunately, complete documentation written by the people or institutions most deeply involved leaves no doubt about what happened.

Three main themes to the mystery are organized on this site in the right panel:

1. What happened? What did Made Jati and her supporters do? What ceremonies did they organize, what documents did they collect, and what false statements did they provide to police and courts, in order to advance a suspected fraud?

2. How did the legal system respond? What did the legal system in Bali do to protect Made Jati and her supporters? What possibly collusive court decisions, police investigations, or prosecutors’ procedures could sustain the suspected fraud over so many years?

3. What was the cost? What was the effect on our children, and what would Made Jati sacrifice to achieve her ends?

To clarify what is probably obvious to most readers, the images of Uluwatu Boutiques and Kori Restaurant are inventions. The Uluwatu commercial website at uluwatu.co.id is based upon a Press Release I wrote in 1992. The complete script is available in Documents : II-42 to II-49. It is a good story, proved to be effective marketing and created an interesting image for Uluwatu Boutiques. But the story is fictional, and any resemblance to any living person is purely coincidental. The true origin of the Uluwatu Boutiques business is contained in Documents.

Most documents were translated manually from their original language, English or Indonesian. Some webpages were translated automatically with Google Translate.com which makes odd mistakes. Apologies for poor translations, they will be corrected.

This website is written in English and published in California. Indonesian translations are provided as a service and do not necessarily acurately reflect the original English text.