I actually met Alexander Abian once (he's one of the two crackpots John mentioned in the discussion of the Crackpot Index). He was a professor at Iowa State University, and he was friends with my advisor, physics professor Bob Leacock. Abian was a nice guy, very friendly. As I understand it, in his own field of mathematics, he wasn't a crackpot (or at least, not that I knew of). But he started writing papers on physics topics such as relativity, and that was his entry into crackpotdom. He showed me (actually, he showed it to Bob, but Bob handed it off to me) an alternative derivation of the Lorentz transformations that he said was much simpler than Einstein's derivation. It made no sense. I politely pointed out what I thought was unclear (my polite way of saying "wrong") about his derivation, and he just laughed and winked at me. Clearly, he didn't actually take his own derivation very seriously. He treated like a game--the idea was to give enough details to be able to pass it off as a rigorous derivation, even though it wasn't.
Later, I "reconnected" with Abian on sci.physics and sci.math, and I got the impression that he was still playing a game. He didn't actually take any of his own ideas very seriously.
I had a similar impression of Archimedes Plutonium. I think his persona was performance art, and he didn't actually believe what he was saying, either. I guess it's hard to tell the difference, though.
