Britney Spears has been known to bend the truth when it suits her. Remember how she spent her first couple of years as a star swearing up and down she was saving herself for marriage, when the reality was she’d long ago given it up to Justin Timberlake?

With that mind, it’s interesting how one Vancouverite saw Wednesday’s debacle at GM Place a little differently from the Twittering masses.

Nicolas de Haas found himself at the show after being hired by Virgin Mobile to do promotional work. The company decked him out in body paint, a top hat, black pants and hightops, and turned him loose to hand out free promo items to those at the concert.

As has been exhaustively reported, Spears walked off-stage 15 or so minutes into the show, leaving fans sitting there wondering what the hell was going on. Eventually a female voice announced that there was too much cigarette and marijuana smoke in the building. After a half-hour break, Spears eventually returned and resumed—to use the terms loosely—singing and dancing.

The official reason from the Spears camp has been that the smoke caused crew members to become ill. But because he wasn’t consigned to a seat, de Haas found himself with an interesting vantage point right before the show ground to a halt. Noting that he was about nine rows up from the stage, paying close attention to what was going on from a production standpoint, he told the Straight that one of the hydraulic lifts that were part of the stage setup appeared to get stuck right before Spears disappeared.

“There were many hydraulic pieces to the stage, and one of them after one of the songs didn’t come back up,” he said. “You could see them scrambling to get it back up, but it was stuck down so there was a big hole in the stage.”

As the crowd chanted for Britney’s return, de Haas said he watched the crew move other hydraulic parts of the stage up and down as if testing to make sure that everything was okay. At the same time, three crew members worked on the stuck part of the staging.

“Finally, you saw the stage piece come back up, and then the show started,” he said.

De Haas said it’s entirely possible that Spears was bothered by the smoke and decided to leave the stage.

“But from what I saw, it looked like technical difficulties, and they didn’t want to say, after 25 minutes, that there were problems with the stage,” he said. “Instead of saying there were technical difficulties with the stage, they said there was smoke near Mrs. Spears, which I don’t believe. We had some people working with us that were right in at the front, as close as you can get to the stage, and they said that during the show there was no smoke.”