Museum of Hoaxes
January/February 2002 Newsletter


2001's MOST MEMORABLE HOAXES

2001 produced a lot of hoaxes. Here's a collection of some of the most memorable of the year:

1) KAYCEE NICOLE SWENSON: Kaycee Nicole was a young woman suffering from a tragic disease. When she died thousands mourned her death. Then it turned out that not only hadn't she died, she had never lived in the first place.

2) DAVID MANNING, FILM CRITIC: David Manning was a film critic who loved movies. He especially loved Sony's movies, and Sony was happy to plaster his ebullient comments all over its movie ads. But David the easy-to-please critic was, it turned out, just the fantasy of an anonymous Sony marketing executive.

3) MONKEY FISHING: The story sounded like something out of the Planet of the Apes, but Michael Kinsley, editor of Slate.com, insisted it was true: certain twisted individuals down in Florida were baiting fishing hooks with fresh fruit and, thus armed, going hunting for the monkeys that lived on the island of Lois Key.

4) THE LOVENSTEIN INSTITUTE IQ REPORT: The prestigious Lovenstein Institute of Scranton, Pennsylvania concluded after extensive study that George W. Bush had the lowest IQ of any President for the past 50 years. What few people bothered to check was if the Lovenstein Institute actually existed.

5) GORGEOUS GUY: Somebody posted a picture on an internet message board showing Dan Baca standing at a bus stop. Suddenly hundreds of people were logging onto the message board, raving about how gorgeous Dan was. The problem was, the majority of those screen names traced back to just one person: Dan Baca himself.

6) TOURISTGUY: It was an unforgettable image seemingly taken seconds before disaster struck on September 11: a tourist standing on the observation deck of the World Trade Center as a hijacked plane approached from behind. But, of course, the picture was just another testament to the wonders of Photoshop.


HOAX WEBSITES

1) McWHORTLE ENTERPRISES, INC.: The SEC recently announced that it would be creating hundreds of hoax websites designed to look like the homepages of legitimate businesses in order to alert investors about the potential for online investing fraud. McWhortle Enterprises, a company supposedly promoting its new 'bio-hazard detector,' is the first of these SEC hoaxes.

2) BOILERPLATE, THE VICTORIAN-ERA ROBOT: This site appears to document the 1890s invention of a mechanical man called 'Boilerplate.' The site includes numerous pictures of Boilerplate, as well as excerpts from contemporary accounts of the robot in action. Unfortunately, Boilerplate never existed.

Check out the full list of hoax websites.


THE CALENDAR OF HOAXES

The Calendar of Hoaxes records the anniversaries of memorable hoaxes from the past. In February we remember ice worms, the Dreadnought hoax, the Great 1814 stockmarket hoax, and others.


HOAX MAILBAG

People continued to write in to the Museum of Hoaxes with their comments and questions. Included was the revelation that the lizard-headed fish, thought to be a hoax, is a real creature known in Mississippi as the alligator-gar. Another reader remembered an old hoax from the Dick van Dyke show, while someone else raised the issue of the Jesus Tree. Read the latest e-mails here.


Past Newsletters: December 2001


Return to Main Page of the Museum of Hoaxes