Hoax Museum Blog: Extraterrestrial Life

The history of the War of the Worlds Panic Broadcast, as told by 3rd Graders — Nice to see kids learning about the history of hoaxes!


Posted: Sun Dec 29, 2013.   Comments (0)

UFO Crash in London — Students at London's North Harringay Primary School arrived at school to find a UFO had crashed in their playground. Police were on their scene, and the students spent the rest of the day discussing and writing about the mysterious craft. The UFO had actually been built by a parent as part of an event "designed to promote creative writing."

Shock and awww... 'UFO crashes' into London primary school playground
independent.co.uk

Pupils at a London primary school were shocked after a UFO appeared to have crashed into their playground. An officer guarded the 'crash site; at North Harringay Primary School while an apparent forensics officer took samples behind a police cordon.

Posted: Fri Oct 04, 2013.   Comments (0)

Vancouver UFO Hoax — On September 3, a small "UFO" was seen hovering outside a Vancouver Canadians baseball game at Nat Bailey Stadium. Turns out it was a fake UFO that was part of a viral marketing scheme to promote Vancouver's H.R. MacMillan Space Centre. Footage of the UFO was circulated online by an ad agency. The Space Centre has seen attendance rise by 65 percent in the last week. So apparently the viral campaign worked. [CTV News]



It certainly isn't the first time a planetarium has used a hoax to drum up business. The example that comes to mind is the time back in 1940 when Philadelphia's Franklin Institute created a panic by announcing that the world was going to end the next day. The startling announcement (which pretty much backfired on them because of all the negative publicity) was intended to promote a talk at its planetarium titled "How Will the World End?"
Posted: Wed Sep 11, 2013.   Comments (0)

Jumping Cow UFO Video — A video posted to youtube about two weeks ago shows a strange light in the sky near Stamford in the UK. Then it pans down to show a herd of cows, and then one of the cows kind of jumps up in the air.



So the cow must be jumping for one of these reasons:
  1. it's really happy
  2. it's being lifted up by the tractor beam of a UFO
  3. it's a CG effect
The answer, according to video analysts that the Huffington Post talked to, is that it's a CG effect. The Stamford Mercury speculates that the video was created to build buzz for an upcoming TV show.
Posted: Tue Aug 20, 2013.   Comments (1)


Posted: Fri Aug 16, 2013.   Comments (4)

Aliens among us? — File this under Low Threshold of Belief. Several Southeast Asian news sites have recently published photos that supposedly document the presence of "extra terrestrial beings" here on Earth. For instance, the Visayan Daily Star ran a picture (below) of "Emily Santodelsis" posing with a small alien. Strangely, she insisted that she hadn't noticed the alien while the picture was being taken. She only spotted it later, when she looked at the photo.


And back in January, the Bangkok Post ran a picture of an alien supposedly spotted on a beach in Thailand.


The Open Minds UFO investigation site explains that the appearance of these alien photos coincides with the addition of new special effects to the Camera360 app for Android phones. These special effects allow the easy addition of UFOs, extraterrestrials, or lightning to photos taken with the Android phone.
Posted: Fri Mar 08, 2013.   Comments (2)

UFO Over Santa Clarita — What part of this UFO sighting has been faked?


The answer is that the UFOs are, of course, fake, but so is everything else. Every part of this video — the car, the scenery, the clouds — is CGI. Wired explains:

"UFO Over Santa Clarita" was a painstakingly crafted joke played by Aristomenis "Meni" Tsirbas, the director of the 2007 computer-animated film Battle for Terra who has also contributed visual effects and animation work to movies like Titanic and Hellboy and several Star Trek television series. A long-time champion of "photorealistic" CGI, Tsirbas and his team spent about four months mimicking the look of an accidental extraterrestrial encounter captured on a smartphone. And until now, Tsirbas hadn't revealed the truth to anyone outside a handful of friends.
"The point of the video was to prove that CGI can look natural and convincing," Tsirbas told Wired. "Everybody assumes the background and car are real, and that the UFOs are probably fake, especially the over-the-top mothership at the end. The general reaction is disbelief, so I usually have to prove it by showing a wireframe of the entire shot to prove that nothing is real."

Posted: Sat Feb 09, 2013.   Comments (0)

Face of ET Found in a Log — Ken Dobson of Chiseldon was sawing logs with a chainsaw for firewood when he saw the face of ET staring back at him from the log he just cut. Dobson doesn't say anything about believing the face to be a message from extraterrestrials. (So by American standards he's clearly nuts! Isn't it obvious this is a sign from ET?) Nor does he have plans to sell this on eBay. Instead he wants to have a professional slice more pieces from the log to see if he can get a couple more faces out of it to give to his sons. Link: BBC News. (Thanks, Hudson!)


Posted: Tue Mar 13, 2012.   Comments (0)

Strange Metal Boxes Washing Up On Beaches — In the past two weeks, various blogs have been reporting that "strange metal boxes" have been washing up on beaches in Oregon, Washington, and northern California. In some versions of the reports, these boxes make humming and screeching noises, are seamless, and can't be moved, even by trucks. The boxes are said to have appeared after UFO sightings.


Theories about what these boxes may be (besides the theory that they're the lost luggage of UFOs) include the speculation that they're the floats that were once used to support docks, or that they're left by drug runners.

However, reports are now coming in that people have gone searching for these boxes, to examine them for themselves, but haven't been able to find anything. And it looks like the entire "strange metal boxes" story traces back to two articles posted by a Dave Masko. Perhaps the boxes only existed in his imagination.
Posted: Wed Feb 22, 2012.   Comments (1)

Evidence of Extraterrestrials in North Korea? — The Alien Disclosure Group (ADG) UK has posted a video on youtube in which they suggest that the funeral of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il may have been attended by extraterrestrials. Or very tall earthlings. One or the other.



The ADG seems eager to see aliens in any mystery. But their video does highlight two legitimate items of strangeness from Kim Jong-Il's funeral.

The first is that there apparently really was an extremely tall person standing in the crowd watching Kim Jong-Il's funeral procession. His identity is unknown. So perhaps it was an extraterrestrial. Or maybe it was Ri Myung Hung, the 7' 9" North Korean basketball player.


The second item of strangeness is that North Korea released a photo of the funeral procession from which, it was later noticed, a group of people had been erased. Why did the North Korean authorities erase these people? The ADG suggests it was because they were aliens. The NY Times suggests it was the work of some unknown North Korean photo editor who simply thought the photo looked better without those people. The Times attributes this to "totalitarian aesthetics":

With the men straggling around the sidelines, a certain martial perfection is lost. Without the men, the tight black bands of the crowd on either side look railroad straight.



Now you see 'em


Now you don't

Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2012.   Comments (5)

Alien Baby or Hoax? — I'm guessing it's a hoax: The Daily Telegraph reports on an ongoing controversy about a "baby alien" discovered in Mexico in 2007. It was supposedly discovered by a farmer who drowned it out of fear. This farmer later burned to death in a parked car (killed by the baby's parents?). Scientists are said to be baffled by the creature.


Posted: Fri Sep 04, 2009.   Comments (12)

Little Blue Man Hoax — The Chicago Tribune (via the Huron Daily Tribune) offers a retrospective on 1958's Little Blue Man hoax.

The story: in early 1958 sightings of a "little blue man" running along the side of Michigan highways began appearing in the news. It turned out that what motorists were seeing was actually a young man named Jerry Sprague, dressed in a costume that included: long underwear, a football helmet, gloves, combat boots, a bedsheet with two holes cut out for the eyes and a button sewed on for the mouth and blinking lights on the helmet -- all of which had been spray painted a shade of blue that glowed faintly in the dark. He would jump out of the trunk of his friend's car, run along the highway a bit, and then jump back in the trunk.

The mysterious little blue man soon became national news. The pranksters eventually turned themselves in to the police and were let off with a warning.
Posted: Mon Nov 10, 2008.   Comments (7)

Students told aliens have landed — Strange "educational" stunts perpetrated by school authorities appear to be a growing trend. We had:

1) The Fake Attack at an Elementary School. (Students were told there was a gunman loose in the area in order to teach them how to respond in case a gunman ever really was loose in the area.)

2) Your classmate has died -- but not really. (Students were told that one of their classmates had died in a drunk-driving accident in order to teach them about the evils of drunk driving.)

But a stunt recently played on kids at Edgware school goes to the top of the list for weirdness. The Harrow Observer reports:

Children from an Edgware school were made to believe aliens had landed in their playground by teachers and police.
After spending this morning bewildered by the unusual hoax, pupils from Stag Lane School in Collier Drive, quizzed police officers brought on to the site during a press conference to make the event seem more realistic. Forensic examiners had earlier analyzed an 'alien claw' they had 'found' on the site.
The aim of the day was to stimulate the children's minds and help develop their story writing skills.
After lunch the pupils were informed by the school's headteacher Elena Evans that it was all a stunt.

Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2008.   Comments (6)

Georgia Monkey Hoax of 1953 — Back in July 1953 three pranksters left the hairless/tailless body of a monkey lying in the middle of a Georgia highway. When a policeman came along, they told him it was the body of an extraterrestrial that they had accidentally run over. Its friends had escaped moments before in a spacecraft. The prank managed to make national headlines. (I describe it in greater detail in the Hoax Archive.)

MSNBC has an article (with picture) about the Great Monkey Hoax. The occasion for it is a visit by an AP reporter to the museum of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, where the body of the monkey is still preserved.

Seven years ago, when I was writing the book version of The Museum of Hoaxes, I spent some time on the phone trying to track down this monkey. I had heard that the GBI still had it, but I wanted to confirm the info.

I eventually reached a woman who worked in the archives of the GBI and asked her if they still had the hairless monkey. I explained the history of the prank to her, but she had no clue what I was going on about. From her tone of voice she evidently thought I was playing a prank on her. She swore to me that the GBI had no such monkey. Looks like she was wrong. They do still have it!
Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2008.   Comments (5)

Faceless Aliens — This has already been posted in the forum, but I've received too many emails about it to ignore it. "Faceless aliens" have been spotted attending various high-profile events in the UK, including Wimbledon and the Harrods summer sale. The "aliens" are people wearing masks. So why are they doing this? According to the Mail Online, theories include:

the possibilities that they are limelight-seeking pranksters, performance artists or that they are at the centre of a viral marketing campaign for an as-yet unknown product of forthcoming horror film.

I'm putting my money on a viral marketing campaign, but for what, I don't know. Maybe the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, coming out in December, which stars Keanu Reeves as an expressionless alien? (Some would say Keanu Reeves has played an expressionless alien in every movie he's ever been in.) But that's just a wild guess. And the problem with that theory is it doesn't explain why the faceless aliens are appearing specifically in the UK.

Update: So it was a viral campaign for Lotus Eagle. Mystery solved before I even posted about it.
Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2008.   Comments (11)

Martian Pareidolia — With the Martian Bigfoot recently making headlines, Dr. Charles Lintott wrote an article for the BBC that traces the long history of Martian pareidolia.

Something about Mars makes us see things that aren't really there. It began with early astronomers believing that the surface of Mars was covered with canals. During the 1960s, some astronomers reported seeing signs of vegetation on the planet's surface.

The image below shows (on the top row) the Martian canals. The bottow row (from left to right) is the "face on Mars" taken by NASA's Viking spacecraft in the 1970s; the fossils that NASA researchers claimed to have found in a Martian meteorite in 1996; the recent Martian bigfoot; and the Martian smiley face (also recently photographed).


Posted: Mon Feb 11, 2008.   Comments (14)

The Martian Bigfoot — Flora posted an image in the forum of what looks like a Martian bigfoot. (I inserted a picture of the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot for comparison.)

According to metro.co.uk, the image was taken by NASA's Mars Explorer Spirit, but it "wasn't until space and science fiction enthusiasts became involved that the images were taken more seriously."

Here's the complete NASA image (thanks, Mongo) from which the image above was enlarged. I drew a red circle around the Bigfoot image. It's barely visible, in the far left corner. As you can see, the Martian Bigfoot is very, very small. Perhaps Littlefoot would be a better name for him.




The image of the Martian Bigfoot comes on the heels of the Martian "Doorway" which was doing the rounds last month. It's just non-stop Martian Pareidolia.


Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2008.   Comments (15)

Is the Antarctic IceCube Telescope really an Alien Receptor Centre? — Down in the Antarctic researchers are building an "ice cube telescope" to detect neutrinos. It's one of the stranger telescopes ever built. Popular Science provides this description of it:

Using a five-megawatt jet of hot water, technicians are melting two-foot-wide holes 1.5 miles into the Antarctic ice near the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Before the water refreezes, they insert a cable strung like a set of Christmas-tree lights with globular camera housings. By the time the technicians are done in 2010, Ice Cube’s 80 vertical strings will adorn a cubic kilometer of ice from a depth of 1.4 kilometers down to 2.4 kilometers. In other words, it’s an instrument of 4,800 cameras looking at solid black ice...
One in a million neutrinos passing near Ice Cube’s photomultiplier cameras will—just by chance—smash head-on into an atomic nucleus within the ice and produce a muon particle that will give off a blue glow called Cherenkov light. Unlike the ice in your freezer, Antarctic ice is stunningly clear, and the blue light travels more than 100 meters in the dark ice. Each muon’s glow will be picked up by several cameras, and its position and direction triangulated.


But, of course, the conspiracy theorists have some different ideas about what is really being built down there in the South Pole. One such theory has been posted in an unlikely place, explorersweb.com -- a site that's usually devoted to news about the exploration community, not woolly conspiracy theories.

The theory was posted by Irish South Pole skier Kevin Dempsey. Here's the gist of it:

the so called Ice-Cube project is in fact the first of a new generation of ARC, as we believe it is now as internally. Think ARC, think Noah. But not in the same way. Noah used his arc to save all life forms from extinction. This new ARC is in a way a reversal of that process."
"ARC stands for..... ALIEN RECEPTOR CENTRE."

"They are bringing aliens in from outer space & other galaxies, processing & programming them for eventual release into countries, societies, cultures all over the planet, that they ultimately want to control. This is not a simple war on the battle for control of oil. This is total & ultimate control of the planet.


I'm not sure whether or not Dempsey's article is meant to be a joke. Supporting the joke theory is the unusual note that Explorerweb appended to the article: "Dempsey is not a scientist; his emails carry advertisements for stylish blinds and rugs."

(Thanks to CuChullaine O'Reilly of the Long Riders Guild for the link.)
Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2008.   Comments (7)

Floods deter crop circle makers — Relatively few crop circles have appeared in British fields this year. This could be because the space aliens who make them are busy elsewhere, or it could be because their human makers have been hampered by the widespread flooding that occurred in the UK this summer.

The Oxford Mail interviewed Geoff Amber, of the Oxfordshire Centre for Crop Circle Studies, who claims that 90% of crop circles are made by "non-humans" (farm animals? sudden gusts of wind?). Ambler says:
"Two years ago it was very prolific and last year was rather good. But they don't seem to have come back to Oxfordshire this year.
"After the terrific storm on July 20 the crop circles seemed to dramatically stop. Usually in that period up to July 30 we have a huge influx of circles but after the big floods there wasn't much anywhere in the region for five or six days.
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"But there's no rhyme or reason for it. Some years are better than others. It may be that we have missed some this year and they have been chopped down by farmers before they have been found."
I hope people don't ever get bored and stop making crop circles, because even if they are man-made, they're still cool to look at.

Posted: Wed Aug 15, 2007.   Comments (2)

Roswell, 60 years and still going strong — Everyone knows the Roswell story, right? People say they saw a flying saucer. The Air Force says it was merely the remnants of a weather balloon. Some claim that the government is covering up the fact that it had the actual corpses of aliens in a hangar.

You may have thought that the whole thing was finally put to rest when the Feds published a very thick report on the Roswell Incident in the 90's (I saw the thing in the Government Book Store near the White House and it was at least as big as a Manhattan Yellow Pages). Ah, but you would be wrong, my friend. As it turns out, the story continues...

It seems the guy who was the P.R. officer at the Roswell base at the time of the alleged "Incident" recently died. After he was gone, it was allegedly discovered that he left some paperwork which alleges that the whole "dead aliens on a slab in the hangar" story was true. Cue the theramin: Oooo-weeee-oooo.

A quick Google search for "Lieutenant Walter Haut," the Roswell P.R. officer, turns up only a sad small handful of sites. That doesn't prove anything about the veracity of his story one way or the other, but I'm surprised that the mainstream press hasn't jumped on this. After all, you should never let something silly like "facts" get in the way of a good story, right?

The REAL Never-ending Story
Posted: Tue Jul 03, 2007.   Comments (14)

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