Hoax Museum Blog: Extraterrestrial Life

UFO Coin — image A mysterious coin, dating from 1680, has experts puzzled. The coin in question appears to show a UFO. Or, if not a UFO, then a 'symbolic representation of the Biblical Ezekiel's wheel". One or the other "but little else" (according to Kenneth Bressett, former president of the American Numismatic Association). It really does look an awful lot like a modern representation of a UFO, but of course it's just present-day bias to think that because it looks like a UFO to us, that's what the coin maker intended it to be. However, I'm sure that many are going to seize on this as evidence of the existence of seventeenth century UFOs.
Posted: Sat Jan 29, 2005.   Comments (25)

Alien Bacteria on eBay — Here's the latest eBay oddity. It's 'Magic Air' that grows alien bacteria and makes your feet swell up:
This glass was left outside by one of my kids during a solar eclipse. When I retrieved it I noticed that it weighed over 10 pounds. I didn't notice any contents but tried pouring it out and spilled some of the "Magic Air" on my left foot. My shoe grew from a size 11 to a 17 DDD in less than 15 seconds. I ceased pouring any more of the Magic Air out and placed the Haunted Purple Glass in my cupboard.
It's already sold, but it sounds like he has a limitless supply of this 'Magic Air' for future auctions.
Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2004.   Comments (22)

Tunguska UFO Hoax? — image What caused the Tunguska Event, that massive, nuclear-bomb-strength blast that occurred in Siberia in 1908? A meteorite, is the standard answer. But a few days ago Russian researcher Yuri Lavbin claimed to have discovered "blocks of an extraterrestrial technical device" in the Tunguska area. Lavbin's theory is that a meteorite was headed for the earth, but it was blasted apart by an alien spaceship, thus causing the massive explosion. Why aliens blasting something out of the sky caused an alien technical device to fall to the ground isn't clear to me.

Lavbin announced this discovery in Pravda (which is kind of like announcing a major scientific discovery in the National Enquirer). He's transported a piece of this alien device to the city of Krasnoyarsk, though, of course, he hasn't yet allowed the general scientific community to view the thing.

So did he really find a piece of an alien ship? Or has he mistaken a piece of Cold-War-era space debris for an alien ship, as some are speculating? Or has he engineered a massive hoax? As is usually the case, time and scientific access to this 'extraterrestrial technical device' should provide the answer. In the meantime, here's a poll so that you can vote on what you think he's found:

Posted: Fri Aug 13, 2004.   Comments (7)

UFO Attracting Device — image This isn't, strictly speaking, a hoax, because I'm quite sure that its creators are serious about it. It's a UFO Attracting Device "equipped with colored strobe lights, low-powered lasers, a radio transmitter and a series of gauges said to track atmospheric changes common to extraterrestrial encounters." It was originally built by Myron 'Mike' Muckerheide, but was then purchased by Julie 'Jitterbug' Pearce. I would definitely buy this thing, if given a chance. But instead of using it to attract UFOs, I'd use it to drive my neighbors crazy. Whenever they play their music too loud, I'd crank up my UFO Attractor and drown them out. If a UFO happened to land in their backyard as a consequence, all the better. (via The Anomalist)
Posted: Tue Aug 10, 2004.   Comments (0)


Xenomorphological Research Institute — image The Nova Corp Xenomorphological Research Institute is "the world's leading centre for the study of extra-terrestrial life." As their website explains: "the NCXRI always attempts to study a species in its native habitat. However, when this is not possible specimens can be brought back to our high-tech research laboratory for further analysis. From simple metal cages to plasma-field containers and full sized aquariums, the NCXRI is fully equipped to house virtually any species." (via Liquito)
Posted: Tue Aug 10, 2004.   Comments (9)

Intergalactic Personal Ads — image Leave a message on Endless Echoes' answering machine, and for only $24.95 they'll beam it into outer space, where it will theoretically travel forever. They bill it as the perfect way to send a message to loved ones who have died (why dead people would get the message in outer space, I don't know). I think the service would be better targeted at lonely hearts in search of alien companionship (Single White Female ISO Single Green Alien). But the whole thing has a hoaxy feel to it... along the lines of those companies that offer to name a star after you, or sell people plots of land on the moon. Why not just call up a radio station and dedicate a song to someone if you really need to send out a message as a radio broadcast? At least that way someone would have a chance of actually hearing what you say.
Posted: Sun Jun 20, 2004.   Comments (7)

Alien Abductions Incorporated — image Alien Abductions, Inc. can provide you with your very own alien-abduction memories. As their website says: "The fact of the matter is that most people will probably never have the opportunity to be abducted by aliens. And even those elite few who are selected for abduction receive no assurances that they will fully remember their experience--much less a guarantee that their abduction will be everything that they hoped it would be. So why wait? Why wonder if they're ever going to come for you? Why even invest the time, trouble, and expense involved in an actual abduction when the highly trained and professional staff at Alien Abductions Incorporated can provide you with personalized, realistic memories of the alien abduction that you have been waiting for your entire life?" Their basic package offers implanted abduction memories, but I figure that if you're going to sign up for this, then at the very least you'd also want to get the 'front yard crop circle' add-on. (Submitted by Sam)
Posted: Tue Jun 15, 2004.   Comments (0)

Alien Implant Removal — Read this question carefully: Have you ever "seen a being with huge, dark, watery-looking, almond-shaped eyes and wrinkled, gray skin? Was it wearing a skin-tight metallic body suit that lit up? Did its huge head seem out of proportion to its frail body?" If you answered yes, then you either live with this guy, or you're a possible victim of alien abduction and might be carrying around an alien implant inside of you. If it's the latter, then you're in luck. The folks over at abduct.com specialize in alien implant removal and deactivation. But please don't laugh. They seem very serious about this. (via J-Walk)
Posted: Tue May 04, 2004.   Comments (1)

Fake UFO Photos — How to fake a UFO photo, courtesy of Skeptical Inquirer.
Posted: Mon Jan 12, 2004.   Comments (0)

Majestic Twelve — Anson also sent along a second site: Majestic Twelve. This is the webpage of a super-above-top secret organization that may or may not cooperate with aliens in the abduction of human beings.
Posted: Mon Jan 12, 2004.   Comments (0)

SciFi Happens — The SciFi Channel has a section on its website called SciFi Happens on which they pretend to invite the public to send in clips of true-life weird things that have been caught on film. All the clips are staged by the SciFi Channel itself, of course, but some of them are kind of cool. There's a UFO spotted flying around the World Trade Center, a guy who becomes magnetized after suffering an electric shock, ladybugs that fly in geometric patterns, and the Lake Champlain sea serpent. You need Quicktime to see the clips.
Posted: Sat Sep 13, 2003.   Comments (1)

The Secret of Drive-In Theaters — Thanks to an anonymous visitor for this link which documents, at last, what I've long suspected—that drive-in movie theaters were designed and built by aliens from outer space for the purpose of studying us and beaming messages into our brains.
Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2003.   Comments (1)

The Anniversary of Roswell — roswell On July 8, 1947, 56 years ago today, the Roswell Daily Record made UFO history by announcing on its front page the discovery by the army of a flying saucer in the Roswell region. The army soon retracted its statement that it had discovered a flying saucer, leading to ever-growing suspicion of a cover-up. Here's a transcript of the 1947 article.
Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2003.   Comments (0)

Roswell Declassified — The government declassifies the Roswell records. Popular Mechanics investigates.
Posted: Mon Jun 16, 2003.   Comments (0)

Another Moon Hoax — The Canberra Times reports on a different moon hoax from the late 1960s which it, in turn, read about in the most recent newsletter of the Canberra Skeptics society. This hoax was perpetrated by a grad student named Ray Crawford who had managed to get his hands on some NASA stationery:


"Shortly after the first moon landing Dr John Lovering at the ANU [Australian National University] received a piece of moon rock to analyse. Ray wrote a letter purporting to be from NASA to Dr Lovering requesting he present a sample of his urine at the US embassy at 3pm on a certain day; this was to be sent to NASA for analysis in case John had become infected by some alien life form.'


Dr Lovering, for all his intellectual eminence, seems to have fallen for the hoax and to have consulted an ANU biochemist about the best way to collect the requested specimen.


'But as urine samples are best collected early morning' Mr Griffith reports [and as this seemed at odds with the request to Dr Lovering to show up with his sample at 3pm] the biochemist 'smelled a rat'.


'So the US Embassy staff were contacted. Of course they knew nothing about this and, after a lot of coming and going with NASA, the urine sample went down the drain, so to speak. The Yanks were not amused and tried their hardest to find out who was behind the letter. But, as with the weapons of mass destruction, the CIA just could not get its act together on this one either.'"

Posted: Thu Jun 05, 2003.   Comments (0)

King Bloop Zod of Mars — King Bloop Zod from the planet Mars strikes up an email exchange with Mel Martinez, the White House Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and gets a response.
Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2003.   Comments (0)

The Lawton Triangle Hoax — The Lawton Triangle Hoax: Was it a true UFO or a Microsoft Optical Mouse glowing in the dark? UFOlogists opt for the former option.
Posted: Mon Aug 26, 2002.   Comments (0)

US News & World Report and the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 — US News & World Report has a special double issue this week on "The Art of the Hoax". Check out the lead article, "Strange but true: This is the golden age of hoaxes." Yours truly was interviewed for it and gets mentioned twice! Very exciting. But also check out their short piece on the Great Moon Hoax of 1835. As it turns out, they fell for a tall-tale about this hoax. In the first paragraph they claim that because of this newspaper hoax:

"Daily sales of the Sun skyrocketed from 4,000 to 19,000–making it the world's most popular paper and launching a new kind of journalism."

Not so! For almost a century historians have been repeating this story about how the great moon hoax propelled the New York Sun to media stardom and established it as the world's most popular paper, and established modern journalism in the process. But the story is actually totally false. The tale got its start because a few days into the hoax, on August 28, 1835, the Sun boasted that it had a circulation of 19,360, making it the most widely circulated paper in the world. Almost a century later the historian Frank M. O'Brien, in his 1918 work about the history of the Sun (The Story of the Sun) made note of this boast in his retelling of the hoax. Subsequent historians, who relied solely upon O'Brien's work for their information about the hoax, figured that if the Sun was boasting about its circulation during the moon hoax, this must have meant that the hoax had caused a rapid rise in the paper's circulation. It seemed like a logical conclusion, but it was wrong.In actuality, the Sun had regularly been making the same boast about its high circulation for weeks before the moon hoax occurred. In fact, two weeks before the moon hoax, on August 13, 1835, the Sun boasted that its circulation was at 26,000, meaning that if you go by the Sun's own numbers, its circulation actually dropped during the moon hoax. But once the idea was established that the moon hoax immediately caused a meteoric rise in the Sun's circulation, it proved to be so compelling (because it provided a slightly scandalous angle to the birth of modern journalism) that no one ever bothered to check if it was actually true. In fact, various historians began to embellish the idea, inventing the claim that the Sun's previous circulation had been 4,000 (or 6,000, or 8,000... pick a number. Almost every author who writes about the moon hoax has a different figure for what the Sun's circulation skyrocketed from, though they all agree on the 19,000 figure).USN&WR also claims that the Journal of Commerce first exposed the hoax after the hoax's author, Richard Adams Locke, confessed to one of their reporters. This is also false. Many New York papers had immediately denounced the Sun's lunar claims as a hoax, and the New York Herald was the first to point the finger at Locke. The idea that the Journal of Commerce exposed the hoax dates to an 1852 retelling of the hoax by William Griggs.USN&WR can't really be blamed for getting some of the facts wrong. The literature about the moon hoax is full of these erroneous claims. The only reason I realized they were wrong is because I'm writing my dissertation about the moon hoax, and so I spent the time to actually dig up the papers from 1835 and find out what the real story was.
Posted: Sun Aug 18, 2002.   Comments (1)

UFO Sightings — UFO sightings expected to increase in the next few weeks. But that bright object in the night sky won't be a UFO. It'll be the International Space Station.
Posted: Sat Jul 27, 2002.   Comments (0)

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