Hoax Museum Blog: Identity/Imposters

Homeless Decoys — The City of Toronto plans to pay 100 people $100 each to pose as homeless people for a day. Each person will first attend a 30-minute training seminar on how to convincingly look homeless. The reason: the decoys will act as a "control measure" during the city's upcoming survey of the homeless population.

I guess I don't sufficiently understand the methodology of conducting surveys, because this doesn't make any sense to me.

Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009.   Comments (16)

The Dalai Lama Twitters and then is gone — February 1: The Dalai Lama joins the micro-blogging service Twitter and starts posting updates, which soon almost 20,000 people are following.

February 9: Twitter announces that the Dalai Lama's account is a fake and cancels it. This explanatory message was posted on the Twitter blog:

One of the essential doctrines of Buddhism is Impermanence. The word expresses the notion that everything we can experience through our senses is in flux, constantly changing, and ceasing to be—nothing is permanent. Is there some meaning, therefore, in the sudden disappearance of a Twitter account thought to be the official account of The Office of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama?
There may be a higher meaning if you meditate enough but the account was suspended because it violated our Terms of Use regarding impersonation. Using Twitter to impersonate others in a manner that does or is intended to mislead, confuse, or deceive others is also cited in the Twitter Rules. Should His Holiness decide to take up Twittering for real, we'll be sure to Follow.

I have a Twitter account, but I never use it. I can't figure out what the point of Twitter is, especially for people who already have a Facebook account. (Thanks, Cranky Media Guy!)
Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2009.   Comments (4)

New York Times Hoaxed — The NY Times apologized for printing an email from the Mayor of Paris in which he criticized Caroline Kennedy's bid for Clinton's senate seat. You see, it's easy to put a fake email address in the "From" field, so it's the Times's policy to always check that the person who seems to have sent them an email actually did so. But they didn't do that in this case, and now the Mayor is denying he wrote the email.

The Times is "reviewing procedures" to make sure something like this doesn't happen again. Which probably means some underpaid intern is getting yelled at. Link: NY Times. (Thanks, John!)
Posted: Tue Dec 23, 2008.   Comments (2)

Fictitious McCain Adviser Exposed — Martin Eisenstadt, who describes himself as a former campaign adviser to John McCain and a Senior Fellow of the Harding Institute, has been in the news a lot lately. First it was for outing himself as the guy who leaked the story about Palin not knowing Africa was a continent. Now it's for being non-existent.

The NY Times has the details. Turns out that Eisenstadt is a fictitious character created by two filmmakers, Eitan Gorlin and Dan Mirvish.

Media outlets fooled: MSNBC, The New Republic, the Huffington Post, Mother Jones, and the Los Angeles Times, among others.

Additional details at the Huffington Post.
Posted: Wed Nov 12, 2008.   Comments (8)


McElhone in movie about James Barry — The Guardian reports that Natasha McElhone is slated to play Dr. James Barry in an upcoming film to be titled Heaven and Earth. Barry was the nineteenth-century British woman who disguised herself as a man in order to become a doctor. (See my post from earlier this year.)

The film is apparently focusing on the rumored romance between Barry and Lord Somerset:

James Purefoy, recently seen as Mark Antony in the TV series Rome, will play Lord Somerset, a diplomat who sacrifices his career to safeguard Barry's secret. The story opens in 1825 in the South African Cape, where Somerset is governor of the garrison colony facing a rebellion. The skill of the new surgeon, known as James Miranda Barry, soon attracts his attention, but the attraction between the two must be suppressed in an era when any hint of homosexual activity would have led to execution. Once Somerset discovers Barry's true identity, they embark on a dangerous affair. Barry's hidden gender remains protected, while the governor is eventually disgraced. The film, which also stars actors Sean Pertwee and Mark Strong, goes on to chart the dramatic resolution of this love story.

(Thanks, Joe!)
Posted: Tue Sep 23, 2008.   Comments (1)

Pietro Psaier: Real or Hoax? — Pietro Psaier was an artist whose works fetch thousands of dollars. He was said to be a friend of Andy Warhol, which helps his saleability. But the question now perplexing the art world is whether Psaier ever actually existed.

This, from the Telegraph, is the little that's known about his life:

Information provided by an agent for the artist's estate states that Psaier was born in Italy in 1936 and died in the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka. He left Italy as a young man and went to America, where he met Warhol while working as a waiter in a café. His life then appears to have evolved into a nomadic, drug-fueled odyssey that took him between California, Mexico, Madrid, India and Sri Lanka, working in a variety of styles from conventional portraiture and illustration to pop art and assemblage.

Here's the problem: There's no birth or death certificates. There's no solid evidence at all (such as a body) that Psaier existed. There's just a few sworn statements.

Smells like a hoax to me. The question is: Who's behind it?
(Thanks, Bob!)
Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2008.   Comments (1)

C. Yeager of the Phillies — Baseball fans attending the recent Fan Fest in New York City had the chance to get memorabilia signed by C. Yeager of the Phillies. The problem: there is no "C. Yeager" playing for the Phillies. The man in the Phillies uniform was really just a guy who likes to dress up as a ballplayer so that, for a few minutes, he can enjoy the adulation of kids... before the police haul him away.

The Sporting Blog (who has video of the guy signing anything people stuck in front of him) writes: "He works for a regional sports media company in Philly and never played ball beyond high school."

I assume "C. Yeager" was a fake name.
Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2008.   Comments (7)

Check-in Pseudonyms — Kate Beckinsale goes by "Sigourney Beaver." Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, when together, were "Mr and Mrs Ross Vegas." And Johnny Depp uses "Mr. Stench."

These are some of the check-in pseudonyms that Hollywood stars use to remain anonymous when registering at hotels.

The only time I ever use a pseudonym is when asked to fill in info for things like online surveys or grocery store cards. Then I'm always "Eric Blair." But I'm thinking of switching to Hugo N. Frye.
Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2008.   Comments (23)

Woman discovers the guy she met online wasn’t really a Sonics star — Another case of an impostor is in the news. A woman in Somerville, Mass. thought she was dating Jeff Turner, a former basketball player for the Washington Seattle Sonics. Turns out she was actually dating an impostor named Ronnie Craven. Craven's cover was blown when the woman became suspicious, tracked down the real Jeff Turner, and called him. Craven admits to the hoax, but says he only did it to impress the woman. In other words, he claims he was only trying to benefit sexually, not financially, from the scheme. However, it appears he had also been telling friends and even his hometown newspaper that he worked for the Sonics. From seattlepi.com:

"I'll admit, it was a hoax," Craven said Monday. "It was all a put-on. But somebody who I met on a dating site is trying to sabotage me. This is some broad that I lied to who said I did identity theft, (and) I am not going to know what hit me. There was no intimacy in the relationship. I never tapped her."...
Craven insisted he would stop lying about his identity. He said this situation would damage his reputation in Somerville. He said he was merely lying to impress a woman, nothing more. But this time his game went too far.
"To be honest with you, this whole thing has already taken its toll," he said.
"I know my credibility doesn't look so great right now. This is embarrassing for me. At this point, I don't know what to do. I will say this is very, very disturbing."

You gotta love how guys like Craven (which is a perfect name for him) rationalize their deception. He figures it was okay to lie to the woman because he hadn't "tapped her."

Impostors often pose as sports stars. Just a few months ago I posted about a guy who, for decades, pretended to be Red Sox's pitcher Bill Henry. Not even his wife knew the truth. (Thanks, Joe)
Posted: Thu Jun 05, 2008.   Comments (7)

Woman discovers husband isn’t a doctor — Tammi Parteet was worried since she hadn't heard from her husband. So she decided to call him at Piedmont Hospital, where he worked as a doctor. WSBTV.com relates what happened next:

She called him on his Piedmont cell phone, the one he told her was for emergencies. A staff member picked up. "I said, 'I'm trying to locate my husband, Dr. Perteet.' And she said, 'Dr. who? We don't have a Dr. Perteet.' And she says, 'Are you talking about the guy that had this cell phone?' And I said 'yes.' And she says, 'Oh, he was arrested last night for impersonating a doctor,'" Tammi Perteet said.

Although her husband is now in jail, he still maintains he really is a doctor... and an electrical engineer as well. Sounds like he's also a skilled actor. (Thanks, Joe)
Posted: Mon Jun 02, 2008.   Comments (9)

Carrollton Mayor’s Questionable Singing Career — Becky Miller, Mayor of Carrollton in Texas, claims that she once sang backup for Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne, and was once engaged to Don Henley. Problem is, none of these people have ever heard of her.

She also claims that her brother was killed in Vietnam. However, her father says that her brother is still alive in Maryland and was never in the service.

And Western Kentucky University can't find any record of her attendance, despite her insistence that she was a student there.

Clearly Mayor Miller is developing a bit of a credibility problem, so it's a good thing she's in politics. She should go far. (Thanks, Joe)
Posted: Thu May 08, 2008.   Comments (11)

Wrong Hillary — From the March 19th edition of the Mahoning Valley Tribune Chronicle:

It was incorrectly reported in Tuesday’s Tribune Chronicle that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton answered questions from voters in a local congressman’s office.
Reporter John Goodall, who was assigned to the story, spoke by telephone with Hillary Wicai Viers, who is a communications director in U.S. Rep. Charlie Wilson’s staff. According to the reporter, when Viers answered the phone with ‘‘This is Hillary,’’ he believed he was speaking with the Democratic presidential candidate, who had made several previous visits to the Mahoning Valley. The quotes from Viers were incorrectly attributed to Clinton.

You have to wonder how a reporter could be that clueless. Did he seriously imagine that Hillary Clinton would be there answering the phones? Or maybe he knew it wasn't Clinton, but thought it would make the story sound better if he attributed the quotes to her, and that no one would ever know the difference.
Posted: Sun Mar 23, 2008.   Comments (8)

Dr. James Barry, aka Margaret Bulkley — Stephanie Pain has an interesting article in this week's New Scientist about Dr. James Barry, a nineteenth-century British doctor who may have been a woman. She writes:

MYSTERY, intrigue, romance... the story of Dr Barry has them all. The tale is so compelling it's been told countless times, yet no one has ever solved the central mystery: who was Barry, the pint-sized physician with the sandy curls and squeaky voice? The doctor was both caring and quarrelsome, dainty yet dashing. He fought for better conditions for the troops, shot a man in a duel and faced a court martial, yet still made it to the top of his profession.
Barry had sprung from nowhere to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1809, and might have returned to obscurity if he hadn't fallen victim to the epidemic of dysentery that swept London in the summer of 1865. He had no known relatives, so the job of preparing his body for burial fell to Sophia Bishop, the charwoman at Barry's lodgings. When the funeral was over, Bishop dropped a bombshell: the distinguished army doctor was a woman.

The debate about Barry's gender has been going on ever since 1865. Short of exhuming the body, there was no good way to settle the debate. But new evidence was recently found which indicates, pretty conclusively, that Barry was a woman. The evidence consists of letters from 1809 in which Barry's family solicitor identifies Barry as "Miss Bulkley."

However, Barry's motives still remain unclear. Did she pose as a man purely for economic reasons? Or was she a transsexual who felt that her true identity was as a man?
Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008.   Comments (19)

Yet Another Literary Hoax — One week after Misha Defonseca confessed that she didn't really grow up with wolves, as she claimed in her memoir of her childhood in war-torn Europe, another literary hoax has surfaced.

Love and Consequences, by Margaret B. Jones, purports to be a non-fiction memoir of the author's life "as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods."

In reality, as the NY Times reports: "Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed."

Seltzer offers the usual excuse: It's true in a vague, metaphorical sense. The things she describes really do happen. They just didn't happen to her.

Seltzer was outed by her older sister who saw an article about her in last week's NY Times. I predict there's going to be some awkward Thanksgiving dinners for that family in the future.

Seltzer's publisher has cancelled her book tour and is recalling all copies of the book.

Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2008.   Comments (9)

Who is Robert Irvine? — What we can say with certainty is that Robert Irvine is the host of the Food Network's show Dinner: Impossible. I've watched this before and found it entertaining. Though Irvine comes across as pretty arrogant.

However, many other facts about Irvine's career have now been called into question. For instance, in the past Irvine has claimed that he was knighted by the Queen, that he owns a castle in Scotland, that he cooked at the White House, and that he created the wedding cake for Prince Charles and Princess Diana.

None of this, it turns out, is true.

A Food Network spokeswoman says, "It's unfortunate if Robert embellished the extent of his culinary experiences. We are investigating the matter and taking the necessary steps to ensure the accuracy of all representations of Robert on Food Network and foodnetwork.com."

I'm sure that'll be the extent of the Food Network's reprimand of him, since his show is too popular to cancel.

Links: sptimes.com; Daily Mail. (Thanks to Joe Littrell for the heads up about this.)
Posted: Fri Feb 22, 2008.   Comments (6)

Woman Marries Blow-Up Bob — Remarries, to be exact. From Yahoo! News:

Sheila Smith's husband, Bob, had to go away on business and couldn't make the Valentine's Day recommitment service at Grove City United Methodist Church. So friends brought a life-size inflatable doll to serve as a stand-in. They dressed Blow-up Bob in dress pants, a shirt and tie, and taped on a head-shot photo of the real Bob Smith.

There's definitely an emerging trend of cardboard or inflatable spouses. Usually it involves military spouses who are stationed abroad.

For instance, back in Dec. 2005 I posted about the Husband Mannequin -- Suzy Walker's stand-in for her husband serving on the USS West Virginia.

Then in Sep. 2006 there was a story going around about Flat Daddys and Flat Mommys -- cardboard cutouts of deployed service members that the military was providing to families. (There are posts about it in both the main blog and the forum.)

I'd be curious to know how old this practice is. Did women back in World War II create husband mannequins?
Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2008.   Comments (4)

Mayor uses magazine picture of himself as ID — A few days ago papers reported a weird news item about Charleston mayor Danny Jones who used a picture of himself in Charleston magazine to ID himself before boarding an airplane.

Turns out that "impromptu IDs" are a perennial urban-legend theme. The Legends & Rumors blog has collected a long list of them.

The examples include a case of a porn star who showed a nude picture of herself in a magazine to ID herself while cashing a check, as well as a nineteenth-century case of a man who used his name written on his shirt flap as ID in a bank.

Of course, this doesn't mean that the story about Mayor Jones is false. But it does make it a little more questionable.

Posted: Fri Feb 01, 2008.   Comments (8)

Quick Links: Jan. 29, 2008 — Russian election draws eccentric candidates
Four empresses are running, as well as a tsar.

Fake tickets offer strange message
Police in Boulder are warning drivers to be on the lookout for fake parking tickets that bear this cryptic message: "The foregoing is falsely alleged upon personal initiative. This ticket hereby notes discredibility. Remember: Things could be worse. Get over yourself."

I'm Not Dead Yet
Polish resident Piotr Kucy is trying to convince officials that he isn't dead, but the bureaucrats are proving hard to convince.

Con Artist Poses as Heath Ledger's Dad
Soon after Heath Ledger died, a man claiming to be his father contacted Tom Cruise and John Travolta, seeking emotional support and free plane tickets. Why he contacted Cruise and Travolta, I don't know. Was Heath Ledger a scientologist?
Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2008.   Comments (2)

Name Change Prank — Robert Ashton and Aisling Davis have been playing tricks on each other for years. But when Robert dyed Aisling's hair blonde while she was asleep, she decided she needed to come up with something big to get him back. What she eventually dreamed up was to legally change Robert's name... to "Ima Stapler." The Halifax Courier reports:

Aisling, of Sowerby Bridge, decided to take her revenge. She knew someone who had recently changed their middle name by deed poll and wondered if it would be possible to change a name without that person knowing.
"Some friends and I thought of different names but Ima Stapler was the one that made us laugh the most," said Aisling, a teaching assistant of Burnley Road, Sowerby Bridge
"I've known him for a long time so I had most of his details. To be honest I thought it would be more difficult.
"I wouldn't have been able to do it to anyone else."


Apparently a "deed poll" is a legal document used in England to change one's name. It seems a bit scary that she was able to get away with this. Imagine what an identity thief could do.

But Robert, aka Ima Staper, says he thinks it's funny and has no plans to change his name back.

The Halifax Courier also reports that more than 40,000 people changed their name by deed poll last year: "New names issued included Jellyfish Mc-Saveloy, Toasted T Cake, Nineteen Sixty-Eight, Hong Kong Phooey, Daddy Fantastic, One-One-Eight Taxi, Ting A Ling, Huggy Bear, Donald Duck and Jojo Magicspacemonkey."
Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2008.   Comments (8)

Not Andy Warhol — Kutv.com has an article describing a hoax perpetrated by Andy Warhol back in 1967. He had been asked to do a speaking tour at various colleges, but decided, at the last minute, that he didn't want to do it. So he sent someone else, Allen Midgette, who pretended to be him: "Midgette whitened his hair and face and adopted a Warhol persona, and, accompanied by Morrissey, went on tour. And most believed the forged artist was authentic."

People finally figured out that Midgette was not Warhol when they compared photos of the two men. Apparently the stunt was not an attempt to make any kind of artistic statement. Warhol just really didn't like public speaking. His friends say that he had undiagnosed Asperger syndrome.

Sending an impostor to an interview or lecture is a fairly common prank. Joey Skaggs has done it often. Though I don't think this type of prank has ever been given a name. Maybe it could be called the Impostor Interviewee Prank. Or the Substitute Speaker Prank. Or just the Impostor Prank. Or what about, the Official or Authorized Impostor Prank.

I have no idea what the earliest example of this kind of prank would be. Sounds like a good research project to waste some time on!
Posted: Sun Dec 16, 2007.   Comments (5)

Page 2 of 8 pages  < 1 2 3 4 >  Last ›