Hoax Museum Blog: Photos

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Operation Cat Nip Confusion — In August 2011, hundreds of cats were rescued during a hoarding case, and then a team of veterinary students volunteered their time to spay and neuter the cats in order to prepare them for adoption.

A photo of this mass spaying/neutering event (named Operation Cat Nip) ran in the Gainesville Sun.


But about a year later that same photo began appearing on Twitter, stripped of any explanatory context, and accompanied by the caption: "Retweet if you say NO to animal testing."

The photo also had a watermark added, "Cause Animale Nord,"which is the name of a French animal welfare society.


Thousands of people obediently retweeted the photo, many of them adding messages expressing their disgust and disapproval, unaware that the photo had nothing to do with animal testing.

Like many viral photo fakes, this one has gone through cycles of being debunked, disappearing for a while, and then suddenly resurging in popularity. Right now, it's again in a popular phase.
Posted: Fri Feb 28, 2014.   Comments (4)

Optical Illusion Cow — This cow illusion has been circulating since at least 2011.


And here's the original, which, I believe, is a stock photo. Though I don't know which stock photo agency it's from.


Posted: Thu Feb 20, 2014.   Comments (0)

Theodore Roosevelt Rides a Moose —

Theodore Roosevelt served as President of the United States for 8 years, from 1901-1909. He was, as Wikipedia notes, acclaimed for his "cowboy persona and robust masculinity." However, his masculinity was not so robust that he once rode a moose, despite what this photo appears to show.

In 1912, Roosevelt split from the Republican Party, after having become unhappy with its increasingly conservative policies. He then ran for President as head of the newly formed Progressive Party. After forming this party, Roosevelt exuberantly proclaimed, "I'm feeling like a bull moose!" For which reason, the Progressive Party was often referred to as the "Bull Moose Party."

Two months before the election, on Sep 8, 1912, the New York Tribune ran a set of humorous pictures under the headline "The Race For The White House," showing the three main presidential candidates astride the animals associated with their parties.


William Howard Taft was shown riding an elephant (for the Republican party). Woodrow Wilson sat on a donkey (for the Democratic party). And Roosevelt rode a moose (for the Bull Moose party).

All three images were fake. They had been created by the photographic firm Underwood and Underwood.

Close inspection of the Roosevelt image reveals the signs of fakery. The firm had extracted Roosevelt's image from a photo of him riding a horse and pasted it into a shot of a swimming moose. Scratch lines are visible around Roosevelt's leg, where the photo editor tried to simulate water ripples. Also, Roosevelt's image is more sharply focused than that of the moose.

But, of course, the image was not supposed to be mistaken for a real scene. It was clearly presented as political humor.

Roosevelt lost the 1912 election to Woodrow Wilson, and the image of him riding a moose disappeared into photo archives. But in the 21st Century the image resurfaced and began circulating online where many people assumed it depicted an actual event.

For instance, in March 2011, Cracked.com included the image in an article titled "18 Old-Timey Photos You Won't Believe Aren't Photoshopped." The author of the article wrote:
This picture is real, this scene existed, and yes, at one point in our history, you could have actually voted for this man.

We do not know if this was a publicity stunt, a routine hunting incident or seriously how our beloved President Theodore Roosevelt used to ride to work every day. All we know is that it was taken during the 1900 presidential election campaign and as far as we are concerned, virtually guaranteed William McKinley's re-election for as many terms as God gave him.

On that note, President McKinley was dead a year later.

Their information was incorrect in almost every detail except that McKinley did regain the White House in 1900, and he did die a year later.

However, Theodore Roosevelt definitely never rode a moose.

References:

Posted: Thu Jan 23, 2014.   Comments (3)

Posing with Mandela — The Mandela-themed hoaxes continue. Kenyan senator Mike Sonko recently posted to his facebook page a photo of himself posing with Nelson Mandela. It's such an awful photoshop job, that it's hardly even worth debunking. Still, for what it's worth, the original image that he doctored was one of Mandela posing with Muhammad Ali. [telegraph.co.uk]


Posted: Sat Dec 14, 2013.   Comments (0)

Fake Mandela Corpse Photo — On Thursday, an image purporting to be a death photo of Nelson Mandela began circulating online.


The photo — a greenish-tinged shot of Mandela with his eyes closed — was originally posted on twitter by someone with the username @nQOW_bee.

IOL news reported: "In between tweets about the sign language interpreter at Nelson Mandela’s memorial at FNB Stadium on Tuesday, which is her sexiest body part, and how she can’t stick to a healthy diet, she posted a picture of Mandela with the words 'He is resting'."

The image was soon retweeted, but in response to a massive negative response, the twitter user subsequently claimed that she hadn't taken the picture: "urgh suka! I did not take the pic"... it was "some Indian guy".

Subsequently @nQOW_bee's account was deleted.

By the end of the day, the "death photo" was revealed to be a falsely captioned image of Mandela closing his eyes during an ANC conference in Durban in July 1991. The original photo had been taken by photographer Trevor Samson for Agence France-Presse. The AFP posted the fake death photo and the original side-by-side for comparison.


Posted: Fri Dec 13, 2013.   Comments (0)

Cat Drinks From Bottle —

There's not a lot of info on where this photo comes from. It's listed on the website of the French National Library as having been created in 1911 by the "Agence Rol." photo agency. For 1911, it's a pretty good example of photo fakery.

Also included in the same series is "Cat peers through binoculars" and "cat looks through a telescope."




Found these over at retronaut.com.
Posted: Tue Dec 03, 2013.   Comments (0)

Soviet Pilot Flies Under Bridge, 1965 —

This image shows Soviet pilot Valentin Privalov flying a MiG-17 under the central span of the Communal Bridge over the River Ob in Novosibirsk on June 4, 1965.

The story goes (as much as I can piece it together) that Privalov did this on his own initiative, as a stunt. The shore of the river was filled with vacationers, among whom were officers from the district headquarters, when suddenly the MiG came roaring out of the sky. Afterwards the crowd spontaneously started to applaud, but Privalov's superiors weren't happy, and they suspended him. He was threatened with disciplinary action, but Secretary of Defense Marshal Malinovsky (perhaps swayed by positive public reaction to the stunt) allowed him to return to service.

The photo found its way onto the internet fairly recently. It first appeared on various Russian-language forums, and then on sites such as Reddit. Unfortunately, I can't find any site that provides an original source for the image. I'm guessing that it must have run in a Russian newspaper or magazine, sometime circa 1965.

The photo is obviously fake. The plane wouldn't have created such a huge plume of water. And how likely is it that someone would have managed to capture a picture of the scene at exactly the right moment? And if you look closely, you can see several people in the lower-right corner who have their backs turned to the bridge. In real life, the noise of the jet would have caused everyone to look in that direction.

But I'm guessing this image was never presented to the public as a real photo. It was a photographer's recreation of the event, and nothing more.

The better question is, did this stunt really happen? As far as I can tell, it did. The story is referenced on the Russian-language wikipedia page about the Communal Bridge in Novosibirsk. (It says that the event happened on June 3, not June 4, so there seems to be some disagreement about the dates.)

Also, I found a reference to the stunt in an American news-wire article dated Aug 29, 1965, which discusses a recent spate of hooliganism in Novosibirsk, including "a drunk who stole a streetcar," "an aircraft mechanic who went on a joyride up and down runways in an Ilyushin 4 transport," and "a stunt flier who flew under bridges."


Albuquerque Journal - Aug 29, 1965

I haven't been able to find any definitive info about Privalov's subsequent career. But I did come across a reference to a Valentin Privalov in the Feb 21, 1993 issue of Stars and Stripes. He was described as being "deputy head of Russia's civil aviation air traffic control center in Moscow." So it could well have been the same guy.
Posted: Tue Dec 03, 2013.   Comments (3)

World’s Largest Tortoise — The International Business Times reports that a "fake image" purporting to show the "world's largest tortoise" being transported on a flatbed truck has recently been circulating online.


I think it's been circulating for at least half a year, but it's not correct to call it a fake image. It's a still from Gamera The Brave (a 2006 Japanese monster movie) that has been falsely captioned. Here's another picture of the "world's largest tortoise" in action:


The question that popped into my head is whether the creature in the image is a tortoise or a turtle. The distinction between the two has always been a bit hazy in my mind.

According to diffen.com, tortoises live on land while turtles live in the water. But wikipedia notes that in North America it's common to use 'turtle' as a generic term for all reptiles of the chelonian order (i.e. turtles and tortoises get lumped together).

Gamera is commonly referred to as both a turtle and a tortoise. But since he walks on his back legs, flies, and breathes fire, it doesn't really seem important to get fussy about what kind of reptile he's classified as.
Posted: Tue Nov 26, 2013.   Comments (1)

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