Hoax Museum Blog: Urban Legends

Links (Oct 31, 2014)

• Is all publicity good publicity? The Chinese dating app Youjia created a fake ad claiming that a young woman was funding her travels throughout China by having sex with men who would pay her way for her. But the ad raised the ire of Chinese authorities who have now banned the sale of the app throughout the country. [telegraph.co.uk]
• 40 years ago. The 1974 War of the Worlds Panic broadcast in which Martians invaded Rhode Island — a lesser-known sequel to the 1932 broadcast. [Providence Journal]
• Satirical art provokes outrage. Artist Darren Cullen set up a fake "Pocket Money Loans" shop for kids (and accompanying website) to mock parasitic payday lenders. Many people didn't realize it was satire. [London24]
  
• Ghost stories for Halloween. Richard Sugg writes about 19th century campus ghosts, and campus ghost hoaxes. [Times Higher Education]
• MOH gets a shout out. Jack Shafer notes that the problem of fake news "clickbait" stories long predates the internet, and he cites a number of examples of 19th century fake news stories archived here at the Hoax Museum. [reuters]
• Fake news. Emergent.info lists an article about a Macedonian man who cut off his penis and put it in the trash as "unverified and problematic." [emergent.info]
• Celebrity death hoaxes. Judd Nelson isn't dead, nor is Walking Dead actor Norman Reedus. [ibtimes, classicalite]
• Music urban legend. Is 27 the age at which rock stars are most likely to die an untimely death? That's the popular theory, but author Dianna Kenny found that it's just a myth. "The average male musician dies in his late 50s, compared with 75 for men outside the industry." [Wall Street Journal]
• A case of a man crying wolf? Andrew Davies lies on the ground faking illness so often that he's now been given an anti-social behavior order banning him from wasting the time of emergency crews any more. [telegraph.co.uk]
• Real photo, fake caption. The viral Airplane Rainbow Photo was supposedly taken by a woman as her plane flew through a rainbow. But the rainbow effect is caused by the light being polarised by the window. Not from flying through a rainbow. [usvsth3m.com]
  
• Halloween urban legend. The 'man arrested for having sex with a pumpkin' urban legend. [About.com urban legends]
• Poe's Law in action. The satirical claim that Michele Bachmann questioned why dinosaur bones are dirty if they've been buried for millions of years has been widely accepted as an actual quotation from her. [Snopes]
• Cryptozoologists feuding. The American Bigfoot research community is well-known for its bitter feuds and rivalries. Apparently Australian Yowie researchers are no different. [Courier Mail]
• Nessie Hunting. New documents show that back in the 1930s, the London Natural History Museum appealed to bounty hunters to shoot and kill Nessie, for the sake of science. A letter from a museum official stated, "Should you ever come within range of the ‘Monster’ I hope you will not be deterred 
by humanitarian considerations from shooting him on the 
spot and sending the carcase to us in cold storage, carriage forward. Short of this, a flipper, a jaw or a tooth would be very welcome." [Scotsman.com]
• Prolific ghosts. Ben Radford's article about spirits who dictate books includes the interesting factoid that, 175 years after her death, Betsy Ross revealed to psychic Susan Lander that she was a lesbian. [Discovery News]

Links (Oct 28, 2014)

• Art fraud. The story of Walter and Margaret Keane is the subject of an upcoming movie by Tim Burton. Walter became an art sensation in the 1960s because of his paintings of sad, big-eyed children. But it was actually his wife Margaret who painted them. [The Guardian]
• Photoshop before photoshop. Back in the 1940s, if photo editors wanted to make a quick change to a photo, they could use the Adams Retouching Machine. [Daily Mail]
• Imaginary friend for sale. Georgia Horrocks's psychiatrist recommended that she say goodbye to Bernard, her imaginary friend. So she offered Bernard for sale on eBay. Bernard "will be sent via imagination to the winning bidder.” [news.com.au]
• Too good to be true? The Consumerist is skeptical about that picture going around of a hungover guy who got a Domino's Pizza delivery person to bring the pizza to him in his bedroom, so he wouldn't have to get up to answer the front door. Although there's no way to prove that it isn't true. [Consumerist]
  
• Hoax becomes reality. Earlier this week an image of a "Sexy Ebola Nurse" Halloween costume started doing the rounds, but it proved to be a hoax. The costume was actually a "Sexy Breaking Bad" costume. But now one company really is offering a "sexy Ebola containment suit" for sale as a Halloween costume. [Buzzfeed]
  
• Another fake news story goes viral. NASA never said that the earth would be plunged into "six days of darkness" in December due to a solar storm. The story was an invention of fake news site Huzlers.com. [GMA News]

Links (Oct 24, 2014)

• Is anyone really named Penis? BabyCenter.com, the self-proclaimed "#1 parenting and pregnancy digital resource," claims there were seven baby boys in the United States named Penis in 2012. But when Ryan Jacobs set out to find them, he couldn't locate a single one of them. [Pacific Standard]
• Do you want to buy a haunted house? Gwynne Watkins interviews a realtor who works at Past Life Homes, a firm that specializes in selling homes with "stigmatized pasts," which is a euphemistic way of saying that they're haunted. [vulture.com]
• 10 of the greatest hoaxes? That's what the Herald Sun claims their list represents. But it's yet another list that reads more like '10 hoaxes that came up on a google search'. [Herald Sun]
• Nazi Party Museum Hoax. A letter received by homes and businesses in Utrecht, informing them that a museum detailing the history of the Dutch Nazi movement will soon open, has been called "extremely odd," since no such museum is planned. [DutchNews.nl]
• Swiss-Army-knife Trout. A picture of a trout swimming in Switzerland's Lake Blausee with a Swiss Army knife stuck in its head is real, says the lake manager, who also adds the fish was later captured and put out of its misery. [NY Daily News]
  
• The true origin of Count Dracula. There's no evidence that Bram Stoker modeled Count Dracula on Vlad the Impaler, despite current widespread belief to the contrary. According to Stoker's notes, he chose the name because "DRACULA in Wallachian language means DEVIL." [io9.com]
• Misinformation about a misinformation study. Indiana University's "Truthy Project" (funded by the NSF) is designed to study how information and misinformation spreads through social media. But it's now become the subject of a conservative rumor claiming that it's actually a government project "to monitor the activities of those who oppose its policies." [motherboard]

Links for Oct 22, 2014

• Sam Neill tweets that he's still alive, despite some rumors to the contrary. [twitter]
• RFID Chips In Ebola Vaccine? A hoax article from a fake news site circulates this claim. [neonnettle]
• Poet Kevin Young lectured yesterday at Princeton on “How to Write a Hoax Poem.” Lecture blurb posed the question, "Is there such a thing as fake poetry? If so, how does one write it?" [princeton.edu]
• The Top Five Casino Myths (such as oxygen being pumped into the casino, and slot machines near the door paying out more) [westsidestory]
• More scary clowns. An orange-haired clown has been roaming the streets of Portsmouth, creeping people out. [telegraph]
  

Is it organic, or is it McDonalds? —
Two guys (Sacha and Cedrique) from a Dutch show called LifeHunters visited a food convention in Houten where they offered the "food experts" in attendance samples of what they said was a "new organic alternative to fast food." In reality, they served bite-sized pieces of McDonalds food.

The result: the attendees were not only impressed by what they tasted, but also a number of them said that it tasted much better than McDonalds fast food. One commented that, "you can just tell this is a lot more pure."

Sacha and Cedrique concluded that, "if you tell people that something is organic, they'll automatically believe it's organic!"

It's not surprising that people reacted positively to the samples. After all, researchers who study the psychology of eating have long known that how we perceive food to taste is closely linked with how we expect it to taste, based on visual and contextual cues.

For instance, in a famous study conducted in 1998, Frederic Brochet asked wine experts to sample and review a selection of red wines. But Brochet actually gave them white wine colored red, and not a single one of the experts realized this. They were expecting to taste red wine, so that's what they tasted.

Likewise, the attendees at the Houten food convention expected to taste an "organic alternative to fast food," so that's what they tasted.

Of course, the LifeHunters segment hardly ranks as a scientific study. It's more of a prank, really. For a start, we have to assume that LifeHunters didn't edit out all the negative reactions from their video. Also, a lot of the "food experts" in the video looked a lot like regular people.

Links for Oct 20, 2014: Banksy arrest, etc.

• Banksy has not been arrested, nor has his identity been revealed [independent.co.uk]
• "Rapper Claims He Signed To Def Jam Records, Posts Hilariously Fake Contract on Instagram" [complex.com]
• Australia’s greatest hoaxes: the pranks the tricked a nation [Herald Sun]
• Another food contamination hoax? Man claims to find mouse in his McDonalds coffee. [kboi2.com]
  
• 20-year-old Spanish conman Francisco Nicolás Gomez Iglesias "without any official position in public life managed to hobnob with leading politicians and business figures, even attempting to negotiate in legal matters on behalf of Spain’s former King Juan Carlos." [thelocal.es]
• The Irish Water authority has been criticized for installing a water meter at an abandoned "fake" house. [Irish Examiner]
• "5 Vintage Urban Legends And Myths That Still Creep Us Out" [Huff Post]
• Kindergarten student left in tears after a birthmark on her neck was photoshopped out of her school pictures without permission. [Barrier Daily Truth]
• Everyone in what looks like a group photo on Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett’s campaign website is photoshopped [Buzzfeed]

Quick Links: Chemtrails, Outer Baldonia, etc.

• This guy fooled millions of chemtrail conspiracy theorists, now they want his head. [deadstate.org]
• "GIVE ME FISH, NOT FEDERALISM" Outer Baldonia and Performances of Micronationality. (PDF article). [Shima Journal]
• From the political fakery file. The Asian Republican Coalition Is Mostly White and Mostly Endorses White Candidates. (Which makes it a lot like the African-American Republican Leadership Council, exposed in 2003 as being mostly a bunch of white guys.) [motherjones.com]
• Crop-circle researcher Megan Heazlewood concedes there have been many hoax crop circles, but insists that "there have also been ones that are very much real, and have been scientifically proven." [dailytelegraph.com.au]
• Pseudo-ostension in Bakersfield, CA. A teen dressed as a clown was recently arrested there for chasing children. The teen told police he was merely "continuing a hoax he saw online." [kfgo.com]
• From 2013: the persistent rumor that Canada's new plastic money was impregnated with the scent of maple syrup. [cbc.ca]
• Iowa City pot business posters and website are a hoax [press-citizen.com]. The fake website is iowamarijuanacompany.com.
• Two people in Africa died after believing a false rumor that drinking or bathing in salt water could prevent Ebola. [business2community.com]
• A two-and-a-half year old story about a man with a chainsaw threatening pub goers is recycled by one of those fake news sites as "Man walks in to haunted house with chainsaw, murders 7 people." Recycled story promptly goes viral. [Intl. Bus. Times]