Hoax Museum Blog: Urban Legends

Eiffel Tower Observation Deck — Pictures have been circulating showing an expanded observation deck that is supposedly going to be added to the Eiffel Tower, transforming it into something resembling a giant mushroom. An article in the Guardian stated:


But it turns out that the Eiffel Tower is not going to have an expanded observation deck, nor did Serero Archictects win a competition to redesign it. The Eiffel Tower management company has completely disavowed such a project, saying, "This is a hoax. We have no idea where this came from. The whole thing is preposterous." Meanwhile, Serero has posted an explanatory note on its website:

April Fools Day 2008 - The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly — Some more reports from April 1st: the good (or at least midly amusing), bad, and plain ugly.

The Good
List Universe posted the Top 10 Bizarre Genetically Modified Organisms. I saw this today, without realizing it was an April Fool's Day joke, and it had me going for a while. My favorite on the list was the paper tree which "grows square leaves that, when dried, are already usable as writing paper." • ThinkGeek wrote about a strange new Nintendo Wii game: Super Pii Pii Brothers. The point of the game: "A series of toilets are presented on screen and the challenge is to tilt your body to control a never-ending stream of pee." • The Norwegian energy company Statkraft released a video announcing they had developed a way to generate power from starlight. • WestJet announced that it would be converting overhead compartments on its planes into sleeper cabins. (Not that bad an idea.)

The Bad
A New Zealand radio station claimed that the Foo Fighters would be playing at an Auckland venue. Hundreds of people took the day off work. Some even booked plane tickets to make it to the concert. Sorry, no concert! • Two Los Angeles DJs pretended that a two-year-old was being tattooed in their studio. When the (fake) child began to scream, some listeners called the police. It was not only a stupid joke, it wasn't even original.

The Ugly
An Australian woman called emergency services to tell them her baby had fallen off the bed and stopped breathing. When the ambulances arrived, there was no sick baby. It was her idea of a hilarious April Fool. • But the absolute worst story from April 1st:

April Fools Day, 2008 — Happy April Fools!

I'm not going to attempt to catalog every April Fools prank that happens. Other sites have that covered, such as aprilfoolsdayontheweb.com and wikipedia. But I'll list a few of what I think are the better ones:

• The BBC has captured footage of flying penguins. As reported by telegraph.co.uk: "Camera crews discovered a colony of Adélie penguins while filming on King George Island, some 750 miles south of the Falkland Islands."

• YouTube UK has rickrolled its visitors. Clink on any of the featured videos and you'll be sent to the infamous Rick Astley video.

• Google Australia has debuted gDay technology "enabling you to search content on the internet before it is created."

Update: A few more April Fool's Day hoaxes from this year.

Nestle announced they were changing the name of the Butterfinger candy bar to "The Finger," in order to give the candy "a shorter, more contemporary name."



Guinness ran ads in some British newspapers announcing a new drink, Guinness White, available for a limited time only. (As a Guinness drinker, I had to include this one.)

A Russian newspaper, Noviye Izvestia, reported that maternity hospitals had been ordered to play the national anthem every time a baby was born, in order to foster patriotism. Given some of the bizarre laws in Russia, this seemed believable to a lot of people. When reporters queried government officials about it, even they weren't sure if it was true or not.

Hillary Clinton challenged Barack Obama to a "bowl off." She said, "today I am challenging Senator Obama to a bowl-off. A bowling night right here in Pennsylvania. Winner take all. I’ll even spot him two frames. It’s time for his campaign to get out of the gutter and allow all of the pins to be counted. And I’m prepared to play this game all the way to the tenth frame." I think Obama should take her up on the challenge.

Virgin Airlines announced in Australian papers that they were introducing a "no chair fare." Half-price tickets for anyone willing to stand for the duration of the flight. They said that about 1000 people responded to the ad and tried to buy a ticket.

April Fools Email - Not My Doing — Someone pasted part of my April Fools list into an email, and this is circulating around Europe. It has the subject line: Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time.

Whoever is responsible for doing this, used my email address in the "From" field. I know this because I'm being swamped by bouncebacks from people who are not in their office, or whose server is rejecting the message.

I'm hoping the email doesn't have a virus attached to it, but my fear is that it does. There's a link at the bottom of the email inviting people to "Read all the other Doaxes," and this link leads to a suspicious-looking document hosted on secure.filesanywhere.com.

I just want to say, to anyone who might have received this message, that I have nothing to do with it. Unfortunately, I'm also powerless to stop it.

Margarine Invitation — From Pakistan comes a report of an elaborate stunt that seems to have been an early April Fool's day prank... though it didn't happen on April 1st, so it can't count as one. Around 300 people were conned by fake margarine salesmen into showing up for what was supposed to be a free breakfast. From the Pakistan Daily Times:


Sounds like a harmless enough prank, though officials are taking it seriously, noting that "terrorists can call students to some place and harm them." So watch out for terrorists posing as margarine salesmen.

Toast Appears on Jesus Christ — John Ordover sent this in. He was looking at a picture of Jesus (or rather, an artist's interpretation of what Jesus might have looked like) when he realized a piece of toast had miraculously appeared on it. I think this must be a message from John's toaster! But can we be sure that actually is a piece of toast? It kinda looks like a granola bar to me.

Molested By Bigfoot — 57-year-old Gene Morrill was charged with soliciting 13-year-old boys over the internet. He pleaded guilty, but in his defense noted that he himself had been molested as a child -- by Bigfoot! The Free Lance-Star reports:


It was probably a strategy to get a reduced sentence due to mental incompetence, but it didn't work. He was sentenced to twenty years.

Quite a few people, men and women, have claimed over the years that they were abducted and molested by Bigfoot. The most famous was the Canadian prospector Albert Ostman, who said that Bigfoot abducted him and held him prisoner for six days for breeding purposes. Brian Helme submitted a haiku to the site a few years ago inspired by this theme:

April Fool, or the Evils of Deception — For the past week I've been researching the history of April Fools Day in order to revise and supplement the info I already have on the site. For instance, I've significantly revised my article about the origin of April Fool's Day. I think it's now just about the most thorough examination of this question in print -- which isn't saying much because most articles about the origin of April Fool's Day simply repeat the same old legends, and leave it at that.

In the course of this research I came across a book printed in 1852 by the Sunday-School Union of the Methodist Episcopal Church in New York titled April Fool; or, The Evils of Deception. I couldn't resist buying it. The preface states:


In the book we read of evil William, who likes to play tricks on strangers in the street. He sees some girls in the street and shouts out at them, "Run, run, girls, a horse is coming!" They start running (though there's no horse), and one of the girls, holding the hand of her little sister, "was so intent upon getting her out of danger, that she did not see a lamp-post, which was in her way, and struck her head against it with so much force that the blood gushed from her nose." (Too bad they didn't have padded lampposts back then.) Evil William snickers and yells out, "April fools."

Just in case we can't quite envision the scene, an illustration is provided, which shows the girl about to collide with the lamppost. We don't get to see the later scene of gushing blood. Thankfully, William later realizes the error of his ways, with some help from his Sunday-School teacher.

We also are told that liars "shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone." So just think about that before planning any April Fool's Day hoaxes this year.

April Fool’s Day Survival Mode — April 1st is approaching, which means that the Museum will probably experience its annual surge of traffic that results in pages loading incredibly slowly or not at all. I'm going to do whatever possible to stop the site from crashing on April 1st, though I'm not sure how much I can really do.

I've already moved most of the images to a separate server, to reduce the strain on the main server. I'm also going to temporarily eliminate avatars in the forum. I'm not deleting them. They just won't show up until I reactivate them after April 1st. Unfortunately, because of the way the forum software works, I can't move them to a different server. They're either served up by my web host, or they're not served up at all.

I'm also tweaking settings in the blog software. If it can be easily done, I might turn off commenting on April 1st. Better to have new visitors be able to see something, but not leave comments, than not see anything at all because the page won't load.

Fred and Sharon’s Movies — Nick Foister sent me a link to Fred and Sharon's Movies, which have become the latest viral video sensation. Fred and Sharon are a couple who claim to run a movie production business in Kelowna, Canada. But their movies are so bad they're actually funny. It takes talent to be that bad.

They have over 20 videos on youtube. If you haven't seen any of them, at least watch "Who Needs a Movie?" (below), in which they try to promote their movie production business.



Fred and Sharon also have a website. Their site was originally free and open, but the majority of it has recently been locked down so that you need to pay to see it. However, the fee is only $1, so I paid the buck. Turns out that all the "extra content" you get if you pay is simply more videos freely available on youtube. I would have felt cheated if I had paid more than $1, but since it was so little I didn't mind. They deserve it for producing some amusing content.

The question that many people are wondering is whether Fred and Sharon can possibly be for real. Or are they either a) the creations of an advertising agency, or b) comedians.

I haven't had much luck shedding light on this mystery. Though my gut feeling is that they're genuine. It's their effort to make people pay for their site that most makes me think they're genuine. An ad agency would never try to restrict access to content. But a couple like Fred and Sharon who suddenly start receiving hundreds of thousands of visitors to their site, and are faced with a huge bandwidth charge, probably would decide they need to make some money to cover the costs.

Fred and Sharon's site is registered to someone called Rob Korbynn. The only info I can find out about him is that he also seems to be the webmaster of The Ram's Horn, an Ontario-based journal about "food systems analysis." I'm guessing he's must be a guy who provides web services such as site design to clients in the Ontario area.

Even though I do think Fred and Sharon and for real, I also think they're now purposefully hamming it up for the camera. After all, they must realize they've suddenly got a huge audience.

Cheesus and Mary — Two examples of religious pareidolia have made headlines recently. The first is "Cheesus" -- a Jesus-shaped Cheeto found by Steve Cragg, a youth director at Memorial Drive United Methodist Church in Houston. He actually found it a couple of years ago, but decided to unveil it recently in honor of Easter.


The second is the Virgin Mary on an Easter egg. KGBT reports: "Veronica Cervera said she was making "cascarones" by dyeing hollow eggshells on Good Friday when an image suddenly appeared. Cervera is convinced it's the Virgin Mary." I can't see the image at all. It looks like a white smudge to me.

Food Advertising vs. Reality — The German website pundo3000.com has assembled a collection of 100 food products and compared what each one looks like, as shown on the packaging, to the actual product. In the majority of cases the difference is quite dramatic. But a few of the food products hold up pretty well in real life. For instance, the Milka chocolate bar looks almost exactly the same as it does on the packaging. But the roll (shown below) looks pretty unappetizing.

Funtasticus.com has collected all the images together into an easier-to-view format.

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


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.

Thief Hypnotizes Checkout Staff — The BBC reports that police in Italy are searching for a thief who hypnotizes checkout staff and orders them to hand over money.


The BBC has a video of the thief in action. It's interesting, because he pulls off his heist in full view of other customers, who are apparently oblivious about what's going on.

This is not a new method of robbery. Back in Oct. 2007 I posted about a thief in New Hampshire who was said to be using hypnosis to rob convenience stores. In that case, the thief was also Indian, which is significant because the art of hypno-robbery seems to have originated in India.

It sounds like a method of robbery that's too good to be true, but I think it is real (i.e. the store clerks aren't secretly in collusion with the criminal. They really do unwittingly hand money over to him). But I don't think the criminal is actually hypnotizing the clerks. They don't go into a trance. Instead, the method takes advantage of a psychological trick -- that if you catch people off guard, they'll often do whatever you tell them to. The British magician Derren Brown demonstrates the principle in a number of his videos. I think you need a combination of a very self-assured thief who projects an air of authority and a highly suggestible victim to get this to work.

Shig-Shag Day — Since April 1st is fast approaching, I've been doing a lot of research into the origins of April Fools Day in order to supplement the info I already have on the site. In the course of this research, I came across references to an old English holiday called Shig-Shag Day, celebrated on May 29, that has some similarities to April Fools Day. Shig-Shag Day is also called Shick-Shack Day or (more boringly) Oak Apple Day.

Celebrants would place sprigs of apple oak in their hats or lapels to commemorate the restoration of the monarchy. The oak was said to symbolize the oak tree that Charles II hid in to escape his enemies. But cultural anthropoligists suggest that the custom may have been a relic of ancient pagan tree-worship festivals. And for most people, the day was simply an excuse to get drunk. An 1855 issue of the journal Notes and Queries (Aug. 11, 1855, pg.100) offers this description of Shig-Shag Day celebrations:


There's some controversy about the origin of the term "Shig-Shag." Some people say oak apples were known as "shig shags" or "shick shacks" in some parts of England. But the more interesting theory is that shig-shag was a euphemism for "shit sack," which was a popular term for non-conformists and enemies of the monarchy back in the 17th century.

I don't think anyone celebrates Shig-Shag Day anymore, but I like the idea of a holiday dedicated to getting drunk and worshiping trees.

Palm Leaf Mary — And now for your daily pareidolia. (Well, weekly pareidolia, at least.)

Manny Duenas of Sacramento was cutting down some old palm leaves in his yard -- on Palm Sunday, no less -- when he happened to look at one of the leaves in his hand and saw an image of the Virgin Mary cradling baby Jesus in her arms.

Duenas says: "God is out there and maybe these are one of the messages that they send."


Actually, I don't so much see the Virgin Mary figure, but I definitely see an outline of the state of Illinois. Maybe it's some kind of message being sent to us by the Illinois Cornflake.

Google Nessie — Tom Spring, writing for Computer World, describes many of the jokes and tricks hidden in Google's various websites and programs. One that I wasn't aware of is that Nessie regularly surfaces on iGoogle:


I don't think I'll ever get to see this, since 3:14 am is way past my bedtime. (I now have great trouble staying up past midnight, unlike in grad school when I would regularly still be awake at sunrise.)

Another hidden Google joke is "Google Gothic". Type this phrase into the Google search engine, and then hit the "I'm feeling lucky" button. You'll be taken to Googoth, a search engine catering to "dark, gothic, industrial, and alternative topics."

Quick Links: Mar. 18, 2008 — Excuse of the Year
"A German lorry driver escaped a rap for driving while using a mobile phone - after claiming he was using it as an ear warmer."

Woman foretells future with asparagus
"Jemima Packington throws asparagus on the floor and makes her predictions based on the pattern. She said that some years ago she made a prediction that came true based on an asparagus pattern and realized she was on to something." Seems to me like it's as good a method as anything else.

Nostradamus delusion ends in murder
Matthew James Woodroffe-Hill believed he was Nostradamus' "son of the west". After suffering from increasingly paranoid delusions involving "spies, terrorists and mythical creatures" he stabbed a friend with a bayonet and then decapitated him.

Eating spaghetti while wearing a burqa — This video of a burqa-wearing woman very awkwardly trying to eat spaghetti is doing the rounds. It's titled "Why Italian Restaurants Failed in Dubai."

All you have to do to find out it's fake is read the comments on youtube, where quite a few people have pointed out that the footage comes from a British comedy show, "3 non-blondes." It's a candid-camera style show, in which the performers pull various bizarre stunts in public to see how the people around them will react. Wikipedia reports: "Ninia Benjamin, Tameka Empson and Jocelyn Jee Esien play a range of comical characters to the unsuspecting public. Varying from a fictional celebrity named Marcia Brown, to a charity worker who only wants a kiss or a hug instead of a cash donation."

I've never seen a woman eat while wearing a burqa, but I assume she would lift the fabric covering her mouth up. She wouldn't try to shove food down from the top.

Jesus in the Door — Ten years ago Wendy Divock felt a touch on her cheek. She thought it was her husband touching her, but when she turned around, he wasn't there. What she saw instead was an image of a face in her closet door.

Initially Wendy and her husband called the image the "guy in the door," but after doing some research on the internet they decided that it was Jesus. The pastor across the street assures them that the image is "very significant and that it's authentic."

The Dovicks have created a site, jesusinthedoor.com, to publicize their door. They're selling 8x10 glossy photos of it for $13.50. Whenever you click any link on their site, a pop-up screen alerts you of this. They've also got a creepy animated figure that introduces people to the site.

They don't say if Jesus-in-the-door still "touches" Wendy when her back is turned. (Thanks, Bob)