Hoax Museum Blog: Urban Legends

Micro Nuclear Reactor — Last month a lot of blogs posted about a "micro nuclear reactor" supposedly developed by Toshiba. It promised to provide dirt-cheap energy, and was also small enough to fit in a basement. The story was first posted on nextenergynews.com:



The idea of everyone putting a nuclear reactor in their basement sounded a bit dicey, and a lot of people were suspicious. Sure enough, the story has turned out to be a hoax. Rod Adams, of the Atomic Insights Blog, contacted Toshiba, who confirmed that they're not building an apartment-sized nuclear reactor. However, it's not clear who was the source of the hoax. Next Energy News perhaps?

“Less Wrinkles” — This ad, which has been running on digg, seems like a particularly egregious example of false advertising. Of course, if anyone would challenge the company in court they could say, "we never actually claimed our product could make an old lady look like a young model. That picture, as the disclaimer indicates, is merely simulated imagery."

The grammar cop in me also has to point out that it should be "fewer wrinkles," not "less wrinkles."

(via adrants)

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?

Video Game Urban Legends — Yahoo! Games has an article about urban legends involving video games. Though half the legends they list are true. Here's a summary:

Donkey Kong was a mistranslation of Monkey Kong.
False. Donkey Kong was the original title. "Donkey" was apparently meant to indicate stubborn stupidity. "Kong" was a reference to King Kong.

Saddam Hussein tried to build a supercomputer out of Playstation 2s.
False. The rumor was offered as an explanation for a shortage of Playstation 2s, but if an evil dictator did want to build a supercomputer, using game consoles would be a bad way to do it.

Sony first developed the Playstation for Nintendo.
True. Back in the late 1980s Nintendo and Sony were considering a partnership, but negotiations fell apart and the two went their separate ways.

Million of Atari games are buried in the New Mexico desert.
True. Atari buried millions of games it couldn't sell.

A video arcade game called Polybius was actually part of a military mind-control experiment.
False. I posted about the Polybius legend back in 2004.

A man died by playing video games nonstop.
True. Apparently this has happened more than once. Technically, they died of exhaustion.

Automotive Bermuda Triangle — In 2006 I posted about the road of non-starting cars in the town of Gosport, England. An unknown force on this road was preventing cars from starting. I don't know if Gosport ever solved its problem, but it seems that the neighborhood around the Empire State Building in New York City is experiencing the same issue.

The New York Daily News reports:


I said it back in 2006, and I'll say it again. Problems like these are obviously the result of inner-earth dwellers and their infernal electromagnetic pulse machines. When will people wise up?

Real-Life Kidney Thieves — A kidney transplant ring has been busted in India. Hundreds of poor people were forced into having their kidneys removed. ABC News reports that victims were promised a job, then taken to a private house and forced at gunpoint to sell their kidneys.

One victim's story sounds just like the kidney-transplant urban legend:


The kidney transplant ring was found out when suspicious neighbors "noticed blood running out of the house's gutters." Yeah, that would kind of be a giveaway. (Thanks, Stephen)

Creepy Cat Photo — This eerie photo of four cats has been attracting attention online. (It recently made it to the front page of digg.) It's the cat in the car that gives it that extra creepy twist.



There's been some speculation about whether it's photoshopped. Unfortunately, the photographer, Ivan Capraro, hasn't posted any info about the image. But my guess would be that it's not photoshopped. I'd say it was either a lucky shot, or a cat was purposefully put in the car for the shot. (via A Welsh View)

Kitler Cat Controversy — A poster created by the German Green Party in Saxony and Hesse shows a cat that looks like Hitler with the tagline "you can't always recognize Nazis at first glance." The poster is meant to be a swipe at their extreme-right opponents.

But the poster has provoked criticism from an unlikely source. Catsthatlooklikehitler.com has given it a paws down, complaining that it shows a photoshopped Hitler-resembling cat, instead of a real one. They write:


(via third party watch)

Huffing Hand Sanitizer — A 14-year-old student at Killian Middle School in Lewisville picked up a bottle of hand sanitizer from the desk of his reading teacher, rubbed the gel on his hands, and then smelled it. According to the teacher, he "inhaled heavily."

The student said he sniffed it because it "smelled good." But the school authorities claimed he sniffed it because he was trying to get high. They gave him an in-school suspension, and then proceeded to file criminal charges against him. WFAA.com reports:


Thankfully, common sense eventually prevailed and prosecutors dropped the charges. As far as I know, it's not possible to get high by "huffing hand sanitizer." Unless, perhaps, you were to do it to the point that it deprived you of enough oxygen. I'm not sure what strange rumors the police were believing when they pursued this case. The WFAA article includes a statement from the National Institute on Drug Abuse debunking the hand-sanitizer-huffing rumor:


It reminds me of the recent Jenkem scare, in which Florida police issued a bulletin warning that local kids were getting high by sniffing the fermenting gas from human sewage.

Man Makes Fake Moon Dirt — Dr. James L. Carter has a weird job. He manufactures fake moon dirt. His company, ETSimulants, produces tons of it every year. His primary customer is NASA, who needs fake moon dirt to test machines that might need to operate on the moon. In an interview with Pegasus News Dr. Carter explains:


I'm sure he could make some good money if he put his product in little glass bottles and sold it on eBay. After all, if eBay shoppers will buy genuine air from Loch Ness, they'll also buy fake dirt from the moon.

Sneezing Bus Stop — In order to educate the bus-riding public about the physics of sneezing, Science World created a Sneezing Bus Stop. Watch the video to understand:



They also created posters that can be wrapped around trees to demonstrate how much beavers can eat.

Benazir Bhutto and the Number Nine — An email going around implies that there's some significance in the fact that, if you search hard enough, you can find numbers associated with Benazir Bhutto's life that add up to nine.


My name, Alex Boese, has nine letters in it. Surely this too has some significance! (via Funny Emails)

Loch Ness Monster Poetry — In the article about the Loch Ness Monster in the hoaxipedia, I've posted some Nessie haiku contributed by readers. I'm quite proud of my own contribution:


But far more accomplished poets have also been inspired by Nessie. Glasgow's poet laureate, Edwin Morgan, included a poem, "The Loch Ness Monster's Song," in his 1970 collection Twelve Songs. Here it is:


According to a Rice University webpage, in 1991 the poem was reprinted in 100 Poems on the Underground, and had this explanation appended to it:


Sure enough, if you read the poem closely, you can tell that the monster is looking for a diplodocus, and does then start swearing.

Man Claims Blue Man Group Attacked Him — According to James Sroden, the popular Blue Man Group attacked him when he went to see their show in October 2006. He says they forced him on stage, circled him, held his neck and arms, forced his head back, and then inserted an "esophagus cam" down his throat, projecting an image of his throat onto a large screen.

Sroden says he subsequently bled from the nose, had nightmares, and lost fillings in his teeth.

The Blue Man Group's version of events is quite different. From msnbc.com:


So it seems that Sroden is expecting a jury to believe that the Blue Man Group's illusion is actually real. Maybe he's hoping the Blue Man Group will pay him something in order to avoid going to court. (Thanks, William)

Sheep Circle — About 100 sheep in Kington, Herefordshire spontaneously formed a ring in a field. Apparently they did this entirely on their own. A photographer was on hand who captured the strange scene.

The Daily Mail interviewed Dan Seaborne, farm manager at Herefordshire College of Technology, who speculated:

"I just think they've been fed with dry feed in that shape - you can get snacker feeders now and you tow behind a quad and it drops pellets on the ground. I would imagine that's what's happened... I think there was a chap in Yorkshire who spelled out 'will you marry me' to his girlfriend in sheep by putting feed down."

Or it could be a signal from extraterrestrials. 😉

Is Blue the new Green? — In what is one of the most absurd articles I've read in a while, Chicago Tribune reporter Nara Schoenberg tries to argue that "blue" is the new "green". In other words, green (as a symbol of environmentalism) is old hat. So people are now starting to say "blue" instead of "green".

Her main evidence is that Mercedes-Benz calls its new clean-diesel technology BLUETEC. And a few environmental websites have blue pages.

I refer to this journalistic technique in Hippo Eats Dwarf as the "Generalization from a Single Example": "A reporter makes a sweeping statement, but backs it up with only one or two examples... [leading] audiences to believe they represent a larger trend, even if the reality is the opposite."

David Roberts of Grist Magazine offers this analysis of Schoenberg's article:

Quick Links: Jan. 25, 2008 — Caught Lipsyncing
Amusing video on youtube of a guy caught lipsyncing. I like how he tries to pretend that nothing happened.


Live Frog in Lettuce
Yet another case of a family finding a live frog in their lettuce. The amazing thing is that instead of trying to sue someone, the family has adopted the frog as a pet. They call him "curious."


Fake Leg as Weapon
"Police said Donna Sturkie-Anthony took her elder sister's prosthetic leg and beat her with it."

Ghostly face floats near floor — 17-year-old Matthew Summers used his mobile phone to take a picture of his sister and some friends as they were preparing to go out. Closer inspection of the photo revealed a ghostly face floating near the floor.





Thisislondon.co.uk writes:


Sure, it's pareidolia. But it also looks like something was either superimposed on the original picture or smudged the pixels. I'd guess it's an artifact created by the software used to compress the size of the image. (via spluch)

The Unrecognised States Numismatic Society — The Unrecognised States Numismatic Society (USNS) describes itself as a "group catering to numismatists whose collecting interests largely focus on coins minted by groups purporting, pretending or appearing to be sovereign states, but which are not recognised as such by established governments."

They've got examples of coins from a bunch of unrecognized nations, including the Principality of Sealand, Atlantis, the Confederation of Antarctica, and the Dominion of West Florida, which apparently is "an internet-based micronation created on 29 November, 2005... founded on an eccentric interpretation of actual historic events." The Dominion has a website!

My favorite coin is that of the Ultimate State of Tædivm (the thumbnail image).

Jesus Hides in Potatoes — Renee Brewster of Florida found Jesus while preparing potato salad. His image was clearly visible in the moldy rot that had formed in the center of the first potato she split open. She put aside the holy potato and finished making the potato salad, which reportedly tasted excellent.

According to MyFoxOrlando, Renee and her husband feel that "the site of their savior in a potato has reinvigorated their faith."

But Cranky Media Guy wonders if this is manufactured pareidolia, noting that, "For the first time in memory, I can actually make out the figure they think they see."

If one Jesus-in-a-potato isn't enough for you, then you're in luck, because the MyFoxOrlando article links to a second story, from just a few weeks ago, about a Houston woman who also discovered Jesus inside a potato. But I think the Florida Jesus-Potato is better.