Hoax Museum Blog: Urban Legends

Halle Berry and her Six Toes — Does Halle Berry have six toes on her right foot? There are people out there who have spent a lot of time pondering this question. The evidence for the six-toe theory is based on these pictures, which are at least two years old.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that, no matter what these pictures appear to show, Halle Berry is not polydactyl. If she was, she'd admit it.

Wrong Number Generator — SpySite.com is selling a prank gadget that seems like it would have the potential to drive someone crazy... such as a boss you intensely dislike. Unfortunately the gadget costs $89, which is a bit steep. From spysite's description:



(via OhGizmo)

Brother Roshan Wants Your Donations! — Canadian police are searching for two men who "falsely represented themselves as a spiritual healer and his assistant." Which raises the question: what counts as a real spiritual healer?

The healer guy advertised himself on the radio as Brother Roshan. He used a magic trick to con his victims out of money. CTV.CA reports:

Some people "donated" over $100,000 to Roshan.

This gives me an idea. Instead of a Museum of Hoaxes, I should open a "Museum of Good Luck and Prosperity." I'll tell people that if they make a donation to the museum it'll guarantee them good luck. I'd make a fortune.

Quick Links: January 22, 2008 — Hiding in plainview
A police officer agreed to escort a car containing a pregnant woman to the hospital only to find the car was stolen - and the woman wasn't pregnant.

An honest politician?
Ed Hamilton is running for the position of Kerr County treasurer. His campaign promise is that, if elected, he won't serve. He won't even take a paycheck. Sounds like the right man for the job.

More men opting for chest implants
At least, that's what the headline claims. The article itself gives the impression that the number of men who get pectoral implants is very small.

Serial prankster claims to find time machine — Julian Lee Hobbs, aka Rory Emerald, recently placed an ad in the Helena Independent Record claiming to have found H.G. Wells' time machine. The ad became the talk of Helena.

Turns out Emerald is a serial prankster who's done this kind of thing often:

The Martian Bigfoot — Flora posted an image in the forum of what looks like a Martian bigfoot. (I inserted a picture of the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot for comparison.)

According to metro.co.uk, the image was taken by NASA's Mars Explorer Spirit, but it "wasn't until space and science fiction enthusiasts became involved that the images were taken more seriously."

Here's the complete NASA image (thanks, Mongo) from which the image above was enlarged. I drew a red circle around the Bigfoot image. It's barely visible, in the far left corner. As you can see, the Martian Bigfoot is very, very small. Perhaps Littlefoot would be a better name for him.




The image of the Martian Bigfoot comes on the heels of the Martian "Doorway" which was doing the rounds last month. It's just non-stop Martian Pareidolia.

Is the Antarctic IceCube Telescope really an Alien Receptor Centre? — Down in the Antarctic researchers are building an "ice cube telescope" to detect neutrinos. It's one of the stranger telescopes ever built. Popular Science provides this description of it:



But, of course, the conspiracy theorists have some different ideas about what is really being built down there in the South Pole. One such theory has been posted in an unlikely place, explorersweb.com -- a site that's usually devoted to news about the exploration community, not woolly conspiracy theories.

The theory was posted by Irish South Pole skier Kevin Dempsey. Here's the gist of it:



I'm not sure whether or not Dempsey's article is meant to be a joke. Supporting the joke theory is the unusual note that Explorerweb appended to the article: "Dempsey is not a scientist; his emails carry advertisements for stylish blinds and rugs."

(Thanks to CuChullaine O'Reilly of the Long Riders Guild for the link.)

End of the James Randi Million Dollar Challenge — At the beginning of this month, James Randi announced that he will be ending his offer of $1 million to anyone who can provide "evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event." From the announcement on his website:

This announcement has predictably brought out the crazies -- people shouting and fuming that Randi is some kind of charlatan. Members of this crowd have been sending out mass emails ranting about Randi, and for some reason they've cc'ed me on these emails. Randi eventually responded with a detailed reply that he promises he'll post in full on his website. Here's a snippet of it:

Personally I think that Jennifer Dziura's proposal deserved the prize money. But no one else even came close.

Rare Coin on eBay — This is one of the stupidest eBay auctions I've seen in a while:



Starting bid is $1,000,000. No bids yet.

Some people in the coin talk forum think it might be two magician's coins, cut in half and glued together. I think the guy just took photos of two separate coins.

The misspellings definitely add to the seller's credibility.

Hrbacek’s Head Finds New Body — Some surgeons (particularly Robert White) believe that "total body replacement" might be a viable option for people suffering from incurable diseases such as cancer. Just cut off the patient's head and attach it to a healthy body.

In the meantime, photo editors have long been using "total body replacement" for a more mundane purpose: making their subjects look better. Recently, the campaign office of congressional candidate Dean Hrbacek admitted that their candidate had been a victim of this technique. The brochure they mailed out to voters showed Hrbacek posing in a suit. But in reality, only the head belonged to him. Not the body (which happened to be significantly slimmer than his own body).

The campaign office defended the use of the fake photo by claiming that Hrbacek didn't have time to pose for a real picture since he had been so busy meeting voters. (Yeah, right.)

I've got more about the photographic technique of total body replacement in the hoaxipedia.

A Warning to Mac Users — I'm a Mac user, and I recently decided to upgrade to the new operating system, OS X Leopard. I thought it would be relatively simple to upgrade. But it wasn't. I've spent the last two days stuck in front of my computer working out all the kinks. So I thought I'd post a warning to help any other people in a similar situation avoid the mistakes I made.

My big mistake was apparently my choice to simply upgrade the existing system. It took an hour or two to complete the installation process, but then, instead of seeing an improvement, the performance of my computer slowed to a crawl. It was like swimming through molasses. I kept getting an endlessly spinning beach ball whenever I tried to do anything. A few times the finder froze. I have a relatively new computer -- an intel mac mini -- so the hardware should have been able to handle the upgrade. I was thinking, "Wow, this new system sucks!"

After some slow searching on the internet, I discovered that other people had been reporting the same problem. The solution was that instead of simply upgrading the system, you had to do a clean install. This meant wiping out everything and starting new. So that's what I decided to do. The problem was, this meant backing everything up first -- something I should have been doing on a regular basis anyway, but hadn't been.

So I spent an entire day backing stuff up, doing a clean install of the system, and then reinstalling everything.

Long story short, I'm back in business, and the new operating system works really well. But it took me two solid days of messing with this to get it to work.

Obviously the experience of others may vary. But I'd definitely recommend doing a clean install right away, and not even thinking about choosing the "upgrade" option. But now that the system is working correctly, I do like it.

Is Bigfoot really Cain? — Here's a Bigfoot theory I haven't heard before. Apparently there are some in the Mormon church who hypothesize that Bigfoot may actually be Cain, condemned to walk the earth forever. Matt Bowman provides some scholarly elaboration on this theory on the Mormon Mentality blog.

Apparently the Bigfoot-Cain connection traces back to a story told by an early leader of the Mormon church, David W. Patten. Patten claimed that in 1835 he encountered Cain walking along the side of the road. He wrote: "He walked along beside me for about two miles. His head was about even with my shoulders as I sat in my saddle. He wore no clothing, but was covered with hair. His skin was very dark."

Hmm. That sounds kind of like Bigfoot. At least, that's what some Mormons have apparently concluded in recent decades. Bowman writes: "Cain’s identification as Bigfoot has provided Mormons with a way to assimilate the claims of folktale with new conceptions of what Cain, the embodiment of evil, should be like."

So if Bigfoot is Cain, maybe Nessie is really the snake from the Garden of Eden. 😉

The Filipino Monkey — Following up on last week's post about the confrontation between US and Iranian vessels in the Persian Gulf, the mysterious threat that the U.S. ships received -- the one in which they heard someone say "I am coming to you... You will explode after... minutes" -- is now being attributed to the "Filipino Monkey."

The Filipino Monkey is apparently a prankster who interjects obscenities and threats into ship-to-ship radio communications in the Persian Gulf. Or rather, it's many pranksters. The name "Filipino Monkey" now serves as a generic term for rogue radio operators in the Middle East.

I became intrigued by the Filipino Monkey phenomenon, so I did some research into it and posted what I found in a brief article in the Hoaxipedia.

Apparently the "Filipino Monkey" dates back to around 1984 during the Iran-Iraq War. It was probably originally one person, but he soon spawned many imitators.

It's a surreal prank, to say the least. You have heavily armed military ships engaging in tense standoffs, and during these very serious situations you suddenly have an idiot bursting on the radio with exclamations such as, "Come and get my ba-NAAAAAAN-a!"

Twins get married… or maybe not — Last week this story was EVERYWHERE. A pair of twins in Britain, who had been adopted into different families, met and fell in love... without realizing they were twins. They then got married, only to discover the terrible secret they shared. Their marriage was promptly annulled.

When I first read about this, it sounded pretty fishy to me -- very much like an urban legend being reported as news -- but on a cursory reading of the story I also got the impression that there were officials involved who knew about the case but couldn't disclose the identity of the twins. So I accepted the news as true. I think the paragraph in the BBC report linked to above that got me was this one:



To me, this sounded as if Mo O'Reilly actually knew about the case first-hand. Unfortunately, I didn't read the article closely enough. Apparently the only person who knew about the case was Lord Alton who used it as an example during a House of Lords debate on the Human Fertility and Embryology Bill. Lord Alton had heard about the case "from a judge who was involved." In other words, the source is a FOAF (friend of a friend), one of the classic signs of an urban legend.

Jon Henley of the Guardian summarizes the situation:



So it looks like this piece of news needs to be categorized as an urban-legend-reported-as-news until proven otherwise. (Thanks, Joe)

Quick Links: January 14, 2008 — Nuclear Reactor in Garage
A 22-year-old man was boasting on an amateur science blog that he had built a mini-nuclear reactor in his garage. His boasts earned him a visit from federal authorities who determined that he didn't actually have a nuclear reactor. But he did have some kind of strange experiment going on that, had it continued, "would have been a cleanup issue." (Thanks, Joe)

Dead Man Cashing Check Scam
"Two men were arrested on Tuesday after pushing a corpse, seated in an office chair, along the sidewalk to a check-cashing store to cash the dead man’s Social Security check." (Thanks, Gary)

Facebook President Hoax
A Facebook application allowed people to pretend to run for "Facebook Worldwide president." A Frency guy got all his friends to vote for him, and when he won told the French media that he was the new president of Facebook. Many members of the French media apparently believed him.

Romance writer accused of plagiarism
Nora Roberts is claiming that fellow romance novelist Cassie Edwards is guilty of plagiarism. It seems that Edwards was lifting passages from old reference works in order to flesh out her historical romances. This actually seems to me like a fairly minor misdemeanor compared to some of the stuff that goes on nowadays. (Thanks, Joe)

Non-Smokers Not Fired — Last week quite a few papers ran this story:



Turns out, the story was a hoax. Stephanie Lamprecht, the reporter whose name appeared on the byline, said that her source -- some guy named Thomas Joschko -- just made it up: "He said it was a joke and worth the trouble. He said he's a chain-smoker himself and said he was tired of smokers being hassled so much."

From what I understand, it's not clear that Thomas Joschko even owns a business. He's just a guy who picked up a phone and told a reporter a wild story, trusting that the reporter would do minimal fact checking before running it.

This was the same modus operandi of Joseph Mulhattan, one of the most prolific hoaxers in America at the end of the nineteenth century. He would invent bizarre stories and wire them to papers, which would invariably print them. It's nice to see that the same tricks still work.

Ernst Bettler — Back in 2000 a graphic design magazine called Dot Dot Dot ran an article about a subversive artist from the 1950s called Ernst Bettler. Design Observer summarizes the article's central tale:



Pretty soon references to Bettler's stunt began appearing elsewhere -- on websites such as AdBusters and Creativepro.com, and in Michael Johnson's textbook Problem Solved. But a couple of years later a blogger named Andy Crewdson became curious about the story and did some research. He discovered that not only did Ernst Bettler not exist, Pfäfferli+Huber didn't either.

Eye Magazine has the entire story.

Husband meets wife in brothel — This story sounds suspiciously like an urban legend being reported as news. It could, of course, be true, though the source (a Polish tabloid called Super Express) makes it difficult to fact check:

Bigfoot Bait — I wonder how many women are going to respond to this craigslist ad? The scary thing is that the guy's probably completely serious.

Jontex Condom Ad - Possible Hoax — The image to the right shows what is supposedly a guerrilla marketing campaign by Jontex, a Brazilian brand of condoms owned by Johnson & Johnson. The campaign involves a cardboard cutout that can be positioned beneath the door of a bathroom stall. The Brazilian phrase translates to, "You do not know when it can be necessary."

But strangely, Johnson and Johnson is denying responsibility for the ad. Or, at least, the folks who run the Johnson and Johnson blog claim it's not their company's campaign:



It seems like a lot of work for someone to create as a hoax. It could either be a subviral campaign (an ad campaign that a company creates but then denies responsibility for), or a "spec ad" (a speculative ad created by an agency to show a potential client what they're capable of).