Hoax Museum Blog: Urban Legends

Miracle Fountain Gushes Water — Due to the honesty of Wadowice's mayor, the town has lost out on a great opportunity to profit from a phony miracle. When water began to gush out of the base of a statue of Pope John Paul II, located in this Polish town, the devout (and gullible) thought it was a miracle. They declared it a "miracle fountain" and eagerly started filling up bottles with the water. Unfortunately for them, the water had a far more mundane source: What the article doesn't mention is that the statue was apparently just installed last month, which explains how the plumbing work was done without anyone noticing.

Ocean Dome — A couple of people have sent me these pictures of an artificial dome-covered beach.... located a few yards away from a real beach! Yes, it's a real place. This is Ocean Dome, located outside of Myazaki in Japan. Its motto is "Paradise within a paradise." David Boyle, author of Authenticity: Brands, Fakes, Spin and the Lust for Real Life (which is a pretty good book, by the way), has an article about it on his website. He speculates that it's possibly the most artificial place on earth. Here's a short clipping:

Optical Illusion As Traffic Control — Chicago's transportation department has announced that they're going to try an interesting experiment to try to get people to slow down on a notoriously hazardous curve. They're going to use an optical illusion: Unfortunately there's no video of what this optical illusion effect looks like (the new stripes haven't been painted yet), but when I read this I immediately thought that if you combined the speeding optical illusion with randomly moving yellow lines, you could really mess with people's minds.

Doctor Who Currency — As a long-time Doctor Who fan, I couldn't resist posting about this. It seems there's some phony British currency circulating around on which the Queen has been replaced by Doctor Who. The faux £10 notes bear the inscription "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of 10 satsumas." Apparently the notes were created by the BBC for use during a scene in which the Doctor causes an ATM machine to start spewing money out into the street. Instead of using real money, which would have been a bit expensive, they printed up some phony notes. But, of course, fans quickly grabbed the loose notes that were floating around. An article in the Western Mail quotes an onlooker who says: "From a distance they almost look like real notes but you'd never be able to use them in the pub." Well, you might be able to if the bartender was a Doctor Who fan. I'd give someone a beer for some Doctor Who currency (but maybe no change). I found scans of the notes on Doctor Who Online.

Can-Throwing Skills — Check out this video that shows a bunch of kids casually tossing empty soda cans into trash bins. They make perfect shot after perfect shot, from behind their back, thirty feet away, beneath their legs, etc. And always as if they're not even trying to make the shot. You can watch the video either on their website, vietnam-26.skyblog.com (scroll down to the link that says The Caca Cola Company), or on youtube. The question is, how did they manage all these perfect shots? Was it through some kind of cgi or digital special effects, or did they simply do repeated takes until they made the shot and then edited the successful shots together?

Most of the commenters on youtube seem to think it's all fake (i.e. digitally manipulated). Many of them point to a scene at 1:32min where the can appears to bounce off of air. But I don't agree. To me it looks like the can is simply bouncing off the rim of the trash can. (Scratch that... I was looking at min 1:32 on a downloaded version of the movie, not on the youtube version... On the youtube movie, at min 1:32, the can does indeed appear to change direction suddenly in mid-air. The scene is the one in the thumbnail. However, this could simply be an illusion caused by the angle of the camera. Or maybe there was some liquid or a weight in the can.) Also, although I don't know a lot about video editing, this looks like a very low-budget movie, and I suspect it would be a lot cheaper to do repeated takes rather than to do fancy cgi or otherwise manipulate the video. So I'm voting that it's real, in the sense that they actually managed to get the cans into the trash bins in real life without the use of special effects. (Thanks to Bart Goovaerts for emailing me about this video.)

Hair-Made Soy Sauce: An Update — Back in January 2004 I posted a short entry about a factory in China that had been caught making soy sauce out of human hair. I also mentioned the incident in Hippo Eats Dwarf (p.76). Now more gruesome details have emerged, published in the Internet Journal of Toxicology (link via Boing Boing): An investigation led by TV journalists then revealed why the soy sauce was so cheap. It was being manufactured from an amino acid powder (or syrup) bought from a manufacturer in Hubei province: Lovely. But what the article doesn't mention, but which I believe to be true, is that soy sauce isn't the only food product made out of this cheap hair-made amino acid powder. The stuff is also sold in large quantities to the bakery industry which uses it as a source of L-cysteine to make dough softer and more elastic. Think about that next time you're chewing on a bagel.

Alien Bug: What Is It? — This video of an alien-looking bug has already been posted in the forum, but I wanted to repost it here to give it a bit more attention (i.e. for those who read the site via RSS and never check out the forum). Hopefully someone will be able to identify this thing.

I should note that I do think it's a real bug and not something mechanical (as one emailer speculated), but what kind of bug is it? I'm leaning towards it being a variety puss moth. For more bug types to choose from check out: hag moths, and stinging caterpillars. (Thanks to hulitoons for the links)

Ancient Book of Psalms Found In Irish Bog — A guy was out digging in an irish bog recently when, purely by chance, he found a book buried in the mud. Turns out that it could be a book of psalms over 1000 years old. Pat Wallace, director of the National Museum of Ireland, points out that this discovery was highly fortuitous: The book is probably real. It would be difficult to fake something that old. (There was recently a discussion about faking old manuscripts in the forum.) But it did strike me as odd that "The book was found open to a page describing, in Latin script, Psalm 83, in which God hears complaints of other nations' attempts to wipe out the name of Israel." This seems to tie-in neatly with recent political events. Though I'm going to chalk it up as a coincidence. After all, the odds of any random psalm mentioning Israel are pretty good.

Update: Well, it looks like it was all a mistake. The National Museum of Ireland has issued a statement saying that while Psalm 83 was the psalm they said was visible, this doesn't mean what people immediately thought it meant:

Is There A Hoose Loose? (Possible Horse-Moose Hybrid) — A Canadian rancher claims that one of his mares has given birth to a horse-moose hybrid. His main evidence for this is that the mare has a funny looking head. Also, he says that his stallions were both sterilized shortly before the mare got pregnant, and there are no other male horses in the region. So who could the father be but a rogue moose that happened to be wandering by?

Biologists, naturally, are skeptical. Gilles Landry, a biologist with Quebec's parks and wildlife department, says: Lou emailed me a bunch of links to articles about this strange hybrid (Thanks, Lou!) and writes: I agree with Lou and the biologists. A horse-moose hybrid seems unlikely. Although I suppose it would be biologically possible. But we'll know for sure once the genetic tests are done.

I should start a new gallery devoted to strange hybrids, since it seems like there's been a lot of them reported recently (i.e. the cumato and the cuculoupe.) The strangest hybrid of all would, of course, be a human-ape hybrid, but there remains no evidence that such a creature has existed in modern times (as opposed to prehistoric times), despite the efforts of Russian scientist Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov.

Texas Town Prays For Rain — It's been a hot summer, and a lot of areas really need some rain. The town of Lubbock, Texas is taking a pro-active approach by organizing everyone in the town to pray for rain. Mayor David Miller says: If the City Council approves the rain-prayer resolution, residents of the town will be asked to pray and fast for rain this Sunday.

Sounds like quite a plan. But Lubbock would do well to take heed of San Diego's troubled history with government-sponsored rain-making projects. Back in 1915 San Diego hired Charles Hatfield, who promoted himself as a "moisture accelerator," to brew up some rain for the city. Hatfield set up his equipment in December 1915, and in January 1916 it began to rain. But it rained so hard that it produced one of the biggest floods San Diego has ever seen, causing millions of dollars of property damage.

So if Lubbock goes ahead with its plan it should take some precautions in case God responds with a flood of Biblical proportions.

Headless Gymnast — A strange photo can be seen on Yahoo! News Photo. It looks like this gymnast is headless, though, of course, that's just an illusion created by the angle of the camera. The gymnast is Katherine Coronel of Venezuela. The photo was taken by Martin Bernetti.

Inflatable Passenger — Sheilas’ Wheels, a UK-based auto-insurance company that caters to women, has announced the invention of a "buddy on Demand": "a blow up man that inflates at the flick of a switch if and when a passenger is needed to be used whenever a woman driving alone after dark needs an instant passenger."

It doesn't sound like a bad idea, and it would be very useful for carpool lanes as well. I suspected the whole thing was a joke since I couldn't find any picture of this "Buddy on Demand," and it's not for sale yet, but in their press release Sheila's Wheels notes that "The 'Buddy on Demand' was designed and created by Inflate, with all design rights owned by esure services Ltd." That sounds official enough to make me believe they really did create this thing.

Update: Found a picture of the Buddy. (Thanks, VL)

Cursor Kite — Has a giant cursor been photoshopped into this picture? It looks like it, but the cursor is actually a kite created by Tim Elverston of WindFire Designs. It's not yet for sale. In the larger version of the picture, you can see someone on the right-hand side holding the strings to keep the kite aloft. More pictures of the Cursor Kite can be seen at the WindFire Designs site. (via OhGizmo)

Did Einstein Consider Geography More Difficult Than Physics? — The following quotation is widely attributed to Albert Einstein: Did he ever say it? No. Nor did he ever work in the Customs Office. (He worked in the Patent Office.) In an article in the Toronto Star, Sharon Burnside traces how the quotation became attributed to Einstein in the first place. Apparently it was actually written by Duane Marble, a faculty member at New York State University, who, a few decades ago, posted the quotation on his office door as a joke directed at the Physics faculty who worked in the same building with him. From there it spread until it became an official Einstein quote. It was finally debunked in 1997 in a series of columns in GIS World written by Jerry Dobson.

I found the Toronto Star article via Craig Silverman's Regret The Error. Craig says that he's thinking of creating a master list of erroneous attributions. If so, he should definitely add to his list the famous P.T. Barnum quotation "There's a sucker born every minute." Barnum always swore he never said it. No one is sure exactly who did say it, but a leading theory is that it was said by the owners of the Cardiff Giant who were annoyed that Barnum's fake Cardiff Giant was getting more attention than their 'real' one.

Another erroneous quotation is "It's not who votes that counts; it's who counts the votes." Often attributed to Joseph Stalin, although there's no evidence he ever said it. It's not known who did say it.

Mock Marijuana — Want some marijuana? Of course, here in America it's illegal to buy the real thing, but you can buy mock marijuana... lifelike marijuana plants made out of silk and wood. It would be a pretty cool conversation piece to have sitting in the corner, especially if the police ever show up unexpectedly. The mock marijuana is sold by New Image Plants, operated by pro-pot activist Joseph White. It's a small business. Most of his customers, ironically, are law-enforcement agencies. But he did just sell $40,000 worth of his plants to the set director of Weeds, a Showtime series about a marijuana-dealing suburbanite soccer mom. White notes that he does have some customers who seem to think he's selling the real stuff, but he notes that: "We cannot be held liable for stupid people smoking our plants."

Actually I did once hear that while it's illegal to buy and sell marijuana plants, it's legal to buy the seeds. I thought this was an urban legend (if not, it's a strange loophole in the law), but a quick google search reveals that there are quite a few internet sites offering to sell marijuana seeds. Personally, I'd be very cautious about giving money to these sites (not that I was planning on doing so, mind you). I'd be worried that they would take the money and run.

Rob the Parachuting War-Hero Dog — A collie named Rob has long been celebrated as a hero of World War II. He received the Dickin Medal for Gallantry "For service including 20 parachute jumps while serving with Infantry in North Africa and SAS Regiment in Italy." However, Rob's plane-jumping exploits have now been exposed as a hoax.

Quentin "Jimmy" Hughes, a former SAS training officer, exposed the hoax in his recent autobiographical account of the SAS, Who Cares Who Wins? The London Times reports: I had never realized that dogs could make parachute jumps, but Wikipedia reports that the first parachute jumps, back in the late eighteenth century, were done by a dog: The BBC also notes that during WWII parachutes were made for pigeons. But if you're imagining pigeons with little harnesses around them, it's not quite like that. The pigeons were first put into containers and then dropped by parachute into France:

Angel Crashlands On Car — Here's a bit of a mystery. Last week Liam Yates went to pick up his car from the Borough Green train station, where he had left it parked, only to discover "the bonnet, windscreen and roof of his car caved in, with one 8ft wing protruding out of the front, and another sticking up out of the top." It looked like an angel had crashlanded on his car. This Is Kent reports: This incident doesn't seem to have been widely reported (I can't find any pictures of it), but it did inspire a number of theories, which are: a) it could have been a practical joke; b) the wings could have fallen from an aircraft; or c) it was a publicity stunt devised by Google (Google denies this, and I don't understand why people linked this to Google in the first place).

Yates seems to have quickly disappeared from the scene without bothering to phone in a police report, which would suggest that this was some kind of bizarre prank or publicity stunt.

Update: MadCarlotta found a site, fallenwings.org, that has some pictures of the car with the angel wings crashed into it. Fallenwings.org is a blog that tracks sightings of angel wings throughout the world. It's affiliated with loab.org (the League of Angel Believers). These sites and the car incident all seem very much like a planned viral marketing campaign. It reminds me of those videos that circulated last year of giants being found in various parts of the world. That turned out to be a viral marketing campaign for a new Playstation game.

Feckenham’s Declaration of Independence — Earlier this spring, while digging up an oak tree, residents of Feckenham (a small British village) discovered an 800-year-old scroll written by King Henry III. The scroll stated that the village should remain independent forever. This prompted the villagers to declare their independence from Britain, set up border-patrol checkpoints around the town, and lower the taxes on beer. The Ottawa Citizen reports: Not everyone realized it was a joke. One businessman reportedly contacted the village to inquire about the possibility of opening an import/export operation to take advantage of the town's tax status.

Is Fake-Nice A Good Thing? — Miss Manners recently tackled the question of whether it's better to be honest (and unpleasant) or to be fake-nice. A correspondent asked her: How can one deal (correct word?) with nice people, saying "all the right things," without meaning any of it? It's just been driving me crazy as it seems to be occurring more and more.

Miss Manners responded that it would be a disaster if people were always brutally honest: Along these same lines, in The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life, Ralph Keyes points out the extent to which being fake-nice is the socially accepted thing to do: I definitely agree that most of the time it's better to be fake nice. If I ask someone how they're doing, I don't really want to hear about their bad back and ingrown toenail. But on the other hand, I think Miss Manners needs to provide some guidance for those cases in which fake happiness goes too far. For instance, my wife used to have a constantly upbeat co-worker whose favorite expression was "Yayyyyy!" She managed to use that word a couple times every hour: "That's Great! Yayyy!.... Awesome! Yayyyy!" My wife had to listen to this constant stream of peppiness all day. Not to be cynical, but surely there must come a point when it becomes socially acceptable to subject such people to various forms of medieval torture?

Related Posts:
March 17, 2006: Fake Smiles May Cause Depression

Penguin On A British Beach? — A penguin might have recently visited a British beach near Yarmouth. Jean Edwards claims to have seen the penguin standing on the beach, and she took a photo of it with her mobile phone. But wildlife experts are skeptical that it really is a penguin. After all, penguins live at the South Pole, so it would be a long way for one to travel. And no local zoos have reported any penguins missing.

Kieran Copeland, animal care manager at Hunstanton Sealife Sanctuary, speculated that it might be a guillemot (though he can't explain why the guillemot would have its winter plumage): "The beak does not look right for a penguin, it looks way too thin, and I am not convinced. It looks a lot more like a guillemot, but the dark colour would more correspond to its winter plumage, and it's the wrong time of the year."

Coincidentally, a penguin seen wandering along the banks of the river Thames was the theme of The Sun's April Fool's Day joke this year. But I doubt that the bird seen by Mrs. Edwards has anything to do with The Sun's joke. (via The Anomalist)