Hoax Museum Blog: Urban Legends

Sad Princess Di Doll — I think this Princess Di doll, created by Texas-based Time Capsule Toys, is an example of what Umberto Eco would call hyperreality—fakes whose fakeness (or kitchiness, or strangeness) makes them interesting in their own right. The likeness of Princess Di isn't actually very good, but its makers have tried to make it more true-to-life by having it say various melancholy phrases that Princess Di said, such as "I sit here in sadness," or "There's far too much about me in the newspapers, far too much," or "I'd like to be a queen of people's hearts." For some reason, they're calling the doll the "Princess of Whales." I don't know if that's a misspelling, or a feeble attempt to avoid using Princess Di's name.

The Brits don't like the doll at all. The Mirror has declared it "probably the most tasteless, tackiest-ever tribute to Diana." Another Mirror columnist wrote: "She has bandy legs, a huge behind, hair like a crash-helmet, wild make-up, a hooked nose, no chest and ankles that make her look like she's got two club feet. Still, if you could blow the doll up, most men would choose to have sex with it before Camilla."

Fish Spells Allah and Muhammad — Oscar, who's a fish, lives in a tank in Waterfoot, England. He's attracting quite a bit of attention because markings on one side of his body seem to spell out the name Allah in arabic script, while markings on his other side seem to spell out Muhammad. Since I don't know arabic, I'm not in a position to judge how much the markings look like these words. But at least saying that markings spell a word is a bit more cut-and-dry than saying that markings look like Jesus, the Virgin Mary, or someone else whose appearance is unknown. (And now that I think about it, I suppose the Muslim ban on images of Muhammad means that the world will never get to see pieces of toast or frying pans bearing the image of Muhammad.) People who have examined Oscar are quite confident that the markings haven't been painted on in any way. I'm sure Oscar's new-found status as a miracle fish won't hurt the price the pet shop owner can fetch for him. (Thanks to Paul Farrington for the link.)

Pets In Uniform — Wouldn't it be great to have a picture of Fido dressed in a military uniform to keep on the mantel? Unfortunately actually dressing Fido in the uniform can be a hassle, but thankfully there's now an alternative, PetsInUniform.com:

Imagine: your dog, cat, or other pet in full military regalia. We make this fantasy a reality. Using the latest digital techniques, we combine a photo of your pet with the uniform and background of your choice.

I don't think this would work for my cat, since she imagines herself more as royalty than as military.

What Happens When Dogs Attack a Bull — This series of images of two pit bulls attacking a bull are a couple of months old (though they're new to me). They recall those images of a mule attacking a mountain lion. Despite looking rather surreal (especially that one of the dog suspended in air above the bull), not to mention bizarre (what were the dogs thinking?), they are real. This scene occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, outside of New Orleans, when the two pit bulls, crazed with hunger, decided that a bull would make a great dinner. They were wrong. A reporter for the Sunday Telegraph witnessed the scene:

Like a wrestling tag team, the bitch and the dog attacked with awesome ferocity, leaping at the bull's head and latching on to its muzzle. The stricken bull repeatedly shook the dogs off, flinging them up to 15 feet in the air. But they took turns to keep up the attack, exhausting the bull which was by now smeared with blood. Even after the bull trampled the bitch, leaving it dazed, the dog stepped up its attack... It was too dangerous for an unarmed witness to intervene but The Sunday Telegraph flagged down a National Guard truck. Seeing what was happening, a soldier shot the bitch in the head. The dog paused before resuming the attack. It took two bullets to stop it dead.

MagicSHELF Update 2 — The saga of the magicSHELF continues. I received my own magicSHELF in the mail yesterday, courtesy of linkydinky, and put it up today. Here I am posing with it. I placed it across from my desk. It's definitely odd to look over and see some books floating there. But I like it. It's kind of cool.

I added a short review of the magicSHELF to my original post about it. While I don't reveal how it works in the review, I do try to strike a balanced tone, pointing out that you could make one of these yourself with enough effort (and time spent searching around hardware stores). I also add a disclaimer, noting that in return for letting linkydinky quote me as saying that the magicSHELF is real, he links back to this site and mentions my book. So hopefully that steers clear of any ethical pitfalls.

Topless Fish Saleswomen Legal in Liverpool — Some of you may have read this claim before: "Topless saleswomen are legal in Liverpool, England, but only in tropical fish stores." I hadn't heard it before until I happened upon it on the blog of Cavan Scott who is (rightly, I think) quite skeptical of it. He's emailed the Liverpool county council to get their opinion about it, but my guess is that he probably won't get a reply. (Though I decided to send them an email too... they must be wondering why so many emails about topless fish clerks are pouring in.)

I then wasted a lot of time trying to track down the source of the claim. I quickly figured out that it's posted on dumblaws.com (which is probably where everyone else on the internet learned about it), but they provide no references for it. So they could have just made it up. I then searched the Lexis-Nexis legal and news database for any mention of topless Liverpudlian fish saleswomen, but found nothing besides references to the dumb laws site. (No surprise there.) My wife, whose grandmother lives in Liverpool, had never heard of such a law. In other words, I can find absolutely no source, besides dumblaws.com, to indicate that this Liverpool law is true. Which is why I'm labelling it as false, until proven otherwise. If it does happen to be true, I'd really like to know what the original reason for passing such a law was.

Suicide Cryptogram — Security expert Bruce Schneier has posted an interesting item on his blog. It's a scan of a cryptogram emailed to him by someone who claims the cryptogram was left behind by a man named David Rayburn, who killed his wife and stepson with a hammer and then hanged himself. It's been confirmed that this murder/suicide did occur, and it seems likely that the correspondent is telling the truth about the presence of the cryptogram at the crime scene, even though news reports didn't mention it. The question is, what does the cryptogram mean? There's a huge amount of debate about this on Schneier's blog. To me the most likely explanation offered so far is that it may be an encrypted password list. (The cryptogram was in a briefcase next to Rayburn's body, along with some CDs of child pornography.) But one person (named Alex, but I swear it wasn't me) posted an intriguing (though slightly sick and twisted) suggestion: "Maybe he was playing hangman with himself and lost."

Painted Room Illusions — These photos show rooms painted in such a way that, if you stand in the correct place, a pattern will appear. Despite looking photoshopped, they are real. The painted rooms are the creations of artist Felice Varini. On his website you can find more examples of his art if you search around long enough (and struggle through the incredibly bad navigation). Varini writes:

The painted form achieves its coherence when the viewer stands at the vantage point. When he* moves out of it, the work meets with space generating infinite vantage points on the form. It is not therefore through this original vantage point that I see the work achieved; it takes place in the set of vantage points the viewer can have on it. If I establish a particular relation to architectural features that influence the installation shape, my work still preserves its independence whatever architectural spaces I encounter. I start from an actual situation to construct my painting. Reality is never altered, erased or modified, it interests and seduces me in all its complexity. I work "here and now".

I have no idea what that's supposed to mean, but the illusions are pretty cool. (Thanks to Eric Kimlinger for sending me a link to the photos.)

Goldfish Have No Memory — Popular legend has it that goldfish have no memory, which is why they're happy to swim around in small glass bowls. (Actually, I had never heard this legend before, but my wife had.) Now researchers in the UK have debunked this legend. The Telegraph reports:

The urban legend of the amnesiac fish has been dealt a new blow by a study which shows that goldfish can learn to avoid parts of their tanks where they receive electric shocks for at least 24 hours, probably longer... The new study was conducted by Rebecca Dunlop, Sarah Millsopp and Peter Laming at the Queen's University of Belfast and is published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science... The Belfast team showed that goldfish can remember accurately where in their tanks they receive electric shocks. The stronger the shocks, the less likely the fish were to return to the sector of the tank where they had received them. The team reported similar results with trout.

Giving fish electric shocks sounds a little cruel, but I guess you can't test them with flash cards, or put them in a maze. Of course, the legend of the forgetful fish might have arisen because goldfish are oxygen-deprived and near blindness from being kept in those little round bowls.

Fake Puma Ad Mystery Solved — Remember this racy PUMA ad? It was circulating around the internet back in early 2003. The rumor was that it had appeared in the Brazilian version of Maxim, but PUMA officials soon denied this, and further stated that their company was not responsible for it in any way. PUMA then threatened to sue anyone who posted it. (No one ever got sued.) This led many bloggers to speculate that PUMA was, in fact, the creator of it, and had spread it as a subviral advertisement (i.e. a viral ad secretly produced by a company, which the company denies any knowledge of... allowing them to experiment with more controversial forms of marketing). But despite this speculation, the question of who created the image remained unresolved, until now. Peter Kim, former PUMA International Marketing Manager, has disclosed the inside story on his blog:

What really happened - a small Eastern European agency affiliated with Saatchi & Saatchi created the ads on spec, trying to win business with a PUMA subsidiary. They got nothing and emailed the ads to friends; from that point it snowballed. As you can guess, when the PUMA powers-that-be decided to get all corporate on the blogosphere, the whole thing exploded. Poor Pete M.'s (PUMA GC in the US) email inbox exploded with junk after that, with his name being on the cease and desist. No "Brazilian Maxim", no evil master plan (they're real but we'll say they're fake), but online store sales were up like CRAZY for a couple of weeks. Too bad we didn't even have the shoes in the ads in stock!

This is bad news for me, because I describe the fake PUMA ad in Hippo Eats Dwarf, but I leave the story about it open ended, stating that no one knows (or is admitting) who created it. Unfortunately it's too late to revise what I wrote because the book is already rolling off the presses. I guess that's the danger of writing about recent events. You risk getting outdated. (via Adrants)

Rainbow vs. Tornado — A very cool picture... and it's not photoshopped. It was taken by Eric Nguyen in Kansas in 2004, and was featured as the Astronomy Picture of the Day on June 13, 2005. APOD explains: "Last June in Kansas, storm chaser Eric Nguyen photographed this budding twister in a different light -- the light of a rainbow. Pictured above, a white tornado cloud descends from a dark storm cloud. The Sun, peeking through a clear patch of sky to the left, illuminates some buildings in the foreground. Sunlight reflects off raindrops to form a rainbow. By coincidence, the tornado appears to end right over the rainbow."

Fighting Dinosaurs Fossil — Zkato wants to know if the fossil of fighting dinosaurs found on the website of the Nakasato dinosaur Center is real. The fossil does sound a little too good to be true:

One Protoceratops, a herbivorous (plant-eating) dinosaur, perished in the struggle with a carnivorous theropod, Velociraptor. After their death 80 million years ago, both skeletons were fossilized, then finally unearthed in 1971 in fully articulated forms without having been smashed.

However, not only is it real, it's one of the most famous fossils in the world. It was found in Mongolia in 1971, and was exhibited in 2000 at the American Museum of Natural History. An episode of Discovery Channel's Dinosaur Planet included a computer-graphic reconstruction of the struggle between the protoceratops and the velociraptor. The fighting dinosaur website seems to be circulating around right now because someone linked to it on digg.com.

The big mystery is how the two dinosaurs managed to get buried alive while fighting. Dinosaur Planet's theory is that "the animals were most likely fighting on a rain-soaked sand dune which collapsed preserving them mid-battle." Or they could have gotten stuck in a sudden sandstorm. A few other theories are outlined in a post on cryptozoology.com.

32-pound Cat — I love fat cat pictures, and here are some good ones, courtesy of Kieran Charette who reports that they were taken at a vets office in Vancouver. Apparently the cat is perfectly healthy. Just large. 32 pounds, to be exact. (Which makes him 8 pounds lighter than Sassy, aka Munchkin.) I don't see any reason why these pictures would be fake. (Although the datestamp on the pictures--09/01/2007--is obviously wrong.)

Near Miss Over London — Barry Bland snapped a photograph of two airplanes apparently narrowly avoiding colliding in the sky over London. However, Civil Aviation Authorities are dismissing the photograph as an optical illusion, pointing out that none of their safety systems indicated that the two planes were close to each other. The BBC reports:

British Air Line Pilots Association chairman Captain Mervyn Granshaw described it as a "fluke photograph". He explained how visual factors conspire to make the planes could look closer together, but safety measures meant they could not be in such proximity. While the lower plane was a A300, a smaller freight plane, the one behind was a JAL A330 - a larger, passenger plane. The difference in size, angle of the photograph and the distance it was taken from - the ground to two planes at high altitude - would exaggerate the effect, he said.

I'm inclined to agree that it's just an optical illusion, since I've seen these kinds of "near miss" photos before. (For instance, there's this phony near miss over San Francisco.) The lack of visual reference points in the sky can really play tricks on your eyes. (Thanks to Charlie Wright for the link.)

Hoax Websites of Lost — After getting the first season of Lost on dvd for christmas, I've become hooked on the show. Although I'm beginning to suspect that the writers of the show are simply going to introduce one mystery after another without ever offering an explanation for anything. But anyway, here are some hoax websites related to Lost: Oceanic World Air (the airline that the Lost passengers were flying on), Dharma Industries (the mysterious project that was being conducted on the island), and The Hanso Foundation (The philanthropic foundation funding the Dharma Initiative. This page is part of an alternate reality game, as is the Dharma Industries site). If you know of any other Lost-related hoax sites, let me know.

And here's something that isn't a hoax, but is rather curious. If you type the mysterious numbers from Lost (4 8 15 16 23 42) into google maps, they correspond to the approximate latitude and longitude of an island in the middle of the Pacific. My guess is that this probably isn't an accident.

Update: A few more hoax websites of Lost:

http://www.driveshaftband.com (the website of Charlie's band. Thanks to Nordan for this link.)

http://www.mrcluck.com or http://www.mrclucks.com (websites of the fast-food restaurant that Hurley used to work in, before he won the lottery. As far as hoax websites go, these aren't very fully developed. The front page simply links to a podcast about the show.)

The island in the Pacific mentioned above is Kosrae Island (Thanks to Eric Schucard and Tim for this info).

Dating Service for Single Men Seeking Birthmoms — Ally forwarded me a link to the website withchild.us, along with this comment:

A friend sent this to me (we used to be part of a young mom's group) and I thought it was really disturbing... Could this site be a hoax? I sure hope so... It's a site that hooks up men who want to adopt with girls who don't want to give up their babies and they have the slogan "Attention Single Men Seeking To Adopt A Baby: Why snatch a baby from a poor 18-year-old birthmom when you can have the baby and the birthmom?" Yeah, weird...

I'm sad to say that I don't think withchild.us is a hoax. Bizarre, yes. But not a hoax. The idea the site promotes, as Ally said, is to pair up guys who want to adopt or find a wife, with pregnant, single women who are considering adoption. The mother gets to keep her baby, the guy gets to have an instant family (wife and kid), and theoretically everyone is happy. But check out the two guys, George Duckworth and Patrick Gibbons, who are listed as seeking pregnant brides:

Not surprisingly, there are no women-seeking-men registered on the site.

Withchild.us is registered to Tom Alciere, who seems to view the adoption industry as an evil business that encourages young girls to get pregnant so it can sell their babies. His alternative is to encourage the young girls to marry guys who would otherwise be shopping for mail-order brides. (He even says, "Why travel to the Philippines to marry an 18-year-old cheerleader when there are young ladies available in your area?") On the surface it seems like a logical solution. Except, of course, that it completely ignores real-world considerations, such as whether any 18-year-old girl in her right mind would want to be saddled with Duckworth for the rest of her life. Alciere is also registered as the owner of internetbrides.info, where he offers info about finding an internet bride, as well as links to sites where you can "get laid tonight". A quick google search reveals that Alciere was a New Hampshire state representative, in which position he stirred up controversy by encouraging people to kill police officers. Charming guy.

Budgie Enjoys Cross-Stitching — Birds can be very clever, but so clever that they'll take up stitching as a hobby? I'm not so sure about that, though that's what Sandra Battye claims of her three-year-old budgie, Spike. She says:

"She would sit on my shoulder and watch me for hours. One day I just sat and didn’t stitch. It seemed to frustrate her. Then suddenly she picked up the needle in her beak and began cross-stitching herself. I was staggered. Now I can’t stop her. She still gets a bit confused at how the patterns work but she is very good at pulling and pushing the needle through the fabric."

Cross-Stitcher magazine gave Spike its Young Cross-Stitcher of the Year Award for 2005. I'm willing to believe that the budgie might enjoy picking up the needle and tugging on it... but actually maneuvering the needle through the fabric is a bit harder to believe. Though sometimes animals do amazing things. I'd like to see a video of Spike in action before I list this as real. I'm curious how much help the owner gives the budgie. (Thanks to Melanie Brock for the link)

Rescued Cat and Frogkitten — The expression on this cat's face is pretty wild, but I don't see any evidence of photoshopping. I found the image on this Russian livejournal site, so I'm guessing it might be a Russian fireman who just saved the cat.


This little guy, however, ("frogkitten" -- whose image has been floating around the internet for years) has definitely been photoshopped.

Carjacker Strategy: Place Paper On Your Rear Window — You may have received this email warning recently:

Imagine: You walk across the parking lot, unlock your car and get inside. Then you lock all your doors, start the engine and shift into REVERSE. Habit!
You look into the rear-view window to back out of your parking space and you notice a piece of paper, some sort of advertisement stuck to your rear window. So, you shift into PARK, unlock your doors and jump out of your vehicle to remove that paper (or whatever it is) that is obstructing your view... when you reach the back of your car, that is when the car-jackers jump out of no where ... jump into your car and take off -- your engine was running, your purse is in the car, and they practically mow you down as they speed off in your car.
BE AWARE OF THIS NEW SCHEME
Just drive away and remove the paper that is stuck to your window later and be thankful that your read this email and that you forwarded it to your friends.

I got it and dismissed it as a hoax, given its similarity to the false warning about people trying to sell perfume in parking lots. (They supposedly get you to sniff the perfume which is really ether and knocks you out.) But an article in the Mercury News notes that it might be worth paying attention to the paper-on-the-rear-window warning. They interview a California Highway Patrol officer who says:

I have heard of this a few times, and it is true. What makes it popular among car thieves is that it's non-confrontational (no gun or threat needed) which equals a lesser fine or sentence if they're caught. And it's a lot easier than traditional methods. Your readers should definitely heed this advice to drive away.

David Emery notes that the warning might be a bit overblown, but also cautions that: "Much more important than worrying about whether or not to remove a piece of paper stuck to your windshield, therefore — in any situation where you might be vulnerable to a carjacking — is being aware of your surroundings and taking note of who may be lurking nearby as you enter or exit your automobile."

Nasdijj, Native-American Memoirist — Here we go again. Another memoirist has been unmasked as a phony. This time it's Nasdijj, celebrated Native-American author of autobiographical works such as The Blood Runs Like A River Through My Dreams and The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping. Turns out he ain't Native American, unless by Native American one means white anglo-saxon protestant. His real identity seems to be that of Tim Barrus, who grew up in a middle-class community in Lansing, Michigan. As Barrus, he was a pioneer of gay "leather" erotica, before the gay community got tired of his antics and he disappeared for a few years, only to resurface as Nasdijj. The Native American community has had its doubts about him for quite a while, since he never seemed to have a firm grasp on the nuances of Navajo culture. But he's been fully unmasked by Matthew Fleischer in an article in this week's LA Weekly.

So this month alone we've seen the work of JT LeRoy, James Frey, and now Nasdijj called into question. One common theme is that the work of all three was widely praised for its raw, brutal honesty. Given how artificial and pre-packaged much of our world seems, there's obviously a big demand for things that seem uncommercialized and genuine. But as we're seeing, this demand has provided a perfect opportunity for con artists who can cynically exploit it by serving up fake experience as the real thing. (Thanks to Joe Littrell for forwarding the link.)