Hoax Museum Blog: Urban Legends

Amputees Used in War Games — Apparently the U.S. Government is prepared to do everything it takes to prepare our troops for battle. This includes hiring amputees to play wounded civilians in war games. They're bussed down to Fort Polk, La., where the soldiers-in-training must also contend with fake Arab civilians, "smoke-making machines and an intercom system that pipes in 'recordings of screaming women, crying babies, barking dogs and other sound effects throughout the whole city,' and, coming soon, the simulated smells of "vomit, burning rubber, burning bodies, those kinds of things."

I was impressed by this account of one scene that occurred during the simulated warfare:

A Humvee and a convoy of trucks were attacked with a fake rocket-propelled grenade, causing a fake explosion that caused Cole Young, 71, who lost a leg in an oil pipeline accident, to lie on the ground with fake blood spurting from his amputated leg. A soldier came to give Young some fake first aid. But when he saw that Young's hand was under his poncho, working his blood-spurting machine, the soldier yelled, "He's got a (bleep) wire!" and started firing laser bullets into Young's chest. That caused the other fake civilians to start screaming, ``Murderers!" That distracted the soldiers, enabling a bunch of fake insurgents to sneak up and wipe them all out — "mowing down the troops as effortlessly," Tower writes, "as they might a herd of grazing cows.''
Which is, alas, not unusual: Time after time, Tower reports, the fake insurgents massacred the American troops in these games.
Grandma would no doubt say that the silver lining in that news is that the games are just ... well, games. In the real war in Iraq, America is kicking insurgent butt, says President George W. Bush.

Mummified Mother Still Watching TV — Big Gary forwarded me this urban-legendesque story about the mummified body of Johannas Pope, who was "found in a chair in front of her television set 2 1/2 years after her death." Apparently she had been left there by her family, who were honoring her wish that she not be buried. They had kept the air conditioner running on full blast, thereby slowing the process of decay. Must have had a huge electricity bill.

Coincidentally, also in the news is the story of Mirko Sartori, who kept the mummified body of his mother sealed up in his bedroom wardrobe so that he could keep receiving her pension check. He evidently was a bad son, since he didn't let her watch TV.

Update: The story of Johannas Pope gets even weirder. Apparently she didn't want to be buried because she believed she was going to come back to life. And apparently her family agreed with her, because they honored her wish, to the extent of engaging in an elaborate deception for 2 1/2 years to prevent people from finding out there was a dead body upstairs in their house: "Friends and relatives who visited were told Pope was upstairs, ill, Owens [the county coroner] said. Some yelled "hello" up the stairs."

It’s Homemade! — I find this a bit hard to believe. According to this news report "Almost a third of young Britons have passed off a ready-made meal as their own creation in order to impress someone, according to a survey by the Department of Health on Monday." Sure, it's common to joke that something is homemade when it's not, but usually it's easy to tell the difference between ready-made and homemade. The same survey also found that "one in 10 had never cooked a proper meal for themselves because they 'don't know how'." I find that easier to believe.

Flaming Mouse Burns Down House — Over in the forum, the 'flaming rodent of doom' thread discusses a story that was reported last weekend about a man who threw a mouse onto a pile of burning of leaves, only to have the mouse run out of the leaves and back at the house, setting the entire structure on fire. Served the guy right, most people thought. But the story also sounded a little too weird to be true. And sure enough, Charybdis just posted a link to an update (which I thought deserved a place here on the front page of the site) in which the guy whose house burned down swears that isn't what happened. He says the mouse was already dead when he threw it on the fire and the wind blew the flames towards his house:

Capt. Jim Lyssy of the Fort Sumner Fire Department said the rumor probably got started because there was "a little too much excitement" at the time of the fire. Mares lost everything -- and has no insurance -- but the mouse story still makes him smile. "I started laughing, and I'll be laughing from now on," he said. "It's silly."

Potential new risk from mobile phones — Dipankar Mitra sent me this graphic which is circulating via email, warning of a "Potential new risk from mobile phones." He notes that it's accompanied by a caption that reads:

Please use left ear while using cell (mobile), because if you use the right one it will affect brain directly. This is a true fact from Apollo medical team. Please forward to all your well wishers

He asks, "Do let me know if it is real or hoax..."

Well, the caption is definitely a hoax. I have no idea what the Apollo medical team is. (When I google the term I just pull up references to this email.) And the suggestion that it would somehow be safer to use your left ear rather than your right is absurd.

However, the graphic and the information in it are not a hoax. The illustration was created by the Graphic News agency back in 2002. (Click 'Graphic Search' on their site, then do a keyword search for the term 'blood-brain barrier', and you'll pull up the graphic.) The information it describes comes from a study published in the May 2002 issue of the scientific journal Differentiation. Researcher Darius Leszcynski did find that when human endothelial cells were exposed to the maximum level of radiation allowed under international safety standards for mobile phones, a stress response could be observed in the cells. But he also noted that most mobile phones emit much less radiation than the levels used in the experiment. So there's probably no imminent danger of damaging your blood-brain barrier by using a mobile phone.

James Frey, Fiction Writer? — It seems to be quite the week for literary hoaxes. First there were the new revelations in the JT LeRoy case, and now The Smoking Gun is now accusing author James Frey of inventing many of the details in his autobiographical novel, A Million Little Pieces. The book tells the story of Frey's past as a drug-addict and criminal. But the Smoking Gun alleges that, "The 36-year-old author, these documents and interviews show, wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw 'wanted in three states.'" They concede that the guy was a drug addict and spent time in rehab, but insist that his life has not been as colorful as he's made it out to be. As a police sergeant whom they interview about Frey says: "Seems Mr. Frey has quite an imagination. He thinks he's a bit of a desperado. He's making a bunch of crap up."

I haven't read A Million Little Pieces, and I don't think I will. Confessional novels by former drug addicts going on about how bad they used to be (but how they're now reformed and don't want anyone else to do what they did) always strike me as being annoying, preachy, and a bit full of themselves.

Four Eyes Illusion — Obviously photoshopped, but interesting nonetheless. Looking at it too long may cause a sensation of whirling and loss of balance. I found it at Mason Inman's blog. (I have no idea where he found it).

Cyclops Kitten — Ichneutron sent me a link to this picture of Cy, the Cyclops Kitten on Yahoo Photos. According to the info on Yahoo, Cy was born in Redmond, Oregon, on Dec. 28, 2005 with only one eye and no nose. He lived for one day. The other cat in the litter (there were only two) was born normal. The photo is by Traci Allen. There's no reason to think the photo isn't real. The condition is known as Cyclopia. Messybeast.com gives this description of it:

The eyes are fused into a single enlarged eye that is placed below the nose (the nose may or may not form, if it forms it resembles a proboscis). Much of the face may be missing, such that the eye and proboscis (if present) are placed near the crown of the skull... Severe cases of cyclopia result in stillbirth or in death within a few hours of birth.

The four-eyed kitten, however, remains a hoax.

Update: I notice that quite a few people are calling hoax on this picture. But I'm keeping it listed as real. After all, it's a known form of mutation, and the photo has a source.

Update 2: And the photoshops of Cy have begun.


Update 3 (April 8, 2006): Cy's owner has sold him to the Lost Museum, a creationist museum opening soon in Phoenix, NY.

J.T. LeRoy: An Update — Last October I posted about the writer JT LeRoy, and the suspicion that he was an elaborate hoax: that his books had actually been written by a woman named Laura Albert, and that the person who appeared in public as LeRoy was an actor. Today the New York Times has revealed more evidence that seems to confirm this theory. The person who has been appearing in public as LeRoy seems to be Savannah Knoop, the half sister of Geoffrey Knoop (who's the guy that supposedly helped rescue the teenage LeRoy). The Times found an image of Savannah Knoop online, and people who have met LeRoy confirm that she is he. Take a look:

Savannah Knoop

J.T. LeRoy

The Times also notes that there's "a mounting circumstantial case that Laura Albert is the person who writes as JT Leroy. Pressure to admit the ruse has been building on Ms. Albert since October, when New York magazine published an article that advanced a theory that she was the author of JT Leroy's books." They note that all the money paid to LeRoy appears to go to Albert or her family members. They also note that LeRoy wrote a travel article for the Times about a trip to Disneyland Paris, but (after looking at pictures of Albert) employees at Disneyland have confirmed that the person who was traveling as LeRoy was actually Albert.

So it seems pretty clear that LeRoy is a hoax.

The question is, does it matter? Defenders of LeRoy have been arguing that if people enjoy the books, the identity of the author shouldn't matter. This is a lot like the excuse that P.T. Barnum always offered, that it doesn't matter it people are fooled, as long as they're entertained. Critics are responding that it does matter because readers have been manipulated into caring about someone who doesn't exist. I suspect that the critics are going to win the day in this case, because the phony LeRoy has gone too far and people feel like they've been used. So LeRoy will probably go the way of Milli Vanilli. We'll have to wait to see if readers file a class-action suit against LeRoy.

The Tempest Prognosticator (aka Leech Barometer) — Students of the history of meteorology may be aware of the Tempest Prognosticator of Dr. George Merryweather, but it was news to me. The Tempest Prognosticator was a device invented in the mid-nineteenth century that allowed the forecast of storms, via leeches. Apparently there's been some debate about whether this contraption actually existed, but author Paul Collins, on his blog, confirms that it did. In fact, it was displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Here's how it worked:

The "Tempest Prognosticator" consisted of twelve pint bottles of white glass, round the base of a circular stand, at the top of which was a bell surrounded by twelve hammers. Each bottle was connected with one of the hammers through a metal tube in its neck, containing a piece of whalebone and a wire, to which was attached a small gilt chain. Here is the inventor’s description of how the Prognosticator works: "After having arranged this mouse trap contrivance, into each bottle was poured rain water, to the height of an inch and a half; and a leech placed in every bottle, which was to be its future residence; and when influenced by the electromagnetic state of the atmosphere a number of leeches ascended into the tubes; in doing which they dislodged the whalebone and caused the bell to ring."

Paul Collins also reports that some guy has built a working replica of the Prognsticator, and has it on display at the Barometer World Museum in Devon, England. No word on whether it actually worked.

Healing Power of Prayer Study — Last night ABC News had a segment about a study being funded by the National Institutes of Health to determine if prayer can help cancer patients heal faster. Or more specifically, whether a stranger's prayers can help a patient heal faster. (The people running the study have invented the bs term 'distant healing' to make what they're studying sound more legitimate.) My jaw was on the floor as I was watching this. I couldn't believe the government had been suckered into paying for it. I suppose the NIH will next be funding studies of voodoo dolls. But unfortunately, ABC didn't spend a lot of time debunking the study. In fact, if you didn't know better, you might have got the impression from their segment that this was a perfectly scientific study, although they did give a critic a few seconds to make a quick point.

The woman running the study, Marilyn Schlitz, sounds like a real piece of work. She's head of something called the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Since she's a firm believer in the power of prayer, it's a good bet that her study will find that prayer does, indeed, have an effect. Never mind that a study conducted by Duke University has already determined that patients show no improvement in their condition when people pray for them. In an interview with SFGate.com, Schlitz desperately tries to duck this inconvenient fact, suggesting that "One study cannot prove or disprove a particular hypothesis." Oh, really? (Unless the study produces results she likes. Then, I'm sure, she would feel it was definitive.) Plus, in an effort to make what she's doing sound more secular, she suggests that she's not studying prayer, per se, but whether one person's "compassionate intention" towards another person, even if those two people are separated by thousands of miles and don't know each other, can have positive medical benefits. But it seems to me like we already have sufficient evidence to answer this. When celebrities (like George Harrison, for instance) are hospitalized, hundreds of thousands of people around the world pray for them. These prayers don't seem to do squat. Shouldn't that be proof enough that prayer has no therapeutic value?

Truthiness — The American Dialect Society has announced its words of the year for 2005 (links to a pdf file). A number of them are relevant to the study of hoaxes. For instance, the word of the year is Truthiness:

truthiness: the quality of stating concepts or facts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.

I suppose the opposite of truthiness would be hoaxiness. A few of the other words of the year include:

flee-ancée: runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks.
Whizzinator: a trademarked urinating device using a realistic prosthetic penis and synthetic urine in order to pass a drug test.
Bumper Nutz: fake testicles hung from the rear end of a vehicle.

In Hippo Eats Dwarf I have a lot of word definitions like this. I included Whizzinator, but truthiness and flee-ancée are new to me, so they didn't make it in. Nor did bumper nutz, even though I knew what these are. (Prankplace, that company I have affiliate links to, actually sells them.) If there's ever a second edition of the book, I'll put them in. (via The Presurfer)

Update: As quite a few people have now pointed out, Stephen Colbert coined the meaning for "truthiness" used in the ADS's definition.

The Flower Fairy — A Flower Fairy is on the loose on Anderson Island:

Last spring flower bouquets and potted plants began appearing without explanation at the homes of numerous residents of this small island southwest of Tacoma. After a summer hiatus, the practice has resumed, island Fire Chief Jim Bixler said... Residents who received the deliveries said they heard a knock and answered the door to find a floral gift with a handwritten note saying, "Hope these make you smile." Each note is signed, "Love, the Flower Fairy."

My theory: it's a local florist trying to drum up business by encouraging spontaneous flower giving. Still, it's a nice idea.

McDonald’s Nessie Ad — Here's an ad for McDonalds featuring the Loch Ness Monster (or one of her cousins). I think the language they're speaking is Polish. (via Ceticismo Aberto)

Counterfeit Money Clogs Toilet — A Colorado couple, realizing the police were onto their counterfeiting operation, tried to get rid of the incriminating evidence by flushing it all down the toilet. The results were predictable:

There's dirty money associated with crime, then there's dirty money. Investigators encountered the latter on Thursday, when they discovered a rental duplex that had flooded with sewage when the tenants flushed at least $10,000 in suspected counterfeit money down a toilet, crippling the duplex's plumbing system... By the time police arrived at the duplex Thursday, standing water and sewage covered its floors and the toilets weren't functional. Detectives said Marquez and Valdez had been relieving themselves in plastic shopping bags for at least a week because of the inoperable plumbing... Video of the duplex's plumbing shot by plumbers using a "snake camera" on Thursday showed hunks of suspected counterfeit bills packed into the pipes. The clogs span from just a few feet beyond the toilet to almost 100 feet along the lines. The volume of bills flushed down the toilet was so great that the money was visible when police and sheriff's deputies lifted a manhole cover on the street outside the duplex.

$25 an Hour, Anyone Hired — Cranky Media Guy (aka Bob Pagani) noticed this story in the HawkEye about a job offer that sounds an awful lot like a Ponzi Scheme. Terrie Brown, who owns a limousine business in Burlington, Iowa, is offering to hire absolutely anyone at the rate of $25 an hour. Here's the part of her offer that sounds like a scam:

The hiring process includes filling out an application and then paying a $10 processing fee, according to Brown. Everyone who fills out an application and pays the $10 fee receives a time card and is hired on the spot, she said. In fact, she added, anyone willing to work who pays the processing fee will be earning $25 an hour. "Everyone is paid $25 an hour whether they work one hour or 40 ... and everyone will receive benefits," Brown said. The benefits include health, dental vision and life insurance for an undetermined fee.

So you pay her $10 to get hired, but I bet that only a very few people will actually be put to work and earn that $25/hour. Still, hundreds of people have been signing up for the job:

Since Tuesday, owner Terrie Brown has been inundated with hundreds of job applications from high school students to senior citizens. On Thursday, parking at the business on the corner of Roosevelt and Sunnyside avenues had to be directed due to high–traffic volume. "We had hundreds in here and we want hundreds more," Brown said. "As long as you are willing to work, we want you."

She's even giving people incentives to recruit other suckers to sign up for this job. The Burlington Police are aware of what she's doing, but won't comment on any investigation.

House For Sale - Princess Caraboo’s Grave Attached — The Bristol Evening Post reports that the house adjacent to what is believed to be Princess Caraboo's grave in Bristol is up for sale. The asking price is a fairly reasonable £299,950 (about $530,000). (I reported back in 2003 that the gravesite was in danger of being paved over to make a parking lot, but I guess that threat was averted.) I can't find the Bristol Evening Post article online, but here's the property listing. (From the date of the listing, it looks like it's been on the market for a while.) If I had the money, I would seriously think about buying it. I figure it would be a great place for a real Museum of Hoaxes. Plus, it would be close to my wife's family in Gloucester. Unfortunately I don't happen to have a spare half-million in my bank account at the moment. So much for that idea.

The State of Maddocha — Olivia Bruce emailed me to ask: Where is this place...or does it just not exist? I'd be hard-pressed to say where exactly Maddocha is. (Its official website simply says that Maddocha was "a wide-open space that was discovered and then occupied by John Madly and his family.") So I'm going to go with option B. It just doesn't exist. A quick google search reveals that Maddocha seems to be the creation of Deartra D. Boone.

Dukes of Fallujah — This is pretty obviously photoshopped. The colors are too bright, for one thing. Also, I don't think the Army lets soldiers custom paint their jeeps. (via Telebush)

Fire Fart — This video of a guy lighting a candle by setting his fart on fire is obviously fake. (Given that the video is one big fart joke, it's probably not safe for work, though it's otherwise work safe.) However, it seems that a number of people actually think it's real. To verify that it's fake, all you need to do is visit the url displayed on the film: sheepfilms.co.uk, which is the website of amateur filmmaker David Packer (aka Sheep). He has a lot of films starring himself that employ various special effects, such as fake fire farts.