Hoax Museum Blog: Urban Legends

Gigantic Tortoise Found on Mt. Etna —
A video circulating on Italian news sites shows what appears to be a gigantic tortoise being transported on a truck. An accompanying story explains that this tortoise "of colossal dimensions" was found recently at the base of Mt. Etna. A helicopter full of Japanese tourists spotted the creature. At first they thought it was a large, dark rock, until they noticed it was moving. The helicopter pilot alerted the earthquake authorities, who arrived and discovered that it was a gigantic tortoise. People were able to film the tortoise as it was loaded onto a truck and taken away to be studied.

None of this story is true. It comes from an Italian fake news site, Corriere del Mattino. A clue that the story is fake (in addition to the absurdity of the gigantic tortoise) is that it's authored by "Carlo Darvini" (i.e. Charles Darwin).

However, Corriere del Mattino didn't create the video, which actually shows the transportation of a piece of art by Kurdish sculptor Zirak Mira. (Although a soundtrack of Italian voices was added for effect.) The full video of the tortoise sculpture's transportation is on YouTube. [info from vitadamamma.com]


This hoax recalls that image of a giant tortoise on a truck that was circulating last year. In that case, the image was actually a still from the 2006 Japanese monster movie Gamera the Brave.

High School Football Player Throws 40-yard Pass… To Himself —

Last week a Vine video of high-school football player Gary Haynes (of Manvel Texas High) throwing a 40-yard pass to himself went viral, sparking much discussion about whether the pass was real or fake.

In order to determine whether such a throw to oneself is possible some people have been performing all kinds of calculations trying to take into account vertical distance, acceleration due to gravity, weight of the ball, time from peak to ground, etc. The general consensus is that such a long self-pass would be extremely difficult, if not impossible.

But I don't think such calculations are necessary, because I don't see any reason to believe that the video shows anything other than the old "throw the ball off camera" trick... and then have someone else throw another ball back onto the screen so that it appears as if an amazing pass has been made. This is one of the oldest camera tricks there is in sports.

If Haynes produces a video in which the ball doesn't immediately go off camera, then I'll be more willing to take it seriously.

And, in fact, Haynes did repeat his stunt for his high school coach, who recorded it on a cell phone camera. The coach stood further back so that more of the trajectory of the ball can be seen. Sure enough, Haynes throws the ball and then catches it. But he doesn't throw it anywhere close to 40 yards. Looks more like 5 or 10 yards, which isn't very remarkable. This second video is included in a segment about Haynes produced by a Houston news team:


It's also worth noting that throwing a ball to oneself is an old joke in football, and has been featured in previous spoofs such as a) an old scene (from the 1990s?) in which wrestler "Mr. Perfect" throws a perfect pass to himself; and b) a Puma ad from 2013 in which Jamaal Charles of the Kansas City Chiefs threw a pass to himself. It was this ad, says Haynes, that inspired him to make his own video.

The Escherian Stairwell — Hidden away in a building at the Rochester Institute of Technology is a little-known marvel called the "Escherian Stairwell." It seems to defy the laws of physics, because when you walk up it, you arrive back at the same place where you started. Don't believe me? Just watch this video from RIT's "Can You Imagine" series in which it was featured.


Okay, so maybe the Escherian Stairwell is not a real thing. The real story here is that the video about it was created by Michael Lacanilao as an attempt to create a "modern myth." To get people believing that something impossible (such as an infinite loop stairwell) could actually exist.

Lacanilao hoped to expand the video into an even longer documentary about Rafael Nelson Aboganda, the (fictitious) architect who supposedly designed the stairwell. He ran a KickStarter campaign last year to raise funding for this project, but unfortunately the campaign didn't reach its funding goal.

But we still have the "Can You Imagine" video, and apparently it's fooled quite a few people since being uploaded to YouTube. Linda Besner, writing for Hazlitt, reports that, "[Lacanilao] had thought that people would see the video and be taken in for a maximum of 15 seconds before rational thought set in. Over the summer, he was taken aback by the flood of pilgrims showing up demanding to see the stairwell. “One couple was really, really angry. She told us that during her trip with her boyfriend they were arguing in the car about who would do the stairwell first. And they were both kind of scared like, 'No, you do it first, No, I don’t know if I want to do it first.'"