Hoax Museum Blog: Urban Legends

Ass-Kicking Sheriff — Kristen sent in this picture of a Kern County police car bearing a decal with the motto, "We'll Kick Your Ass... And take your doughnuts too." The picture is doing the email rounds (it's been doing them for about a year) accompanied by a caption that explains:
Kern County California police drove this car for 1 week before an officer noticed what the graphics company employee did on the passenger side of the car. The employee did this on his last day working for the graphics company before he retired.
The picture is actually real (i.e. it's not photoshopped), but the caption explaining it is incorrect, which is a pity because the real story is better than the phony story. The decals weren't created by a mischievous graphics company employee. They were created by the Kern County police themselves as an in-house joke. This all happened last year (2003). Of course, when the picture of the squad car began circulating via email, it soon found its way to a local newspaper, the editor of which called up the Sheriff to ask him what it was all about. The Sheriff at first denied all knowledge of it, saying it was a doctored photo, but later the truth leaked out: a Kern County police Commander had ordered the decals made. All the details of the story can be found in this KGET News article. Of course, it didn't take long for someone to start selling 'We'll Kick Your Ass' merchandise on cafepress. Or, if your dog's birthday is coming up, you can get him a 'We'll Bite Your Ass' t-shirt.

Airplane in Troy — From the Hoax Forum: Gutza has submitted this suspicious goof from the movie Troy, which shows an airplane flying behind Brad Pitt (Achilles) as he stands in front of the Temple of Apollo. I saw this movie just a week ago, and I don't remember seeing a plane in that scene. You'd think it would have been pretty obvious. More significantly, the movie sleuths over at moviemistakes.com don't seem to have noted this either, even though I'm sure they'd be falling all over themselves to point it out if it actually was there. The picture, of course, could be a still from the set. But it's most likely just photoshopped.

Senior Prank Time — It's senior prank time. Students at North Penn High School observed the tradition by sticking 35,000 plastic forks into the school lawn. Over at Niles North High School, they put their school up for sale on eBay, though most of the bids seemed to come from teachers in on the joke. I searched for the auction itself, but unfortunately it looks like eBay has removed it from the site.

Fluids for Christ — Just last night I added a new feature to the site: a discussion forum (I'm calling it the Hoax Forum) where people can post questions or info about new hoaxes they've found. I figure this will be better than having everyone email me stuff like this directly, since the email just sits unanswered in my inbox for ages. And already, on the first day of the forum's existence, someone has posted something good. Rachel Hurley found Fluids for Christ, which claims to be a blood bank for Christian fluid donations. After all, what good Christian would want to receive heathen blood? The site is almost believable (there are Christian Credit Agencies and Christian Pharmacies, so why not Christian Blood Banks?), until you start looking through it and it begins to become obviously silly, such as when they start describing their "Christpherization methods" of separating out the Christian components of blood.

More Weird Clouds — Here's a picture of some more weird clouds, sent in by Darren McEwen. I've got absolutely no information about where or when this picture was taken, or if it's real or not. I'm guessing that it's real because it looks to me like some of the scenes we saw during the forest fires here in Southern California last year. But the time stamp on the picture says it's from 2002, so it can't be from the 2003 fires.

Bizarre Clouds — If I just saw this picture randomly out of context, I'd swear it was fake. After all, I've never in my life seen clouds that look like that. But according to the Astronomy Picture of the Day site (which I trust), the picture is real. They're Mammatus Clouds that appeared over Monclova, Mexico. Apparently such clouds sometimes form in turbulent air near thunderstorms.

Jesus Christ Online Pharmacy — Karl Marx did say that religion is the opium of the masses. Well, now it's also a direct supplier of Prozac, Wellbutrin, and Zoloft. Yes, you can get all this and more over at JesusChristRx.com. You can even order up a whole bunch of cheap Viagra from the Son of God himself, if that's your thing. I really don't know what to make of the site. It appears to be a genuine online pharmacy. The Presurfer (whose site I found the link at) notes that it's some kind of knock-off of ChicagoRx.biz. If you click on the About Us link, it even describes itself as Chicago Rx. I suspect JesusChristRx is simply yet another attempt to doll up a business for the Fundamentalist crowd by slapping a Christian label on it... even if the business has nothing whatsoever to do with religion. Kind of like the Christian Debt Removers site I stumbled upon last week.

Citizens for a Murder-Free America — This is an old site, but I hadn't seen it before. It pretends to be the homepage of a lobbying group called 'Citizens for a Murder-Free America' who are campaigning for passage of 'Precrime' legislation that will help stop murders before they happen. In reality, the site is part of the publicity campaign for Steven Spielberg's movie Minority Report, which was about a future society where the police use psychics to see into the future and tell them about murders before they happen (based on a Philip K. Dick short story). It was a pretty good movie.

Impact in June — Head for the hills. The end of the world is near. For the past month conspiracy-theory sites have been all abuzz with the latest scare story: that a comet surrounded by a cloud of dust is going to hit the Earth this month and trigger an end-of-the-human-race scenario.

Word of the approaching comet was first leaked on the internet by someone using the screen name 'Aussie Bloke,' who claimed to be an Australian astronomer. You can look at some of his posts over at Bushcountry.org (thanks to Marco Langbroek for sending the link). They make pretty dramatic reading. For instance, here's where he describes the effect that the cometary impact will have:

"There will be several impacts of differing sizes spread over the globe. The bombardment will last a week or so at most. The largest fragment will rock the planet and the smaller ones will wipe out a city here or there depending on where they come down. There WILL be quakes and firestorms and major flooding of coastlines due to ocean impacts. Yes...it will be much like the movie 'deep impact' only worse."

According to Aussie Bloke, there's not much time to get your affairs in order because the dust cloud will begin to reach us tomorrow (June 8), and the first impact will occur on June 18.

Now it seemed pretty easy to dismiss some random guy calling himself Aussie Bloke, but then he decided to reveal his true identity. He said that he was Dr. Grant Gartrell, and sure enough there definitely is a fully credentialed Australian astronomer by that name... who has published articles about meteors and cometary impacts. But unfortunately (or fortunately, rather), that Dr. Grant Gartrell completely denies any knowledge of this 'Impact in June' stuff. In fact, he's been retired from astronomy for quite a while and now spends his time running a blueberry farm, not tracking comets.

It looks like the entire 'Impact in June' hysteria has actually been an elaborate hoax designed to poke fun at the conspiracy nuts. One clue that it was all a joke can be found in the evidence that was presented. For instance, one poster noted that you could tell the comet was approaching because "fireballs have increased significantly over the last several weeks and are happening EVERYWHERE." He then noted that a fireball was seen near Grover's Mill, New Jersey (scroll about a third of the way down the page). Grover's Mill, of course, is where the Martians supposedly landed during the 1938 War of the Worlds Panic Broadcast.

Fake Cop with Guard Sheep — I've heard of plenty of cases of people pretending to be cops, but this one takes the cake. It's the line about how "the bogus policeman used to patrol at night in company of a sheep that looks like a dog" that really boggles my mind. I'm trying to visualize a sheep that could pass for a dog, but my imagination just isn't good enough.

Woman Performs C-Section, on herself — This story just seems wrong on so many levels... Four years ago a 40-year old Mexican woman, alone in the middle of Nowhere, is giving birth to a baby. Her husband is getting drunk at the local cantina. She's been in labor twelve hours, and the baby isn't coming out. So she reaches over, grabs a butcher knife, slices open her stomach, reaches inside her uterus and pulls out her baby boy. Miraculously both her and the baby survive. When I read this story, it triggered all kinds of hoax alarm bells in my mind. How could anyone possibly do that, I thought. Wouldn't she have passed out from the pain? What about infection? Isn't it a little suspicious that there were no witnesses (though I suppose the very reason she did this was because there was no one around)? But when I did some research, sure enough the case has been described in a scientific journal. So it looks like the story is true. Amazing.

Phishing Scam Example — A Phishing scam is... well, I'll just let the webopedia define it because I'm too lazy to write a definition myself. Phishing is "the act of sending an e-mail to a user falsely claiming to be an established legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft. The e-mail directs the user to visit a Web site where they are asked to update personal information, such as passwords and credit card, social security, and bank account numbers, that the legitimate organization already has. The Web site, however, is bogus and set up only to steal the user’s information." Here's a very good example of a phishing scam that David Mitchell received in his email and put up on his site. It looks pretty convincing. I could see how people would be fooled by it.

Eric Bruderton — A guy calling himself Eric Bruderton has some dramatic footage up on his website of people (soldiers or mercenaries? It's hard to tell) being attacked by unseen assailants wielding rocket-propelled grenades. Bruderton himself admits he doesn't know what the footage is about. As he writes, "I don’t know these people, I don’t know who’s shooting at them and I don’t know why they are being targeted. I don’t even know where they are. Maybe the Middle East." But he insists that the footage is important, and that he has somehow put himself in danger by making the footage publicly available. The whole thing reeks of a Blair-Witch-style publicity stunt. But the footage, if it is staged (which I'm guessing it is), is pretty high production value. (the video takes about 20 or 30 seconds to load). (via Chapel Perilous)

Meteor Hoax — A couple of people have sent me links to this meteor hoax that the AP fell for. The AP reported that a meteor about the size of a small car hit near Olympia, Washington early this morning. Its source for this story was one Bradley Hammermaster, supposedly an Astronomy professor at the University of Washington, who called in a report of the meteor to Seattle's KIRO radio. The AP later had to admit that, "No one by the name of Hammermaster is known to the astronomy department, and the description given by the caller to the station of the object... was clearly bogus." However, it does appear that there really was meteor activity over Washington state, but nothing the size of a small car has been found. This hoax reminds me of a similar hoax perpetrated by the newspaperman Joseph Mulholland back in the 1890s. Mulholland claimed that a meteor had fallen in western Pennsylvania, but he also went on to claim, more dramatically, that it had set fire to much of the surrounding country.

Fake Road Rage Takes Turn for the Worse — If you break down by the side of the road, what should you do? Use your cellphone to call for help, of course. Or, if you're a complete idiot, you can pretend that you and your buddy are fighting so that concerned motorists will call the police for you. A group of budding geniuses in Massachusetts chose option B, and soon ended up in jail after a policeman showed up and ordered them to the ground at gunpoint.

Seance Hoax — On Monday illusionist Derren Brown performed a seance live on Britain's Channel 4, successfully channeling the spirit of 'Jane,' the victim of a mass suicide. Only after the show did he admit it was all a hoax... an attempt to debunk seances by showing how easily people can be manipulated into believing that they're real. Still, the show managed to attract more complaints than almost any other show in British history, although most of the complaints were lodged before the show aired (evidently because those complaining... church groups mostly... had seen into the future and knew they wouldn't like it before they saw it). Darren Brown is the same guy who pretended to play Russian Roulette on British TV back in October 2003. But for my money, it doesn't sound like Brown's faux-seance quite rivalled the drama of 1992's Ghostwatch Halloween seance.

Watching Paint Dry — UKTV has come up with the ultimate reality TV show: Watching Paint Dry. As the name suggests, viewers get to watch the thrilling spectacle of paint drying, broadcast live, 24 hours a day. And viewers can vote for their favorite paints: Matt, Gloss, Silk, Satin, etc. UKTV notes that, "Every other reality show is full of boring drips so we thought that we would go one step further." Is this real? Well, sort of. UKTV feels watching paint dry is "too boring" for TV, so it's only going to be broadcast on the internet. (via J-Walk)

Ass-vertising — First there was head-vertising. Now there's ass-vertising, which appears to be just as real as headvertising was (which means that, as odd as it seems, it actually is real). The concept behind assvertising is pretty simple. Slap an ad on an attractive woman's ass. I guess men are looking there anyway, so some advertiser (Night Agency, to be specific) had the brilliant idea to put the ads where the eyes are focused. Even though assvertising is real, tADoos (which are corporate-sponsored tattoos) remain a hoax. (via Adrants)

Second Thoughts About Rance — Yesterday I suggested that the anonymous blogger 'Rance' might really be a cartoonist/screenwriter named Keith Thomson because Thomson's name kept popping up when I tracked down who was initially hyping Rance in internet discussion groups. But people have pointed out that movie studios and talent agencies often create phony identities that they use to hype projects they're working on. Maybe the phony identities they used to hype Rance just happened to have been used earlier to hype Thomson's work. Could be. And whoever runs Defamer seems to feel confident that Rance really is a celebrity.

So I'm willing to consider that Rance is a celebrity. If this is the case, then it would be a celebrity who's a client of International Creative Management, and who probably is also a client of Nick Reed, the same agent who represents Keith Thomson. I searched for celebrities who fit this profile and the person I came up with is Kevin Pollak. He's a comedian; and he's represented by Nick Reed. Plus, what he writes on his online diary sounds a bit like Rance.
Admittedly Pollak is a shot in the dark. But I'm pretty sure that someone at ICM (most likely Nick Reed) helped hype Rance, so ICM somehow holds the solution to the mystery of who he is.

Unfortunate URLs — I posted an entry a week or so ago about unfortunate last names. On a related subject, here are some unfortunate URLs. First we have cummingfirst.com. It's the website of the Cumming First United Methodist Church located in Cumming, Georgia (via The Presurfer). It's definitely a real church and not a joke. Next we have IPWine.com, home on the web of the Ingleside Vineyards in Virginia. I actually visited the Ingleside Vineyards (it's a nice place), and when they told me their website url I had to ask them if they were joking. Incredibly, it didn't seem to have occurred to them what their url spelled out. Along the same lines is IPAnywhere (also not a joke). And WhorePresents.com. The classic joke url is PowergenItalia.com (or Power Genitalia), which has nothing to do with the real company called Powergen.