Hoax Museum Blog: Urban Legends

First Kiss —
Director Tatia Pilieva recently released a video showing 20 strangers who were paired up and then asked to kiss each other. The video quickly went viral, with currently over 37 millions views on YouTube.

But now the video is being outed as a kind of hoax because while it is true that the people were all strangers to each other, they were also professional performers. And the whole video was an ad for clothes, paid for by Wren Studio which is promoting its "Fall 14 collection".

Amanda Hess writes for Slate:

The video peddles the fantasy that beauty can spring from an unexpected connection between two random people, but what it's really showing us is the beauty of models making out. It's like the hipster Bachelor. I doubt that millions of viewers would be so quick to celebrate a video of randos kissing if they were all less thin, hip, stylish, charming, and well-manicured.

 
In an interesting parallel, Robert Doisneau's famous 1950 photo of a Parisian couple kissing, titled "The kiss at city hall," was also staged by professional models. Doisneau revealed this in 1993 after a couple who claimed to be the pair in the scene sued him, seeking compensation for the use of their image.

HUVr Board — On March 3 a video appeared online (with an accompanying website) announcing that a company had created an actual working hoverboard (aka HUVr Board), of the kind seen in the 1989 movie Back to the Future II, using antigravity technology. The video immediately went viral, with over 3 million views already on YouTube.


As many have noted, the video is clearly fake. No one has created a working hoverboard. But it was an impressive fake. Especially noteworthy is the number of celebrities appearing in the video — including Christopher Lloyd, Moby, Tony Hawk, Terrel Owens, etc.


Which raises the question: why did someone go to the considerable expense of creating this video? What's the purpose of it?

A leading theory is that it may be a teaser for an upcoming Back to the Future sequel.

But apparently the comedy site Funny or Die was involved in the video's production, as discovered by sleuths who found that an LA wardrobe stylist mentioned in her online resume having worked on the video for that site.

So maybe the video is just a viral comedy bit for Funny or Die.

Operation Cat Nip Confusion — In August 2011, hundreds of cats were rescued during a hoarding case, and then a team of veterinary students volunteered their time to spay and neuter the cats in order to prepare them for adoption.

A photo of this mass spaying/neutering event (named Operation Cat Nip) ran in the Gainesville Sun.


But about a year later that same photo began appearing on Twitter, stripped of any explanatory context, and accompanied by the caption: "Retweet if you say NO to animal testing."

The photo also had a watermark added, "Cause Animale Nord,"which is the name of a French animal welfare society.


Thousands of people obediently retweeted the photo, many of them adding messages expressing their disgust and disapproval, unaware that the photo had nothing to do with animal testing.

Like many viral photo fakes, this one has gone through cycles of being debunked, disappearing for a while, and then suddenly resurging in popularity. Right now, it's again in a popular phase.

April Fool UFO Hoax — One problem is that the planned hoax is too late in the day. According to the rules of April Fool's Day, pranks have to be done before noon! If you do it after noon, then you become the fool. (Does no one care about the rules any more???)

So it would be better to do this early in the morning on the 1st, rather than in the evening.

RC Group Plans UFO Hoax
A Group of RC enthusiasts plan a April Fools Day UFO hoax.
This group of RC enthusiasts seem to have a secret plan to create an apocalyptic UFO doomsday hoax on April Fools Day. I not sure how long this big secret can be kept seeing that the entire plan is posted on their public forum.
The group plans on getting as many people as than can to rig their flying RC quadracopters
(or anything else they can get in the air) with lights and release them to the skies on April 1st at 8 pm. The preferred color is blue but they say any color will do. The plan is to get them in the air while it is dark but early enough that people are still out and about.

Every day is Back to the Future Day! —
A Tumblr blog titled "Today is the Day Marty McFly Went to the Future" posts a new photo every day, indicating that today is the day McFly arrives in the future, as indicated by the Delorean's onboard time monitor in Back to the Future Part II (1989).

It's the latest take on the perennial return of Future Day (an ongoing internet prank in which people claim that the date of McFly's arrival is closer at hand than it really is).

The actual date of McFly's arrival is October 21, 2015.

Celebrity Salami —
A new website has many people slightly puzzled. It claims to be producing artisanal salamis made from lab-grown meat from celebrity tissue samples. So it's kind of like a celebrity version of Manbeef.com (from way back in 2001) — except that it's celebrity beef and the human meat is grown using in-vitro meat production.

Salon.com got a response from "Kevin" on the BiteLabs team who explains that "the site is partly a commentary on food culture, the ethics of meat, and 'the way celebrity culture is consumed.'"

So yes, it's a parody site. However, Kevin also insists that they do actually plan to make salami from celebrity meat.

I'm not sure about the current state-of-the-art of in-vitro meat technology. But I'm doubtful that the technology is good enough to make salami that tastes appetizing. Even if it is meat from Jennifer Lawrence of James Franco.

The idea of celebrity salami recalls an idea PETA proposed a few years back of making George Clooney-flavored tofu.

Error Day —
The Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna is hosting a 3-day festival that will celebrate and explore the human propensity to screw up. They're calling it Error Day. Festivities begin on Feb. 28 and continue until Mar. 2.

From the website for the event (which is mostly in Italian, but has a few pages in English): "Welcome errors, blunders, mistakes, miscarriages, misunderstandings, omissions, faults, failures, inaccuracies, misapprehensions, oversights, misprints, howlers, wrongs, gaffes, lapsuses, goofs, betrayals, fails, falls: here is humanity's true common denominator!"

Big Mango Disappears — The town of Bowen in Queensland, Australia is home to the world's largest mango statue. It's 33 feet tall, 26 feet wide, and weighs 7 tons. Yesterday, that mango went missing. Employees of the Bowen tourist information centre, adjacent to the statue, said they showed up for work and it was simply gone.


CCTV footage revealed a mobile crane backing up to the statue in the night and taking off with it.

Word quickly spread via social media of the missing mango.


However, people quickly suspected that the mango heist might be a publicity stunt since no theft report was filed with the police. And sure enough, a chicken restaurant chain, Nando's, has now owned up to the theft. It's some kind of promotion for its new mango sauce.

The mango never traveled very far. It was moved to a paddock behind the information center and covered with a tarp. Nando's claims to have further plans for it. But, in the meantime, they've posted a video showing how they managed to "steal" the mango. [link: npr.org]

The Buckhead Neighborhood Coalition Against Justin Bieber —
After Justin Bieber reportedly looked at a few houses in the Buckhead community of Atlanta, Georgia, a group calling itself the Buckhead Neighborhood Coalition formed to protest him moving to the area.

And since the media loves to cover anything related to Justin Bieber, the protest group was soon making headlines, reported on by the BBC, CNN, Daily Mail, Time, Atlanta Journal Constitution, etc.

Harold White, leader of the group, told CNN: "We're concerned he'll bring the wrong type of element into a quiet, residential area. It is our position that a person with his means could certainly find a neighborhood more suited to his eclectic lifestyle."

On its Facebook page, the group further explained:

As a community here in Buckhead, we have worked hard to achieve our goals and get to where we are. Justin Bieber's relocation to Atlanta can be nothing but bad for our children, as well as the community. Some can't even let their children play in the driveway without fear; he has raced vehicles under the influence, before. What's to say he won't do it again? As a home owner down the street from this residence, one can assume many people will be contacting real estate agents soon enough.

When asked if the protest was excessive, given that Bieber hadn't actually bought a house in Buckhead, White replied: "This is sort of a warning to say 'We don't need you here we don't want yellow Lamborghinis driving around our roads at 90 miles an hour'."

The coalition staged a rally Monday in front of an on-the-market mansion.

But after the rally, an Atlanta morning show called The Regular Guys, broadcast on Atlanta station Rock 100.5, admitted that the protest was actually an elaborate joke engineered by them. The "protesters" were interns at their show. And 'Harold White' was actually one of the Regular Guys hosts, Tim Andrews.

An accidental victim of the phony protest was former Atlanta mayor Sam Massell, president of the Buckhead Coalition, which is a genuine neighborhood group, totally unaffiliated with the faux Buckhead Neighborhood Coalition. He had been receiving hundreds of phone calls from the media, inquiring about the Justin Bieber protest, about which he was entirely clueless. [link: accessAtlanta.com]

Loch Ness Chip Monster — Artist Prudence Straite makes works of art out of fish-and-chip shop food. Below is her version of the Loch Ness Monster.

It's a chip monster, and it looks like the banks of the Loch are made from fried fish. [via Yahoo! News]