Hoax Museum Blog: Urban Legends

Calling 999 does not charge your mobile phone battery — Idiotic things people will believe: The Bedfordshire Police recently posted a statement on their website, informing everyone that calling 999 and then disconnecting immediately will not actually boost the battery life of your mobile phone battery, despite a rumor to the contrary. Apparently emergency operators have been receiving a lot of these phone-charging calls.

There's a similar rumor that claims you can recharge your mobile phone by putting it in a microwave for a minute. Also not true.

Don’t Ring 999 to Charge Your Mobile – It Doesn’t Work!
Bedfordshire Police would like to warn mobile phone users not to phone 999 to charge their mobiles.
It is known that a rumour or urban myth suggesting that calling 999 and disconnecting immediately will boost the battery life of a phone has been circulating for some time throughout the country.
Over the past 6 months the Force Control Room (FCR) has received numerous calls from members of the public who believe the myth and are incorrectly trying to get more power out of their mobile device.
Inspector Claire Ackerman, of the Force Control Room, said, “This myth has been circulating for some time now and we are not the only force to have suffered from these false calls. Calling 999 for anything other than an emergency or a non-police matter puts additional pressure on resources, ties up an operator and wastes valuable time that could be better spent helping genuine callers possibly in a life-threatening situation. The only way to boost a mobile phone battery is to use a charger.”

Pastor drowns trying to walk on water — A news story has been circulating recently about a west African preacher, Franck Kabele, who drowned while trying to show his congregation that he could walk on water just like Jesus Christ.


This story is almost certainly a hoax that media outlets are repeating as real news.

The Christian Post notes that this story about Franck Kabele was first reported in British papers back in August 2006. They say it first appeared in the Scottish Daily Record, but I found it printed a day earlier (Aug 29, 2006) in the London Evening Standard, as follows:

Priest drowns 'walking on water'
The Evening Standard (London) - Aug 29, 2006

A PRIEST in Gabon has drowned as he tried to demonstrate how Jesus walked on water.
Franck Kabele, 35, told churchgoers in the west African country's capital Libreville that after a revelation he realised that if he had enough faith he could walk on water like Jesus. "He took his congregation to the beach in Libreville saying he would walk across the Komo estuary, which takes 20 minutes by boat," said an onlooker. "He walked into the water, which soon passed over his head and he never came back."

The story had no byline. No details were provided about what church this priest belonged to. And further information never materialized. The story eventually ran in quite a few papers, but always with the exact same details and lack of sources. All of which raises red flags.


So where could this story have come from? Well, digging deeper back into news archives, I found a similar Reuters story that ran back in October 1993. Here's the version that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Minister, Students Drown Trying to Walk on Water
THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE - Friday, October 29, 1993

A group of Tanzanian students and a minister who tried to walk on water have drowned in Lake Victoria, police said yesterday.

The members of the Seventh-day Adventist church were traveling in a flotilla of canoes to a religious festival when they decided to make the walk on water .

"They decided to test their faith by walking on the water like Jesus, but they all drowned,'' a police spokesman said.

Other participants in the pilgrimage looked on helplessly from the shore as the victims drowned. Police are questioning four ministers who arranged the pilgrimage, but they said parents and relatives of the dead will not press charges.

This story had a lot more details, but it turned out to be a case of incorrect reporting. A week later the Seventh-day Adventist Church issued an official statement denying the report:

"Contrary to what Reuters reported, the fact is that on Sat., Oct. 23, a group of Pathfinders (a Scout-like organization) who had gone by boat to attend a Pathfinder rally on a nearby island met with a tragic accident on their way back. Their boat capsized. Of the 20 people in the boat, eight girls and two adults drowned. Ten other young people swam to safety... None of the church members involved was trying to 'walk on water'."

So here's my guess about what happened. The 1993 story about the Tanzanian students and minister drowning must have transformed into an urban legend that circulated in Africa. Details were changed. The students were omitted. The location shifted. But the key detail about a church leader drowning while trying to walk on water remained.

Until eventually, in 2006, the story was heard by a reporter, who wrote it up as a news story and sent it out via a news-wire service, from which it was picked up by British papers that never bothered to fact-check it.

And seven years later it's surfaced again. Proving that a good story never dies. It just gets recycled endlessly.

(Thanks to LaMa for first calling attention to this story in the Hoax Forum.)

Bigfoot Likes Pizza — Michigan resident Anthony Padilla thinks that Bigfoot has been wandering around his property and eating his food. Specifically, his pizza. And after Bigfoot eats the pizza, he poops. Padilla has collected the scat and he wants the police to test it for DNA. The police have demurred.

Padilla is apparently staking his claim to a $10 million prize being offered by Spike TV for coming up with "irrefutable proof" of the existence of Bigfoot. Actually, it's not clear to me whether Spike TV is offering the prize to anyone, or only to the group of competitors on its forthcoming "10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty" TV show. If it's the latter, Padilla is wasting his time.

Cardiff Giant Wine —
Sort This Out Cellars has announced the imminent return of its Cardiff Giant Wine, which it describes as "one of our most popular wines ever."

I've come across quite a few hoax-themed beers (Bigfoot Ale, Nessie's Monster Mash, Jackalope Ale, etc.), but not many hoax-themed wines. I always assumed that wine marketers thought that hoaxes were too low-brow to appeal to the sophisticated tastes of wine drinkers.

The illustration of the Cardiff Giant on the wine label comes from a poster created by the sideshow banner artist Fred G. Johnson in the 1930s or 40s. But I'm not sure Sort This Out Cellars realizes this, because the blurb on the back of the label (from the 2005 bottling) describes it as an "1869 carnival poster," which it isn't. It's pretty obvious the artwork couldn't be from 1869 because the "Average Man" in the picture isn't wearing nineteenth-century style clothing.


For the true Cardiff Giant enthusiasts out there, Sort This Out Cellars is also selling Cardiff Giant coasters. [Correction: it was selling them. They're now out of stock.]

Subversive Vodafone Puppet Ad — A Vodafone commercial featuring talking puppets has been the subject of some strange rumors in Egypt. The buzz is that the commercial is full of coded messages telling Islamist terrorists to bomb churches.

You see, the commercial opens and closes with a shot of a four-branched cactus from which hangs a single Christmas ornament. The four branches, so the rumors suggest, represent the four-fingered salute of the Muslim brotherhood. The cactus itself represents bitterness and resistance. And the ornament is a bomb.


The bulk of the commercial consists of a puppet, Mother Abla Fahita, talking on the phone to an unseen friend, whom she calls Mama Tutu. Obviously this friend represents the Brotherhood.

These rumors were circulating so widely that Vodafone eventually felt compelled to address them. On New Year's Day it issued a statement denying that the commercial carried any subversive messages.

The Economist magazine writes:

By and large, Egyptians have poured scorn and ridicule on all this silly talk. Not, however, the government. The country’s prosecutor general has formally tasked the state security prosecution service, a feared branch that handles terrorist cases, with carrying out an urgent and thorough investigation of Mama Fahita.

Not surprisingly, Egypt’s internet has exploded with farcical “support groups” for the floppy doll, complete with preemptive protests against her likely abuse and torture at the hands of Egypt’s overenthusiastic police. Posing as hyper-nationalists, rival posts have demanded a nationwide round-up of puppets and a manhunt for Mama Tutu.

And here's the commercial that's caused all the fuss:

Pathetic story of a Nigerian man whose kidney was stolen — The 'kidney thieves' urban legend has resurfaced in Nigeria, as evidenced by the story below which is circulating on Nigerian news sites (such as here and here).

This version of the tale has a slight twist. After having his kidney removed, the victim doesn't realize what's happened until weeks later. He doesn't even realize he's been cut open, because the closure of the incision was "perfectly done and skin was used to cover up the stitch."

Pathetic Story Of A Nigerian Whose Kidney Was Stolen In Malaysia [MUST READ]

We saw this story and we thought it wise to share it. It's touching and shocking and we hope we all learn from it.

I'm 26 years old and last year after graduating from one of the Polytechnics in Nigeria, I couldn't get a job. I needed to travel out of the country to better my life and that of my family. I planned on going to Turkey but fell into the hands of dupes who gave me fake documents and I was thrown out of the Turkish embassy during my interview and almost got arrested.

Standing outside, I met an old acquaintance, a young guy I met through a mutual friend. I found myself telling him about my plight and how I had been duped into paying for fake documents.I told him how my dad sold his plot of land to ensure I traveled. How was I going to tell them their money went down the drain?

He then told me the best thing was to tell them I got the visa, so when my dad sends money for my flight ticket, I use it to go to Malaysia. He said he had an agent who would help me and also give me a job once I get there. He said several guys had gone to Malaysia too.

I told my excited parents that I got the Visa and would need money for my flight. I raised 600 thousand naira which was sent to the agent I had never met and was given a 1 month visa. I got to Malaysia expecting to see the agent but never did. It was 3 weeks, no job, and paying my hotel bill, I had exhausted all my money. The so-called agent I had been calling suddenly switched off his phone. It was one week to the expiration of my visa.

So I decided to step-out and find other Nigerians who could help me. I was unsuccessful as the two guys I knew way back in Nigeria were club bouncers and had no connections. Was shocked because they claimed to be big boys.

I was on my way back from one of my unsuccessful outings. I was wondering what to do when a short Indian man intercepted me. "Hello my friend you looking for a job? I have a job for you. How will you like to earn 3 thousand dollars a month? I was speechless" He told me "Lets go and have a drink and talk about it"

I was so happy. He took me to a spot not far from where we met. It was like a private house and I saw two other Black boys who the man introduced me to saying they were also beneficiaries of the job. I was just about to ask what the job was when a waiter brought me a drink and he told me to give him a minute to bring papers which would show me my job description.

I don't know what happened next. I found myself in an uncompleted building. I was confused at first and felt I was dreaming. But the cold was unbearable to be a mere dream and the sharp pain on the side of my belly was too intense to be real. I saw my shoes on the floor. I was confused. How did I get here? What about the job? Did I loose my chance by getting too drunk? Then I recalled I didn't drink alcohol. I decided to put on my shoes when I noticed my legs were so swollen my shoes didn't size me anymore.

I left the place with no money in my pocket, didn't even know where I was. I tried to ask some Arabs to help but no one even listened to me. As I kept walking, I saw 2 security men and walked up to them. They were Nigerians and after telling them about my plight, they took pity on me and asked me to sleep in the factory where they worked for the night. They gave me some pain killers to relieve me.But advised me to go for a test the next day. The next day I told them I had no money to even go for a checkup and I was probably going to be deported as I had just one week for my visa to expire.

The elderly one told me there was a job opening as a life guard at some private beach. I couldn't be more grateful.

I took up the job but the reoccurring belly ache which I kept suppressing with pain killers was getting more intense. Then after rescuing someone who almost drowned, the intense stress which accompanied that made me fall ill. And after several tests, they couldn't ascertain what was wrong with me. I had used up all the little money I earned from my job as a life guard and I had no option but to give myself up to the authorities so I could be deported since I couldn't pay for my flight ticket.

I returned to Nigeria seriously ill and my parents took me from one hospital to the other and they couldn't detect what was wrong with me. We went to several prayer houses even very popular miracle pastors who claimed it was evil people from my village chasing me. Destiny killers they said. I was ordered to fast for 21 days and four days later I collapsed . Then my father ran into an old classmate who owned a hospital. He told him about my plight and he told my dad to bring me over.

He ordered a full scan to be run on me and while I was alone, he came to me and said" Young man, why did you have one of your kidney's removed?" I was shocked 'My Kidney? Sir I don't get". He smiled"At least if you want to have your kidney removed, do it well. You must have earned a few millions from it so what did you do with the money? Why didn't you treat yourself properly?"""

I was confused and I insisted I knew nothing and he showed me the scan. Yes one kidney was missing. He also said the closure was perfectly done and skin was used to cover up the stitch. He said only Indians did such perfect cover-ups. After insisting there was a mistake somewhere, the doctor said the fact was one of my kidneys was removed and he told me the dangers of selling my kidney which many Nigerian youths do these days to make quick cash I was in tears and I told him I didn't know what he was talking about then I recalled the Indian man I met who told me he had a job for me.

It hit me that that man had me drugged and took me to an unknown place and had my kidney removed and then dumped me in that building.

Now I'm a 26 year old man who put my parents through hell and I'm now living on one kidney and very ill. I keep hoping this one doesn't develop a problem. I want youths to be careful of where they go to and who they interact with.I just found-out its a cartel and several African jobless youths have been trapped and have their kidneys removed without their knowledge.

It's a wicked world.

Salinas Crop Circle Update — To almost nobody's surprise, that crop circle near Salinas has been revealed to be a marketing stunt. It was created in order to promote a new mobile processor by NVIDIA. The CEO of NVIDIA admitted to the stunt during a presentation in Las Vegas.


There were some clues. Small dots inside the circle spelled out the number 192, in braille. Also, three large dots on the outer perimeter of the circle were positioned at the clock-hand positions of 1, 9, and 2.

The number 192 was a reference to the number of cores in the company's new processor.

This isn't the first time a company has created a crop circle as a marketing stunt. Back in February 1993 a crop circle appeared in a field of rye outside Johannesburg, South Africa. The clue that time was more obvious. The crop circle was in the shape of the BMW logo.

Infectious Money Scam — A new scam targeting the elderly in Italy. Well-dressed young women knock on the door and identify themselves as health department officials. They tell the elderly resident that banknotes have been contaminated with a deadly virus. They ask, "Do you have any banknotes in the house? If so, give them to us, and we will decontaminate them." One elderly woman handed the scammers over $2300. [ninemsn.com.au]

Lions at large in the Hamptons —
Dan's Papers, which serves the Hamptons in New York, recently reported that lions were going to be released in order to cull the growing deer population in the region. The lions would be supplied, free of charge, by a wealthy South African industrialist who had recently bought a home there.

The report disturbed some of the locals. According to southampton.patch.com: "[The police] fielded anywhere between 10 and 15 calls from residents voicing their anger at the 'news,' and at least one caller claimed to have seen a lion stalking her back yard."

The report was actually the latest effort from Dan Rattiner, the "hoaxer of the Hamptons" — the owner and founder of Dan's Papers. He's been salting his papers with fake stories since the 1960s. Way longer than all these johhny-come-lately fake-news sites online nowadays.

The Ancient Sport of Haggis Hurling — According to legend, the sport of haggis hurling originated in the seventeenth century when the women of Auchnaclory tossed meals of haggis across the River Dromach for their husbands, who would catch it in their kilts. However, the sport eventually lapsed into obscurity.


But in 1977, at the International Gathering of the Clans in Edinburgh, haggis hurling was brought back as a featured event.

The sport was given formalized rules. Competitors had to rub peat on their hands and hurl the haggis while standing on top of a half-barrel of Scotch whisky.

The competition was overseen by three officials: the Hagrarian, the Clerk of the Heather, and the Steward of the Heather. The Hagrarian would first ensure that all was in order. The Clerk of the Heather would then "blow the hooter" to indicate that the hurl should commence. And finally, the Steward of the Heather would measure the length of the hurl. The length of the hurl was always measured in feet and inches. Also, the haggis had to remain unburst on landing.


The revival of haggis hurling was a resounding success. So much so that haggis hurling was soon being included in highland festivals throughout the world.

A World Haggis Hurling Association was founded, which sent certificates to the best hurlers, announcing their inclusion in the Fellowship of the Order of the Crumbs. National haggis hurling organizations appeared in the US, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. And the Guinness Book of World Records began documenting the longest hurls. The first world record holder was Alan Pettigrew, who hurled a haggis 180' 10" in 1984.

But on January 25, 2004, haggis hurlers throughout the world were stunned to learn that their sport wasn't ancient at all. It was just a modern invention. A hoax.

The news was broken by Scotland's Sunday Herald which reported that the sport had been invented in 1977 by, of all things, an Irishman, Robin Dunseath, in order to "gauge the gullibility of the Scots."

Dunseath had served for 20 years as President of the World Haggis Hurling Association, but he told the paper that he had finally decided to come clean and reveal the sport's faux origins because he was worried that the sport was becoming too commercial and ridiculous.

Dunseath, who had been working as a publicist for Scottish entrepreneur Tom Farmer back in 1977, offered this explanation of how the sport actually originated:


Newspaper reports about haggis hurling from the late 1970s and early 1980s had often referred to the sport as a joke. Nevertheless, when the Sunday Herald interviewed haggis hurlers around the world, they professed to be shocked that the sport wasn't actually an ancient tradition.

Jim Nethery, Chief Hagrarian of the Association for Scottish Haggis Hurling (United States Branch), said: "Oh boy. He just made that up? I've never actually looked it up."

Alan Pettigrew, the Guinness world record holder, had an angrier response: "[Dunseath] said he invented the history? That's rubbish. He may have helped revive the sport, but he didn't make it up. The history is real."

Dunseath's revelation briefly threw a wrench into the sport of haggis hurling. The 2004 World Haggis Hurling Championships in Glasgow had to be cancelled following the withdrawal of commercial support due to the adverse publicity.

But eventually the dust settled. New sponsors were found, and everyone decided that they didn't really care whether haggis hurling was an ancient tradition or a modern joke. The games had to continue.

As Dunseath noted in a 2013 interview: "It made no difference and happy people continued to hurl the Scottish delicacy as far away from themselves as they could, hoping to be nominated for membership of the Order of the Haggis."

A new official World Record for Haggis Hurling was set by Lorne Coltart at the Milngavie Highland Games on 11 June 2011, when he hurled a haggis 217 feet.

The Florida Keys—the ‘fake your death’ capital of the world — Why do people go to the Florida Keys to fake their death? Because of the water: "all the water — the ocean, the channels, the bay — all plausible places for a body never to be found."

Marijuana overdoses in Colorado? — A story posted recently on the fake-news site DailyCurrant.com alleged that hospitals in Colorado were being overwhelmed by people suffering from marijuana poisoning. There were 37 people dead already!


The article quoted a Dr. Jack Shepard of St. Luke's Medical Center in Denver as saying, "It's complete chaos here. I've put five college students in body bags since breakfast and more are arriving every minute."

Enough people believed this story that St. Luke's Medical Center (which is a real hospital) felt compelled to issue a statement denying the report:


The name Dr. Jack Shepard is an allusion to the fictional doctor on the TV show Lost.

Also, marijuana has extremely low toxicity. There's no known case of a fatal marijuana overdose.

Update: Among those who apparently were taken in by the Daily Currant's article was Sweden's Justice Minister Beatrice Ask. She shared the article on her Facebook page, along with the comment, "Stupid and sad. My first submitted proposal in the youth wing was called 'Crush drugs!'. In this matter, I have not changed my judgment at all." 

She was subsequently heavily criticized for sharing the article (and apparently believing it). However, her press secretary told the Aftonbladet newspaper that she had been aware the article was satire. [thelocal.se]

North Korean leader fed to hungry dogs? —
A report is circulating, sourced to "a newspaper with close ties to China's ruling Communist Party" (according to NBC), alleging that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un had his uncle, Jang Song Thaek, eaten alive last month by a pack of 120 ravenous dogs. Gruesome stuff, if true.

But Max Fisher of the Washington Post cautions that there are good reasons to doubt this story. The report comes from a small Hong Kong newspaper Wen Wei Po, which has a reputation for sensationalism.

Somehow it got this incredible scoop just a day after the execution. No one else reported it, and Wen Wei Po cited no source. The rest of the media in Asia (including, most importantly, the media in South Korea which has the best sources inside North Korea), have ignored the story.

Fisher suggests that the official report, that Jang was executed by a firing squad, is far more plausible.

Update: So it looks like people have gotten to the bottom of this story and how it spread. Trevor Powell, a Chicago-based software engineer who's fluent in both Chinese and English, gets the credit for being the first to figure out exactly what happened.

This is the timeline of events:

1) On Dec 11, someone posing as the well-known Chinese satirist Pyongyang Choi Seongho posted a tweet (screenshot below) to Tencent Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter) describing how Jang Song Thaek had been devoured by ravenous dogs.


2) The next day, the Hong Kong paper Wen Wei Po published an article in which they quoted this tweet word-for-word. The article cited Pyongyang Choi Seongho as the original source. (Although Pyongyang Choi Seongho has denied posting the tweet.)

3) On Dec 24, the Singapore Straits Times published an English-language article referencing the claim that Jang had been fed to dogs. The article cited Wen Wei Po as the source, but failed to mention that Wen Wei Po had, in turn, cited a known satirist as its source.

4) Once the claim was in English, it snowballed across the world.

Powell offers this take on how the story spread:

The Zero G Day Hoax — January 4 will be "Zero G Day," according to a report trending online. Do a twitter search for #zerogday, and you can find people talking about it. The report originates from news-hound.net, which offers this explanation:


This is all nonsense, of course. Patrick Moore has been dead for over a year, so he hasn't been telling anybody anything.

Zero G Day is just a shameless recycling of Moore's famous 1976 April Fool's Day hoax about the "Jovian-Plutonian Gravitational Effect." Moore intended his joke to be a spoof of a book called the The Jupiter Effect, published in late 1974, which claimed that a rare alignment of the planets in 1982 was going to trigger massive earthquakes on Earth.


I've got a fairly long article about Moore's 1976 hoax in the April Fool Archive, and I couldn't help but notice that the language of news-hound.net's article is very similar to what I wrote in my article. (I can't remember how many years ago I wrote it, but it was a while.) For the sake of comparison, here's what I wrote:


I think it's fair to assume that at some point the news-hound.net writers read my article.

End of the world in 2014 — Should we be worried?

From the Brazil (Indiana) Weekly Democrat - Oct 17, 1912: