Hoax Museum Blog: Urban Legends

Do hoaxes tell us anything about the character of their victims? — On the New York Times opinion page Stanley Fish recently offered some thoughts about the Wine Spectator hoax, comparing it to the Sokal hoax of the 1990s. After musing about the two hoaxes, he draws this lesson about hoaxes in general:


So what he's saying is that while hoaxes may be amusing pieces of drama, they reveal nothing about the gullibility or character of their victims. Hmm. I completely agree about hoaxes being essentially theatrical in nature. They're artistic creations. But does art only refer to itself, telling us nothing about the external world? I don't think so.

Satirists, parodists, and hoaxers all use the tools of fiction. They dramatize, exaggerate, and simplify things. They reduce their subjects to caricatures. But their creations only work if they expose some recognizable part of the character of their subjects. Otherwise, they fall flat. (Of course, it's a matter of subjective opinion whether they've fallen flat or scored a hit.)

So, yes, hoaxes are staged pieces of drama, but I wouldn't dismiss the view they offer us onto the nature of their victims as being meaningless for that reason.

Real Shark Surfing — A few months ago I posted a phony video showing a guy on a surfboard being towed by a shark. It now looks like that video was a case of satirical prophecy, because a guy in Australia is reporting that something similar happened to him in real life. From news.com.au:

Of course, the guy could be making the whole thing up, but I don't any have reason to doubt his story.

Hoax Photo Database: Recent Additions — I've been a bit lazy about posting on the blog for the past few days, but that doesn't mean I haven't been working on the site! I've actually been adding lots of content to the Hoax Photo Database. Here are a few of the photos I've added recently:

The Vanishing Belly Button
Back in 1964 the LA Times ran an ad for Scandinavian Airlines showing a blonde model posing on top of a rock. Strangely, the Times felt the need to remove the model's belly button... because a belly button might have been too provocative for its readers!

Dickens in America
Back in 1867 the Mathew Brady studio in New York produced this doctored image of Charles Dickens. We'd call this photoshopping today, but back then everything had to be done in a darkroom. It's a good example of image doctoring from early in the history of photography.

The Peppered Moth
H.B.D. Kettlewell's photos of (dead) moths on trees are probably the most famous example of scientific photo fakery.

Bloody Sunday, 1905
For decades this image was included in Soviet textbooks, where it was described as an actual photo of the "Bloody Sunday" massacre that occurred in St. Petersburg, 1905, when the police opened fire on workers marching toward the Tsar's Winter Palace. In reality, the photo was a still from a 1925 movie.

The Telegraph’s Memorable Photo Fakes — The Telegraph recently came out with a list of "20 memorable picture fakes." And the Museum of Hoaxes is listed as one of the sources they used to do their research... along with a few of the other usual suspects.

It strikes me as a bit of a random list. They leave out some classics, such as the Surgeon's Photo (which I would think would be in the top 10 or 20 on any list of famous picture fakes) as well as National Geographic's cover on which they moved the pyramids, but they include photos that I wouldn't think would make the top 200 let alone top 20, such as "Karl Rove's secret file" and "James Purnell doctored at hospital".

One of these days (hopefully soon) I'm going to get around to producing my own list of the top 20 fake photos of all time.

Big Footprint Found — Harold Jackson, a resident of Cookeville, Tennessee, found an indentation on a rock on his property. It looks vaguely like a footprint... a very big footprint. 11 inches across and 15 inches long. The article says he took it home. (I assume he must have made a cast of it and taken that home.)

The surprising thing is that he doesn't think it's a Bigfoot print, though his friends do. He thinks it's a footprint of a Native American.

So how tall would this Native American have been if his feet were 15-inches long? According to WikiAnswers, a person's foot is usually 15% of the height of his body. Therefore, this Native American would have been approximately 100 inches tall, or 8.3 feet.

Fleeing Purse Snatcher Drops Breast — Police in Port St. Lucie are on the lookout for a cross-dressing purse snatcher who accidentally dropped a condom filled with water after grabbing a 74-year-old woman's purse. He had been using the condom as a fake breast. That's weird enough. What I can't understand is why he was using a water-filled condom. Wouldn't a regular balloon have worked better?

Though questioning the fashion decisions of a cross-dressing purse snatcher is surely an exercise in pointlessness.

Caps for Charity — Another case of the Collecting Junk for Charity hoax. Aleta Brace of Parkersburg, West Virginia collected 20,000 bottle caps, believing that the caps could be redeemed for money which would aid cancer patients. And she wasn't alone. Churches, schools, businesses, and individuals throughout West Virginia have been collecting the bottle caps all summer.

The caps would all have gone to waste, but now the Aveda skin care company has announced it'll take the caps and recycle them into new caps for its products.

More photoshopped Palin pics — This one is titled "Caribou Barbie". I wouldn't label it fake based on the content (seems totally believable to me), but if you enlarge it you can see that Palin's head is far more pixellated than the rest of the picture, indicating it was cut-and-pasted in.

This Vogue cover was created by "Ishmael Melville" of the Kodiak Konfidential blog back in Dec 2007. Palin really did appear in Vogue, but wasn't on the cover. However, apparently a couple of news sites believed this photoshop creation was the real thing.

Sarah Palin in a Miniskirt — McCain announced his decision yesterday (Friday) that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin will be his running mate, and already the photoshopped pics of Palin are starting to circulate.

Actually, this picture of Palin in a miniskirt seems to predate Friday's announcement, but now that she's on the ticket with McCain it's begun to appear everywhere.

It definitely is photoshopped -- a case of head transplantation. The real picture of Palin, from which her head was lifted, seems to be the one below, posted on Flickr by "marymary81" on Feb. 1, 2007.



Update: I added the image to the Hoax Photo Database.

Pareidolia Roundup: August 2008 — It's time for the monthly pareidolia roundup:

Toronto Virgin Mary
Christopher Moreau was having a beer in his garden, when he realized that scarring on a tree limb in his yard looked kind of like the Virgin Mary. His neighbor is a bit skeptical, but doesn't really care as long as the religious sightseers stay out of her yard.

JC in Cell Phone
Pensacola resident Linda Square thinks an image stored on her cell phone shows her in silhouette with Jesus Christ beside her. She swears that no one sent her the photo, and she didn't take it herself. The phone created it! Congratulations to anyone who can see ANYTHING in this image.

Jesus Wood
Nadine Ostroff calls this round slab of sycamore her "Jesus Wood." She's had it for 12 years but only recently decided to go public with it. Back then people might have thought her a bit odd for having a Jesus Wood, but nowadays it's no big deal.

Rockwell Jesus
Members of Ebenezer Lutheran Church in Rockwell, North Carolina think there's an image of Jesus in a knot on an oak tree in front of their church.

Knotty Virgin Mary
Antonina Filipertis of Lockport, New York heard a voice in her head telling her to "Look in your tree." She did and, lo and behold, saw images of the Virgin Mary in the knotholes of the tree. She's still hearing the voices in her head. People tell her that she's blessed.

Basswood Jesus
At first David Reed of Birch Run, Michigan couldn't see the Jesus face in the tree in his front yard, though his girlfriend kept pointing it out to him. But now it's clear as day to him. He says, "If the price is right, I might be willing to part with it."

Fosh Automotive — The website of Fosh Automotive appeared a few weeks ago, promising that the company was soon going to unveil an unlimited mileage electric car that would sell for under $25,000. A lot of people were skeptical.

Fast forward to a few days ago, when Fosh unveiled something, but it wasn't an electric car. Instead, it was a bizarre anti-Obama, anti-abortion diatribe. Turns out the whole "electric car" thing was a bait-and-switch to lure eco-liberals to their site and then hit them with pictures of dead babies.

More evidence that conservatives basically have no clue how to pull off a good hoax. (via Ecorazzi)

Cursed By Allah — There was an interesting post on alt.folklore.urban discussing several examples of Muslim hoaxes alleging there have been people who were recently cursed by Allah, for one reason or another, and transformed into bizarre animals.

For instance, Arabic newspapers ran one story about a girl who threw the Quran at her mother and was transformed into a large, rat-like creature. (The story became a popular video as well.) An image (below) accompanied the story, showing what the girl had become.


In reality, the image of the rat-like creature was lifted from an art exhibit titled "Leather Landscape" by Patricia Piccinini. Piccinini posted a statement online disavowing any knowledge of how the 'cursed' story originated and expressing sympathy for anyone disturbed by it.



A second story circulating in Arabic-language communities (via a youtube video) details the case of a girl who kicked the Quran and was transformed into an ugly mermaid-like creature. In reality, the creature shown is a guitar fish.



If the punishment for kicking or throwing the Quran is to be transformed into an animal, then what's the punishment for making bizarre stuff up to scare people?

Photo Quiz Criticism — Real or Photoshop quizzes are becoming pretty common on the web. Here's another one. My criticism of this one is that it's using the term "photoshop" to refer to any fake photo, including ones that have been staged or falsely captioned. I've noticed this usage becoming increasingly common.

However, if you're going to call falsely captioned photos fake, then you need to at least include the caption. Otherwise, the photos aren't making any claim, true or false. For instance, the quiz includes a photo of a clay model of a diplocaulus that was circulating online back in 2004 (discussed here in the hoax photo database). It's not photoshopped at all, but if you can remember that some people were briefly claiming that it was a real diplocaulus, then you might realize that you're supposed to say the photo is "photoshopped."

Likewise with this photo of a Bush lookalike trying to solve a Rubik's cube, taken by artist Alison Jackson (Here in the HPD.) It's not photoshopped, despite what the quiz claims. But it is misleading. Those are two different things.

Confused Prankster — MSNBC reported a case a few days ago of a confused prankster. A delivery woman showed up outside the house of Joe Biden with a pizza:


What "Chris" apparently failed to understand is that if you've paid for the pizza, it's not a prank to send it to someone's house. It's then a gift. I'm happy to accept all free pizzas people want to send me.

Related posts:
• Pizza Delivery Prank Goes Wrong.

Fake iPhone Queues — There probably is some sound marketing psychology to the idea that if people are seen lining up for something, other people will assume it's desirable. I've often suspected that those people who line up to buy Sony Playstations (or whatever the product might be) are getting paid. From Scotsman.com:

Wine Spectator Hoaxed — Osteria L’Intrepido, a restaurant in Milan, Italy, was recently awarded Wine Spectator's Award of Excellence for its wine list. Problem is, Osteria L'Intrepido doesn't exist. It was a hoax restaurant created by Robin Goldstein (author of The Wine Trials) which he created to test the validity of Wine Spectator's award program.

Goldstein's description of the hoax can be read here. Wine Spectator's response is here.

If you don't know much about Wine Spectator's award program (as I didn't) this article in the NY Times provides some good background. Basically, the awards have long been recognized as a bit of a joke within the restaurant industry. Almost everyone who sends in the $250 application fee along with a copy of their menu and wine list gets the award. It's the restaurant equivalent of getting a Brillante Weblog Premio Award.

However, most restaurant goers don't know that. (I didn't.) And they're likely to be impressed by seeing a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence plaque hanging on the wall. That's the whole idea. It's a marketing scheme masquerading as an award program.

For Wine Spectator and their awardees it was a cozy little arrangement. I'm sure they never figured that someone would pay the $250 application fee just to poop on the party. (Thanks to Joe Littrell and Cranky Media Guy)

The Pooping Intern — Gawker has reported a rumor -- the tale of the pooping intern -- that has all the earmarks of an urban legend. The rumor, about an unnamed person, comes from an unnamed source, and it details the kind of too-awful-to-be-true scenario that's the stock-in-trade of urban legends. Which isn't to say that the story isn't true. I have no idea. I'm just saying it sounds like an urban legend.

The story, to summarize: A young woman had recently taken a trip to Israel where she caught a stomach bug. After the vacation she shows up at NBC for the first day of her summer internship. But disaster strikes when she's overcome by sudden-onset diarrhea. She rushes to the bathroom... only to discover that NBC locks its bathrooms, and she doesn't have the key. Therefore, the contents of her intestines end up all over the hallways of NBC.

Most people might decide to not show up for work again, after that. But she shows up the next day... and no one ever says anything about it because they're all too embarrassed. But the rumor about it ends up all over the internet.

747 Struck By Lightning — From YouTube: A Boeing 747 being struck by lightning. It's been circulating around for a while, but it's new to me, and apparently it's real. (No reason to doubt it's not.)



I haven't been able to find out exactly where and when this video was taken, but some versions of the video on YouTube state that it was an All Nippon Airways (ANA) flight leaving Osaka, Japan.

Update: Accipiter tracked down some info about this video (see the comments). The plane was taking off from Kamatzu Air Force Base on the coast of the Sea of Japan during the winter sometime before 2003. According to the article Accipiter found, this video helped to demonstrate to researchers that "the vast majority of lightning strikes to aircraft are initiated by the aircraft, as opposed to the aircraft’s intercepting a discharge already in progress."

Checking in with Bigfoot — Last week I predicted that the discovery of Bigfoot's body was bound to be a hoax. Score one for me. I also said the "body" looked like a Bigfoot costume. Score another one for me.

In all fairness, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. The Bigfoot Body farce was so obviously a hoax that I'm surprised it gained as much traction as it did. But then, the media can be relied upon to eat up a good Bigfoot story.

Meanwhile, Bigfoot promoter Tom Biscardi, who paid Georgia "Bigfoot trackers" Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer $50,000 for the body, is trying to pass himself off as the victim of a scam. And Whitton and Dyer are trying to portray themselves as clever pranksters. My sense is that they were all out to make a buck.

Links: Fox News, Yahoo! News.

Shroud of Turin Update — The 1988 radiocarbon results that dated the Shroud of Turin to the Middle Ages have long been a thorn in the side to the True Believers. But they may get the chance to have new tests conducted, thanks to the efforts of John and Rebecca Jackson of Colorado. From the LA Times:


Some facts about the Jacksons: 1) They own a styrofoam model of Jesus's corpse which they call "Roger"; 2) John once suspended himself from a cross in order to learn how blood flows from a crucified body; 3) Rebecca, who used to be Jewish but converted to Catholicism, became interested in the Shroud "when it occurred to her that the image of the man's face looked like her grandfather's."

I'd like to have "Roger" as an exhibit in the someday-to-be-real Museum of Hoaxes. He'd fit in perfectly alongside the Cardiff Giant. (Thanks to Joe Littrell)