Hoax Museum Blog: Urban Legends

World’s Largest Tortoise — The International Business Times reports that a "fake image" purporting to show the "world's largest tortoise" being transported on a flatbed truck has recently been circulating online.


I think it's been circulating for at least half a year, but it's not correct to call it a fake image. It's a still from Gamera The Brave (a 2006 Japanese monster movie) that has been falsely captioned. Here's another picture of the "world's largest tortoise" in action:


The question that popped into my head is whether the creature in the image is a tortoise or a turtle. The distinction between the two has always been a bit hazy in my mind.

According to diffen.com, tortoises live on land while turtles live in the water. But wikipedia notes that in North America it's common to use 'turtle' as a generic term for all reptiles of the chelonian order (i.e. turtles and tortoises get lumped together).

Gamera is commonly referred to as both a turtle and a tortoise. But since he walks on his back legs, flies, and breathes fire, it doesn't really seem important to get fussy about what kind of reptile he's classified as.

Another case of a note on a restaurant receipt — Dayna Morales, a server at the Gallop Asian Bistro in New Jersey, says that a couple she recently waited on not only didn't tip her, but also left a note on the receipt criticizing her lifestyle. So Morales took a photo of the receipt and uploaded it to the facebook page of the "Have A Gay Day" organization.


The photo attracted a lot of publicity and sympathetic supporters soon sent Morales almost $3000, which she says she's donating to charity.

But the twist in the story: a couple has contacted a local news station claiming they were the ones whom Morales served and a) they did tip her (almost 20%), and b) they didn't write any note on the receipt.

They have a customer copy of the receipt that matches the one Morales posted online, and their credit card statement shows they were charged the higher, tip-included amount — which lends credibility to their side of the story.

There seems to be a trend emerging here. It was a little over a month ago that doubts were cast on a very similar case in which a waitress at Red Lobster claimed a customer wrote a racist note on the receipt (and also didn't tip her).

Tornado Photo Fakery — When tornadoes struck the Midwest last week, some unusual photo fakes managed to get past the media fact-checkers who try to catch these things before publishing or broadcasting them.

The WTHR website posted a photo (submitted by an "iwitness contributor") that showed downtown Lafayette being threatened by both a fake tornado and a UFO. [jimromenesko.com]


And Chicago CBS affiliate WBBM ran a tornado photo that included a small man-cow love sign photoshopped into the bottom-left corner. The photo itself actually showed a tornado in Oklahoma several months earlier. [deadspin]

The Samsung Pays Apple in Nickels Rumor — In August 2012, a jury awarded Apple over $1 billion in damages in their patent infringement case against Samsung. This sparked a rumor that Samsung had gotten its own back against Apple by paying the fine entirely in nickels — sending 30 trucks full of nickels over to Apple's headquarters.

A video of a bunch of delivery trucks driving down a city street was offered as confirmation of the rumor — although the trucks in the video weren't from Samsung. A picture also circulated showing coins pouring down a ramp in some warehouse setting.


The Guardian posted a good article debunking the rumor, pointing out:

1. The fine wasn't yet payable, because the judge hadn't made his decision.
2. Private businesses are not required to accept any form of coin or currency as payment, despite a popular belief to the contrary.
3. It would require 2,755 trucks to transport that many nickels, not 30.
4. There's probably not that many nickels in circulation.
5. The "payment in nickels" rumor originated from El Deforma, an Onion-like Mexican website specializing in fake news.

Several days ago (Nov. 21) a new jury decision was announced in a retrial of the damages. Samsung now only has to pay Apple $290 million. But that appears to have started the "payment in nickels" rumor circulating again.

I can think of several real-life cases of people who paid fines or fees in coins, just to be annoying. For instance, Washington resident John Patric perennially ran for state elections during the 1950s and 60s, and always insisted on paying the filing fee with loose change. He also always listed his name as "John 'Hugo N. Frye' Patric".

In 2012, Thomas Daigle of Massachusetts carted 62000 pennies to the bank to make his final mortgage payment. [ABC News]

And also in 2012, a man calling himself "Bacon Moose" paid a $137 traffic fine with 137 dollar bills, all folded into origami pigs. [HuffPost]

eMeringue — If you need a meringue top for a pie, and you need it fast, then look no further than eMeringue.com. They're the "Internet's #1 meringue delivery service." Their fleet of eMeringue trucks are gassed up and ready to hit the highway, to deliver your meringue top directly to your door.


eMeringue was an April Fool's Day hoax by the Motley Fool investment people. But it dates back to 1999, so I'm impressed that they've kept the site up all this time.

If you look at the eMeringue welcome page, you'll see a photo of "eMeringue chef Serge LeGrenouille." My wife is the food geek in the family, but she's rubbed off on me enough that I recognized that chef Serge LeGrenouille is actually Chef Patrick O'Connell of the Inn at Little Washington. I wonder if he knows that in addition to being one of America's top chefs, he's also the head chef at eMeringue?

Rat-Milk Cheese Redux — Back in 2005, I posted about the website of The Federation of Rodent Cheesemakers, promoters of rat-milk cheese. That website is suddenly back in the news, thanks to an article in Modern Farmer, "Rat Cheese: Internet Hoax or Future Delicacy?"

The author (Sam Brasch) acknowledges that the Rodent Cheesemakers site is a spoof, but then he seriously addresses the question of how to make cheese from rat milk. He notes that you would need a lot of rats: "You’d need an army of 674 rats to produce the 31 kilograms of milk one dairy cow puts out each day."

But if you had that many rats, they might produce a surprisingly good product:


My thought here: depending on what you fed the rats, their milk might also be quite tasty!

But the International Business Times has also weighed in on this issue and throws cold water on the promise of rat-milk cheese by pointing out, "We don't have milking machines small enough to make rat dairies a viable option."

But they're wrong about this. There are milking machines for rats. Back in 1946, Prof. B.L. Herrington of Cornell University designed a "midget milker" — the world's smallest milking machine mounted on a board 18x6 inches. He designed it primarily to milk guinea pigs, but also used it on rats, rabbits, and hamsters. A Science News Letter article noted that "milking guinea pigs is a two-man operation, with one person holding the animal, and it takes about 10 minutes."


I haven't been able to find any pictures of Herrington's midget milker in action, but there is a diagram of it in a 1951 article in the Journal of Nutrition ("Milking Techniques and the Composition of Guinea Pig Milk").


So there wouldn't be a technological problem with milking rats. It could be done. The problem would be the labor involved. It would take too long to milk enough rats to produce a decent amount of cheese. So it would never be done except as a one-off thing.

Clown Crime Spree — West Yorkshire police denied reports there was a sinister clown on the prowl in Bradford, "peering in windows, committing robberies and even stabbing people." A police spokesman said, "This seems like it might be a hoax. We haven't had any reports of crimes committed by a clown, I can say that much."


During the past week, a photo has been circulating on facebook and twitter showing an evil clown standing outside a Bradford McDonalds. This photo has apparently helped to fuel the rumors of a clown crime spree.

The Bradford Telegraph and Argus notes that the most popular search term recently on its website has been "clown".

Emus Going Cheap — I posted last year about India's Great Emu Scam. Thousands of people, lured in by con artists, invested in emu farms, believing they were a sure-fire way to get rich quick. But demand for emu products never materialized, and so the investors lost their money.

The fallout from all this is not only lost money, but also huge herds of homeless emus that no one can figure out what to do with. India's Revenue department is trying to sell them, but isn't finding any buyers, even though the emus are being offered for pennies on the dollar. [thehindu.com]

LoveRoom — The premise of LoveRoom is that it's an apartment rental service that only rents to attractive people. So if you're an attractive person with an extra bed you're willing to rent out, LoveRoom will match you with another attractive person looking for a bed to rent. Forbes calls it an "Airbnb for Hotties".


After the recent debut of the LoveRoom website, quite a few media outlets wrote about the company as if it were a real thing. But Forbes reporter Kashmir Hill didn't have to do much digging before she learned it was only a "thought experiment" — so-called by Josh Bocanegra, who's the guy who put up the website. But Bocanegra says the site has generated so much media interest that he's considering trying to make it a reality.

Last year I posted about Miss Travel, which is a travel service that caters only to attractive people. And that's apparently real. So maybe LoveRoom can make the leap into reality as well. And hey, it looks like Bocanegra already has a beta-version of a functioning site up.

Sam Harris Takes a Stance Against the Santa Lie — Sam Harris argues that parents should never lie to their own children, even about something as seemingly innocuous as the existence of Santa, because all lies can sow the seeds of distrust between parent and child. I see his point. But if any kid asks me if Jackalopes are real, I'm going to continue to tell them they are, because that's the truth.

From the Archive: The Loch Ness Monster Captured, 1934 — The "Surgeon's Photo" taken on April 19, 1934 was one of the earliest (and remains the most famous) Nessie photo hoax. But three weeks before the Surgeon's Photo was taken, the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung came out with a photo-feature declaring that Nessie had been captured ("Das Untier vom Loch Ness gefangen!"). It was an April Fool's Day hoax.

I recently acquired a copy of the article, so I've added it to the April Fool archive. You can see why this Nessie hoax never became as famous as the Surgeon's Photo, because I doubt it fooled anyone. Still, it's an interesting piece of Nessie history. Read the full thing here.

Continue…

Squirrel Rides Fawn —
This unusual photo ran in numerous papers in September 1963. I can't find a linkable example in the Google News Archive, but here it is in the Binghamton Press [PDF]. (A lot of examples of it come up in a search on newspaperarchive.com, but that's a paid archive, so I can't link to any of the results.)

The caption read:

The photo looks a little suspect to me. However, none of the papers it ran in raised any doubts about its veracity.

Back in the 60s, photo editors would often darken the outlines of figures in photos so that you could see them better when they ran in newspapers. To modern eyes, this can make "real" photos look manipulated. That might be the case with this photo. Perhaps the outline of the squirrel was darkened, which makes the squirrel look like it was pasted into the shot. But given the subject matter — a squirrel riding a fawn while eating a nut — I'm still suspicious.

Fake Einstein Quotation Paperweight — I recently received an "Uncommon Goods" catalog in the mail and noticed an item they call the "Imagination Paperweight." It displays an inspiring Albert Einstein quotation: "Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere."


Knowing how many fake Einstein quotations there are floating around, my suspicion was aroused. So I checked and sure enough, this Einstein quotation has been called into question by the few people who have bothered to investigate it (as opposed to mindlessly parroting it).

The Skeptica Esoterica blog notes that it's listed in The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (2010) by Alice Calaprice, but it's in the "Probably Not By Einstein" section.

The quotation appears to have become very popular in the last 10 years. But I can't find any earlier references to it. Nor do any of the people who repeat the quotation mention where or when Einstein said it. So I'll conclude that it must be fake.

However, Einstein did say something very similar. According to quoteinvestigator.com, in an interview published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1929 Einstein was asked, "Then you trust more to your imagination than to your knowledge?" And he responded:


"Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." That's a good quotation — and real! Uncommon Goods should have put that on their paperweight.

‘Help Me, I’m German!’ — UK police are warning drivers of a new scam in which fraudsters pose as stranded motorists in lay-bys, beseeching the aid of good samaritans with pleas such as, "Help me, I'm German!"

The fraudsters claim that they're out of gas and have lost their wallet. But they offer gold jewelry in return for money. The scam is that the gold jewelry is fake. [cambridge-news]

When I first saw the headline I thought it was going to be about people who wake up, realize they've become German, and cry out for help. Kind of like a Germanified version of Gregor Samsa. That would have been better.

Typing fake profiles causes wrist injury (maybe) — Doriana Silva says she was hired by Ashley Madison (that matchmaking service that caters to people who want to have extramarital affairs) in order to type up 1000 fake female profiles for the company's new Portuguese-language website. Doing this, she claims, led to severe wrist and forearm pain, and she now wants compensation, to the tune of $20 million.

Ashley Madison admits it hired Silva, but dismisses her claims as frivolous. It points out that one of Silva's recent facebook photos shows her jet skiing during a vacation, apparently unhampered by severe wrist pain. [When will people learn that if it's on facebook, everyone can potentially see it?]

As for the idea that their website includes fake female profiles? Why, the very notion shocks and appals them! "Our service is 100% authentic, as described in our terms and conditions, and we resent any implication otherwise."

However, the company hasn't explained exactly what Silva was doing during her brief period of employment with them. [links: Toronto Sun, Ashley Madison]

Dave Wilson—Not Black — Dave Wilson insists he didn't get elected to the Houston Community College System Board of Trustees by "pretending to be black," though many people are now accusing him of doing exactly that. He says he merely ran a smart campaign and used "targeted marketing" to appeal to voters in the majority black neighborhood where he was running.


Yes, he avoided putting a photo of his own white face in his campaign literature, but included lots of stock photos of smiling black people. But there's nothing illegal in that.

And yes, he did prominently claim to be endorsed by Ron Wilson. People might have assumed that was the well-known black Houston politician called Ron Wilson. But if they did so, that was their own fault, because it was made clear somewhere (in the fine print at the bottom of the campaign flyer) that the Ron Wilson in question was Dave's (white) cousin in Iowa. [That brings to mind the "Subways Are For Sleeping" hoax from 1962 in which the newspaper ad for the Broadway play trumpeted the rave reviews it received from people who happened to have the same name as famous theater critics.]

Anyway, Dave Wilson is in office now, and will be for the next six years. And there's not much anyone can do to change that. [khou.com]

Unterstitzen on the Bleiweis—the German town that was never taken — In the first months of 1945, the Allied forces began advancing rapidly on Berlin. But to the press correspondents tagging along behind the military, it seemed as if the going was actually quite slow. They had thought they would be in Berlin in a few days, but instead officers kept telling them that Berlin would be reached soon, but there was just one more stream, one more creek, one more canal, one more small river that had to be taken first.

So Bill Heinz of the New York Sun joked that the path to Berlin would be clear as soon as Unterstitzen on the Bleiweis was taken — the joke being that there was no such town or river. Soon Unterstitzen on the Bleiweis had become a symbol for the press corps of all the obstacles that remained in the way of the Army before Berlin could be reached.

And the story goes that one day the following scene took place. I'll quote directly from the 1945 AP story for the rest:


[Deseret News - May 16, 1945]

Andy Kaufman’s Daughter — The surprise guest at this year's Andy Kaufman Awards, which took place in NYC over the long weekend, was Andy Kaufman's 24-year-old daughter. The surprise is that Kaufman died 29 years ago. And Andy didn't store his sperm, or anything like that, in order to facilitate post-mortem conception.

Andy's brother Michael explained that Andy faked his death because "Andy wanted to go into hiding and live a normal life, that he'd met and fallen in love with a woman and had a daughter, and that he didn't want Michael or anyone to say anything while their own father was still alive. Andy's and Michael's father died this summer. " [via The Comics Comic]

The Nigerian Message-In-A-Bottle Bank Scam — Warning: if you find a message in a bottle requesting your help with transferring £4,500,000 out of Nigeria, it may be a scam.

Tom Fenton recently found such a message in a bottle while cycling along the Thames. It was written by Barrister Umsloppogas Adinga:



Fenton says the message "must be a joke." But a police spokeswoman reminded the public to: "Be wary of who you give your personal details to in the street (eg charities, products, competitions etc). Do not sign up for anything until you have researched the company or charity. Never send money to anyone you don't know." [mirror.co.uk]