Hoax Museum Blog: Urban Legends

Myth: Pearls are made from a grain of sand — Came across this in a Guardian article about a new exhibit opening at the Victoria & Albert Museum:

Bucky Badger Imposter — The University of Wisconsin-Madison has issued a press release warning the public that an imposter Bucky Badger is at large. (Bucky Badger being the university's mascot.) This imposter has been showing up at political rallies, waving protest signs. UW-Madison says that the imposter can be spotted by its "puffy features, odd coloring and sloppy sweater."

But the "imposter" is fighting back, noting that Bucky costumes can be bought at the campus book store. So who has the right to say which is the real Bucky and which is the fake one?

Money From the Sky Scam — Two men in Dubai were offering to share a sure-fire way to get rich quick. All one had to do was buy a special juice from them and offer it to a jinn (a ghost). The juice wasn't cheap. It cost $30,000. But the jinn liked it so much, that upon receiving it he would return the favor by making $200 million rain down from the sky.

However, these men made the mistake of selling their jinn-juice to an undercover police officer, who promptly arrested them.

The Dubai authorities had harsh words for the victims of these con artists, as well as for the con artists themselves, saying that only greediness could have led the victims to believe that money actually would rain down from the sky. [emirates.247.com]

Miss Uzbekistan — The Miss World Competition (set to begin Sep 28 in Indonesia) seemed quite pleased to have its first-ever representative from Uzbekistan. But perhaps not anymore, because the young woman, 18-year-old Rakhima Ganieva, is attracting more attention than any of the other contestants, and not for the right reasons.

The problem is that no one can figure out how she earned the title Miss Uzbekistan. No one in Uzbekistan remembers a selection process. In fact, in her home country they're calling her an imposter. It looks like she simply showed up in Indonesia and declared herself to be Miss Uzbekistan.

Miss World officials are, so far, remaining silent about the rapidly growing controversy. Although I think it's strange that the Miss World Corporation wouldn't have realized immediately that they don't have a franchise in Uzbekistan. Unless they do have a franchise there, and it neglected to hold a competition, handing the title directly to Ganieva. [Radio Free Europe]


The whole thing reminds me of a hoax from the early 1950s, in which a PR agent invented titles such as 'Miss Perfect Profile' and 'Miss Water Conservation' in order to get publicity for the models he represented.

Update: There are reports from back in July of a "Rahima Ganieva" winning a Miss Uzbekistan competition organized by the Interalliance UZ in Tashkent. So perhaps this whole controversy about her being an imposter might be caused by miscommunication or confusion. At least, it doesn't seem to be the case that she just showed up in Indonesia calling herself Miss Uzbekistan for no reason at all.

Dead Dog Hoax — One of the easiest ways to attract attention online is to claim to have done something shocking or disturbing. It's also known as trolling. A case in point is a young woman (using the twitter account @illumivato) who recently claimed that she killed her dog because the British pop group One Direction wouldn't follow her on Twitter.

She first sent them a tweet asking them to follow her "or I'll break my dog's neck." Then, when they inevitably ignored her, she followed this up with a tweet showing herself cradling her dead dog. [nydailynews.com]

But as David Emery points out, the picture of her and her dog dates back a couple of months. Plus, she's been making similar threats via tweet for quite a while.

In other words, we can safely dismiss her as just another disturbed, attention-seeking individual online. And she got the attention she wanted. She also admitted via tweet a few days ago, "Are people still going on about this f*cking dog thing, I was trolling!!!! STOP." And then twitter suspended her account.

Massive Louvre Ticket Scam — Parisian authorities are now warily considering the possibility that thousands of Chinese tourists might be getting into the Louvre for free, after Belgian customs officials discovered fake Louvre tickets that were "perfect clones" of genuine tickets in a package sent from China. Though I assume the tourists paid someone for the tickets. They just paid the wrong person. [BBC News]

Trout-Pig — A trout-pig hybrid, discovered in the Tet river in southeastern France. As reported by L'Indépendant, April 1, 2013. I imagine that, when cooked, this would taste like trout wrapped in bacon.

Collage Poetry — Prize-winning Australian poet Andrew Slattery (winner, most recently, of the Cardiff International Poetry Competition, that came with a jackpot of £5000) is being stripped of many of his prizes after judges discovered that most of his poetry consists of lines lifted from the works of other poets. For instance, his poem Ransom, which won him the Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize (and potentially $10,000 — he hadn't received the money yet) was a stitched-together version of "50-odd poets' work, some of them famous, such as Americans Charles Simic and Robert Bly, and one Australian, Chris Andrews."

Slattery now explains that he intended his poems to be a form of "collage poetry" written in the "cento format." Apparently this is a kind of poetry that's a patchwork of lines from other poems. He just failed to mention this fact to anyone. [Sydney Morning Herald]

Sloth Family Portrait — Gapers Block offers the full story behind the famous "Sloth Family Portrait" revealing that yes, of course, the photo was intentionally staged. And no, it wasn't photoshopped in any way. And the sloth in the foreground was stuffed, not alive.

The story, summarized, is that the couple in the photo are Jim and Debbie Gallo, owners of Shangri-La Vintage, a Chicago vintage clothes store. They found the stuffed sloth at an estate sale in the early 1990s, bought it, and then thought it would be funny to dress up in tacky clothes and wigs and get their picture taken with it at the local K-Mart. The Sloth Family Portrait, and later internet fame, was the result.

Questions about the Milgram experiment — Gina Perry has authored a new book about Stanley Milgram's famous obedience experiment (Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments) in which she argues that Milgram fudged his data and conclusions. Boing Boing reviews it.


Perry suggests the fudging happened in several ways:

• First, although Milgram claimed his experiment always followed a set script, Perry reviewed the original audio tapes and found this wasn't the case. Instead, Milgram's experimenter "wheedled and nagged the subjects into turning up the shock dial."
• Second, she argues that a substantial portion of the experimental subjects saw through Milgram's ruse and realized that they weren't actually shocking someone.

I'll have to read Perry's book to get her full argument, but it was my impression that her allegations aren't exactly new. Milgram's experiment met with a lot of skepticism from other researchers. But other researchers have conducted versions of his experiment and, for the most part, gotten similar results.

For instance, in Elephants on Acid I write about how many people suspected that Milgram's subjects saw through his ruse. Therefore, two researchers conducted a version of the experiment in which subjects were asked to shock a victim (a puppy) — and the puppy actually got shocked! ("Obedience to authority with an authentic victim" - PDF). In other words, they eliminated the ruse. And their results were similar to Milgram's. The majority of their subjects obeyed the command to shock the puppy.

I'm sure Perry must address this, but I don't know how. Looks like another book to add to the pile.

Mystery Letterbox — A red letterbox has appeared on the side of a bridge crossing the Thames in the village of Sonning-on-Thames. It's accessible only from the river. The Royal Mail says it's "a mystery to us."

What makes this story doubly strange is that spoon-bender Uri Geller happens to live in this town and was interviewed about it by the BBC. He speculates that "the ghost of a mischievous little girl" might have put the letterbox there.

Kimmel’s ‘Girl on Fire’ Hoax and the Two Traditions Within the History of Hoaxing — Daniel Engber doesn't think Jimmy Kimmel's "Twerking Girl on Fire" hoax was very funny. He wrote in Slate:


At times Engber's critique became so over-the-top that I wasn't sure if he was being entirely serious, or if he was deliberately trolling. Nevertheless, what he wrote did make me think of an ongoing controversy within the world of hoaxing. The issue is that there are two traditions within the history of hoaxing, and these two traditions have never been able to agree on what constitutes a good hoax.

The first tradition dates back to the 18th century Enlighenment — the Age of Reason. Those promoting the values of the Enlightenment (people like Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Swift) recognized that hoaxes were a great vehicle for exposing credulity and superstition. Irrationalism could be shamed (and hopefully banished) by exposing it to ridicule and laughter. So in this tradition, hoaxes were acceptable if they served as educational tools for creating an informed citizenry.

The second tradition dates to the "market revolution" of the early 19th century, when entrepreneurs (in particular, newspaper editors and showmen such as P.T. Barnum) realized that hoaxes might be a good way of exposing credulity, but they were also a great way of attracting public attention. In other words, hoaxes could be cheap and highly effective ads.

Defenders of this tradition argued that being educational shouldn't be the only standard for a good hoax — that a hoax could also be good if it was clever and amusing, and offered the public entertainment value in return for being deceived.

So, on the one hand, you have the enlightenment tradition of hoaxes as educational tools to promote reason and skepticism. And on the other hand, you have the entrepreneurial tradition of hoaxes as deceptive but entertaining publicity stunts.

Proponents of the enlightenment view of hoaxes have never been happy about what they see as cheap, self-promoting entrepreneurial hoaxes — and this sense of resentment continues to this day, as evidenced by Engber's article.

But the thing is, many of the most celebrated hoaxes since the early 19th century have been of the entrepreneurial, self-promoting kind. The Great Moon Hoax of 1835, the Cardiff Giant, and all of Barnum's hoaxes certainly fall into that camp.

Where do I stand in the debate? Well, as someone who studies the history of hoaxing, I don't have to take sides. I report on the phenomenon as a whole. (Though I have to admit I thought Kimmel's hoax was amusing, even if it didn't serve any grand, educational purpose.)

However, both the enlightenment and entrepreneurial traditions agree that good hoaxes should be created with the intention of being eventually exposed — usually to the embarrassment of their victims. If a hoaxer never intends for his deception to be unmasked, then he's simply trying to get away something. The hoax becomes a species of fraud.

So I think Engber is totally wrong when, later in his article, he suggests that Kimmel's 'Twerking Girl on Fire' hoax was no different than the hoaxes of Stephen Glass, James Frey, or Richard Heene. None of them wanted their deceptions to be exposed. They were hoping to get away with something. There's clearly a difference.

Vancouver UFO Hoax — On September 3, a small "UFO" was seen hovering outside a Vancouver Canadians baseball game at Nat Bailey Stadium. Turns out it was a fake UFO that was part of a viral marketing scheme to promote Vancouver's H.R. MacMillan Space Centre. Footage of the UFO was circulated online by an ad agency. The Space Centre has seen attendance rise by 65 percent in the last week. So apparently the viral campaign worked. [CTV News]



It certainly isn't the first time a planetarium has used a hoax to drum up business. The example that comes to mind is the time back in 1940 when Philadelphia's Franklin Institute created a panic by announcing that the world was going to end the next day. The startling announcement (which pretty much backfired on them because of all the negative publicity) was intended to promote a talk at its planetarium titled "How Will the World End?"

Twerking Girl Catches Fire Hoax — On Sep 3, Caitlin Heller posted a video on youtube that she titled, "Worst Twerk Fail EVER - Girl Catches Fire!"

She further explained: "I tried making a sexy twerk video for my boyfriend and things got a little too hot 😊"



The video quickly went viral, accumulating 9 million views in less than a week, and getting airtime on numerous media outlets.

But last night, "Caitlin Heller" appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and the hoax was revealed. Her real name was Daphne Avalon. She was a stunt woman, and the entire video had been staged for Jimmy Kimmel Live.



Kimmel claims that his team didn't send it to TV stations or tweet it. He says, "we just put it on youtube and let the magic happen." I'm skeptical that they didn't do something to help spread the word, given the speed at which it attracted attention. But nevetheless, it was an amusing hoax.

Soccer without a ball? — The latest episode of CBC Radio's This is That show discussed how the Midlake Youth Athletic Association in Midlake, Ontario has decided to eliminate the ball from its soccer program, in order to "further address some of the negative side of competition."


Keith Schultz, head coach (aka "Imagination Captain") of the Thundercats, the Midlake ball-less soccer team, is interviewed, and he explains that the course of the game is determined by "the kids' interpretation of what went down."

Schultz admits that he occasionally misses coaching traditional soccer (with a ball), but because "injuries are down and self-esteem is up," the Youth Association has judged its experiment with ball-less soccer to be a success — so much so that it's decided to extend the concept into the hockey program, by removing the puck.

The news report has sparked angry outbursts on message boards throughout the internet. One guy complained that it was a symptom of the "Pussification of America" (he must have meant North America).

But, of course, as Wikipedia notes, This is That is a satire program "which airs comedic news stories presented in the style of a real CBC Radio public affairs program." In another words, this is yet another case of Satire Mistaken As News.

Pat Kelly, This is That co-host, told sportsgrid.com, "I guess it struck a nerve due to the sports theme. The response is still going strong."

The Good Health Bug — A case of satirical prophecy? On April 1, 1931, the Los Angeles Times ran an article on its front page declaring that health can "be caught." It explained that a German scientist, Dr. Eugene Lirpa, had discovered that good health was caused by a bacteria, "Bacillus sanitatis." People who lacked this bacteria grew ill. Therefore, it would be possible to make people healthy by infecting them with the "germ of health."

The article was an April Fool's Day hoax. In fact, I think it's the ONLY April Fool hoax the LA Times has ever perpetrated, because the major US newspapers (unlike their British counterparts) tend to view themselves as being somewhat above the vulgar tradition of April Foolery.

But fast forward to the present day. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine recently published an article in Science suggesting that people who are of a healthy weight might be infected by a bacteria called Bacteroides. Obese people lack this bacteria. Therefore, infecting overweight people with this bug might help them lose the pounds.

Sounds to me a lot like the LA Times 1931 article. April Fool's Day once again anticipates reality.

Bricked-in Car Prank, 1964 — October 1964: The work of pranksters. A car boxed in by brick walls on a foot bridge of the North Branch of the Chicago River in the 5000 block of North Spaulding. Source: Chicago Daily News.

If you say gullible slowly, it sounds like oranges — A fairly old meme, but it was new to me. Image via theburlapbag.com.

Mammoth Hailstone Hoax, 1911 — I found this photo in the collections of the Minnesota Historical Society. It shows a Mr. O'Mahony (of Pipestone, Minnesota) proudly showing off a "mammoth hail stone" — size: 6" x 6" x 8" and weighing 5½ lbs.


A note attached to the photo reveals that the hailstone was a fake:


If this hailstone had been real, its dimensions would have made it the largest ever recorded. But according to NOAA, the record goes to a stone discovered in South Dakota after a storm on July 23, 2010, measuring 8 inches in diameter and weighing nearly 2 pounds.