Hoax Museum Blog: Journalism

The Disappearance of Rozel, 1897 — Rozel is a small town in the middle of Kansas. Population: 156. It was founded in 1886 — its main reason for existence being that it served as a stop on the Santa Fe railroad line. Throughout its history, it hasn't been in the news much. The one time it did receive national attention was back in 1897 when it supposedly disappeared, swallowed up by a giant sinkhole.

The report of its disappearance went out in November 1897 and appeared in papers nationwide, including the New York Times:


However, the story of the town's disappearance came as a shock to the residents of Rozel, because as far as they could tell, the railroad station and surrounding buildings were all still there, intact.


No one is entirely sure who invented the story of the giant sinkhole, but the leading suspect is Dick Beeth, a station agent in Larned, the nearest town.

The story goes that the railroad company had recently decided to move the Rozel train depot elsewhere where it was more needed. So workers had loaded the entire building onto a boxcar and shipped it off. This left a shallow hole in the ground that filled with water when it rained. Locals who saw this hole joked that the depot had been swallowed by a sinkhole.

When Beeth heard this joke, it inspired him to send out a story on the telegraph wire claiming that the entire town had been swallowed by a sinkhole. Local Kansas papers picked up the story and ran it, and then it spread to the national news.


The "Rozel sinkhole" became a running joke in the region. But the fact that the story had been reported as fact in major newspapers continued to fool people for decades. In 1935, Professor Kenneth Landes, an assistant state geologist, wrote a booklet titled Scenic Kansas, in which he included the Rozel sinkhole as one of Kansas's more unusual sights, describing it as being one acre in size. A decade later, the Rozel sinkhole made its way into a Kansas school geography.

The town still remains standing to this day, its size and population not having changed much since 1897.

A Global Warming Hoax from 1874 — I periodically receive emails from people who insist I need to add global warming to the site because it's the "biggest hoax in human history." I don't agree with that. Actually, I think global warming is something that definitely merits being worried about. However, I did just add a global warming hoax to the hoax archive, which might make the global-warming-is-a-hoax crowd happy. Except that this hoax occurred in 1874.

It's a story that appeared in U.S. newspapers in February 1874. The premise was that scientists had discovered the earth was getting hotter and hotter. Europe was predicted to be tropical in 12 years, and soon after that the planet would become too hot to support life. The cause of this warming wasn't carbon emissions, but rather the recent laying of transatlantic telegraph cables, which were supposedly acting like giant electromagnets, pulling the earth into the sun.

This was a very minor nineteenth-century hoax. It didn't generate much interest at the time because it was pretty far-fetched. But it's more interesting to us today because of its depiction of man-made global warming. In fact, I suspect it may be the earliest fictional portrayal of global warming caused by man's technology. At least, I can't find any earlier examples.

The full article about the hoax is in the hoax archive. I've redirected comments there to avoid having duplicate threads.

Story about jilted woman who pulled out all her ex-boyfriend’s teeth turns out to be a hoax — At the end of April, a news story was widely reported involving a jilted Polish woman, Anna Maćkowiak, who got revenge on her ex-boyfriend by pulling out all his teeth. Seems she was a dentist, and he made the mistake of showing up at her practice complaining of toothache. So she sedated him, and set to work. He woke up later with no toothache, and no teeth.

This got posted over at Weird Universe (though not by me), but it didn't trigger any hoax alarms in my head. But it should have. MSNBC reporter Erin Tennant was suspicious, did some investigating, and discovered it was all a hoax. Or rather, it seems to have been a case of satire mistaken as news. And it was that bastion of great journalism, the Daily Mail, that first published the story in English. More details from MSNBC:

The Maureen Dowd Plagiarism Defense, or ‘I thought I was copying my friend, not you!’ — Craig Silverman has coined a term for a new kind of excuse popular with writers caught plagiarizing. It's the Maureen Dowd Plagiarism Defense. He explains:


So yes, the words weren't hers. But she thought she was just copying the words of a friend.

Craig notes a more recent use of this defense. A piece by Josh Linkner on Fast Company was found to contain parts of a blog post by Chris Dixon, unattributed. Linkner apologized to Dixon and explained:

The Great Wall of China Hoax—The Play — Another famous hoax has made its way onto the stage. The Denver Center for the Performing Arts is staging a production of the "Great Wall Story" from March 16 to April 22. The play tells the story of the Great Wall of China Hoax from 1899, in which a group of Denver reporters cooked up a story claiming that China had decided to tear down the Great Wall, and was inviting American firms to bid on the demolition project. The play gets a good review from the Denver Post. Check out a scene below.

The Continuing Troubles of Stephen Glass — Former media hoaxer Stephen Glass, whose exploits were depicted in the movie Shattered Glass, is back in the news. It seems that his career since getting fired from the New Republic has been a bit rocky. He made $140,000 from his 2003 semi-autobiographical novel, The Fabulist, but that money didn't last too long. In recent years, he's been trying to become a lawyer. According to SFGate.com, he passed the bar exam and applied for an attorney's license in 2007, but the State Bar of California turned him down on the grounds that he was morally unfit to practice law. He appealed the decision, and the California Supreme Court has agreed to hear his case.

Morally unfit to practice law? That seems like a contradiction in terms. Given his past, Glass should fit right in to the legal profession.

My Great Moon Hoax Data Dump — Way back when, in the mid-1990s, the hoax that initially got me hooked on studying hoaxes was the Great Moon Hoax of 1835. I remember coming across a brief reference to it in a book — I can't remember which book anymore — and being so intrigued by it that I immediately started tracking down more information about it. Then I decided to devote a chapter in my doctoral dissertation to it. I never finished the dissertation. Got a bit sidetracked. But I did spend a lot of time researching the moon hoax, and writing up notes about it, before I gave up on the dissertation.

However, all that information then sat on my computer. It never made its way to the Museum of Hoaxes, where I had posted only a short article about the moon hoax — and that article actually had some errors in it.

But recently I was cleaning up the Hoax Archive, and as I was doing so, it occurred to me that I really should have a better article about the moon hoax on the site. After all, I spent a couple of years researching it (though, of course, that wasn't the only thing I was doing during that time), but all I had to show for that effort was a short, error-filled article. Why not take all my moon hoax notes, organize them into a coherent form, and put them online, where they might be of interest to someone. And where they'd definitely be of better use than sitting on my computer, inaccessible to anyone but me.

So that's what I spent the last few weeks doing. I got a bit carried away. My new moon hoax article is, by far, the longest article posted on the site, coming in at around 17,000 words — or about 60 pages, if someone were to print it out, though I've got the entire thing on a single page.

It's definitely more information about the moon hoax than most people want to know. I go into detail analyzing questions such as how many people actually fell for the hoax? Why did people believe it? Did the hoax really cause the NY Sun's circulation to rise dramatically? And why was there speculation that Richard Adams Locke wasn't the only author?

But I feel good that I finally got all that material out there. Like I said, maybe it'll be of use to some future researcher of the moon hoax.

Oh, and one more thing: I noticed that someone is selling an original copy of the moon hoax on eBay. That is, they're selling the actual copies of the NY Sun from 1835. They're asking $488. I thought an original copy of the moon hoax would fetch more, but the copies they're selling are in pretty bad condition, and they're not complete pages. Someone cut out the text of the hoax, so none of the surrounding material is preserved.

Dobrica Cosic Doesn’t Win the Nobel Prize — Serbian media reported Thursday that one of their own countrymen, writer Dobrica Cosic, had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. However, he hadn't. Soon after, the Swedish Academy announced the real winner: Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer.

The Serbian media reported Cosic as the winner because they had all received an email, seeming to come from the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, announcing Cosic as the winner. The email linked to a website, nobelprizeliterature.org, that seemed to confirm Cosic as the winner. However, both the email and the site were fakes. (link)

Apparently Cosic is a strong Serbian nationalist. The Economist describes him as, "the intellectual godfather of the Serbian nationalism which played such a decisive role, not just in the destruction of Yugoslavia but in the military drive to create a greater Serbia from its ashes." According to the Montreal Gazette, Cosic writes, "lengthy tomes about the suffering of the Serbs through the ages." The hoax was perpetrated by some people who don't like him. Its basic purpose was to annoy him. The group, describing themselves as a "non-profit, self-organized group of web activists," have now posted this explanation on the site:

The Script Kiddies Strike Again — There's a long history of hoaxers finding ways to slip fake stories into newspapers. Back in 1864 Joseph Howard tried to manipulate the New York stock market by sending fake Associated Press telegrams to newspaper offices. The telegrams claimed Lincoln had decided to conscript an extra 400,000 men into the Union army. Several papers printed the fake news. The stock market panicked, because the news suggested the Civil War was going to drag on for a lot longer, and Howard (who had invested heavily in gold) made a nice profit.

During the 1870s and 1880s, Joseph Mulhattan (a very odd character) made a kind of career out of tricking newspapers into printing fake stories. One of his more notorious hoaxes was when he fooled papers into reporting that a giant meteor had fallen in Texas. And on April Fool's Day 1915, a worker in the printing press of the Boston Globe surreptitiously made a minor alteration to the front page of the paper, lowering its price from Two Cents per Copy to One cent.

Technology changes, but the hoaxes remain much the same. And so yesterday a group of pranksters calling themselves The Script Kiddies (or TH3 5CR1PT K1DD3S) managed to hack into the Twitter feed of NBC News and posted a series of fake newsflashes. The first of these announced: "Breaking News! Ground Zero has just been attacked. Flight 5736 has crashed into the site, suspected hijacking. more as the story develops."

Obviously NBC News didn't much appreciate this. Their Twitter account was soon taken offline and the fake messages deleted.

The Script Kiddies perpetrated a similar stunt back in July when they hacked into the Twitter account of Fox News and posted tweets claiming President Obama was dead.

According to an interview they conducted with Think magazine, The Script Kiddies see themselves as anti-corporate activists, and they intend their pranks to embarrass and annoy the corporations they target.

Fox News Falsifies Footage of Protest — Fox News reminds me of William Randolph Hearst. They're no longer even trying to be subtle about falsifying the news. In particular, the latest from Fox News reminds me of something Hearst's New York Mirror did back in 1932. Here (in the words of Curtis MacDougall) is the 1932 incident:


And here's what Fox News did recently, in the words of the Huffington Post:

Mr. Man on the Street Strikes Again — I wrote about Greg Packer, aka the phony Man on the Street, in Hippo Eats Dwarf:


Apparently Packer is still going strong. The Philadelphia Daily News admits that they were the latest paper to fall for his act.
(Thanks, Bob!)

Man Sues Over Lack of Axe Effect — A news story is circulating claiming that an Indian man, 26-year-old Vaibhav Bedi, has sued Axe deodorant (aka Lynx in Europe) because he failed to land a single girlfriend after using their product for seven years. It's in The Australian and the Daily Record, among other news sources.

This is an example of satire being mistaken as news. According to Asylum.com:

Newspaper claims Armstrong admitted moon landing was a hoax — Satire mistaken as news: On Monday, August 31 The Onion published an article claiming that Neil Armstrong had been convinced, after watching a few "persuasive YouTube videos," that "his historic first step on the moon was part of an elaborate hoax orchestrated by the United States government." A few days later this claim was picked up by a Bangladeshi newspaper, the Daily Manab Zamin, and run as fact. The paper has now apologized for its mistake, noting "We've since learned that the fun site [The Onion] runs false and juicy reports based on a historic incident." (Thanks to Tom Littrell)

Fake Air France Footage — Posted by Peter in the forum:
This confirms my theory that should a suitably dramatic picture of a major event not exist, one will be created. It's because our culture craves visual images. And hoaxers are always ready to supply what we crave.

For more examples of this phenomenon, see the gallery Imagining Disaster in the Hoax Photo Archive. In particular, the photos that circulated after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, supposedly taken by an Israeli satellite, but really screen shots from the movie Armageddon.

Wikipedia Hoax — Irish student Shane Fitzgerald conducted an experiment to test whether journalists blindly rely upon wikipedia as a source of information. Shortly after composer Maurice Jarre died, Fitzgerald placed a false quote on the wikipedia page about him, claiming Jarre had said: "One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear."

Sure enough, the quotation soon appeared in newspapers throughout the world. Why is this no surprise? [Yahoo]

Ads Disguised as News Columns — Should the LA Times have run an ad designed to look like a regular news column on its front page? (The ad was for an NBC news show Southland.) Critics, who include quite a few of the paper's own staffers, argue that it crossed a line of journalistic integrity. The paper's defenders point out that all newspapers are losing money nowadays, so whether you like it or not, expect to see more ads disguised as news columns in the future. [Editors Weblog]

Cheating Hubby Caught on Street View — A recent article in The Sun (and we all know how diligent The Sun is about fact checking) claimed that a woman, while using Google Street View, spotted her husband's car parked outside another woman's home. Now she's filing for divorce!

But Matt Platino, of the Idiot Forever blog, claims he hoaxed the sun into printing the story:


There's been no word yet from The Sun about their side of the story.

Astrological Discrimination — Two days ago the Daily Mail published an article describing an unnamed "Salzburg insurance company" that seems to be practicing a form of astrological discrimination in its hiring. The company is said to have placed this ad in newspapers:


When accused of discrimination, the company responded: "A statistical study indicated that almost all of our best employees across Austria have one of the five star signs." And a spokeswoman later followed up with this argument: "When an employer considers star signs and says: 'I want to only hire Pisces,' for an example, it must be assumed that within this group of people born under the sign of Pisces there are old and young people, women and women etc. It does appear like a certain limitation, but it is not discrimination."

The story has now begun to appear in other papers and websites, although the Daily Mail appears to be the sole original source. So is there any evidence the story is true? Not that I can find. My German-language skills aren't too good, but I can't find any sign of the story in papers such as the Salzburger Nachrichten.

New York Times Hoaxed — The NY Times apologized for printing an email from the Mayor of Paris in which he criticized Caroline Kennedy's bid for Clinton's senate seat. You see, it's easy to put a fake email address in the "From" field, so it's the Times's policy to always check that the person who seems to have sent them an email actually did so. But they didn't do that in this case, and now the Mayor is denying he wrote the email.

The Times is "reviewing procedures" to make sure something like this doesn't happen again. Which probably means some underpaid intern is getting yelled at. Link: NY Times. (Thanks, John!)

Man names son “Carter Barack Obama Sealy” — A Broomfield, Colorado man got his name in the local newspaper for claiming he had named his new son Carter Barack Obama Sealy. He also said that his two other children were named Brooke Trout Sealy and Cooper John Elway Sealy. Supposedly he had a deal with his wife. She got to choose the kids' first names, and he got to choose their middle names.

The children's grandmother spilled the beans on the father, notifying the paper that the names were not real. The guy's wife explained that the fake names were her husband's idea of a joke. She added, "My husband's an idiot."