Hoax Museum Blog: Photos

About.Com Hoax Photo Test — David Emery has posted a 'real or fake' image quiz on his about.com urban legends site. The quiz includes many old favorites, but I still managed to get one wrong (the one about human remains inside a crocodile). I'm glad to see that he identified the picture of the spider in the Iraqi desert as real. This other hoax photo test that I linked to earlier claimed it was fake.

Texas Tortilla and ‘An Amazing Photograph’ — Here are two more curious auctions on eBay (people keep sending me this stuff... probably because I keep posting about it). The first is a tortilla shaped like the state of Texas (item# 5557639562). The auctioner swears that "I have not cut it, clipped it, chewed it or changed it in any way. What you see is what came out of the bag." And I've got to hand it to him. It really does look like Texas. The current bid is only $1.99.

What you're supposed to see in the other auction, however, isn't anywhere near as obvious, but the current bid on this is $3,100. It's supposed to be a photograph of 'The Face of the Lord' as seen in a cloud (item# 5557053951). The photo was taken 31 years ago. I think I can see some kind of face-like features in the cloud, but as one person has already commented on the auction, 'What if it's the devil?' I wonder if it would fetch even more money if it were a demonic photo.

Snake Flossing — Here's another odd picture I got in my email (click image to enlarge). This one I happen to know is real. It's a picture of C. Manoharan, aka "Snake Manu". Threading snakes into his nose and out his mouth is his specialty. It's called 'snake flossing'. The snake in this picture is just a harmless garden snake, though apparently he also does the trick with cobras. Plus, Snake Manu also holds the Guinness World Record for most earthworms eaten. He's just an all-around Renaissance man. Below are some more pictures of him doing his snake flossing trick, taken from this article about him and his career. I think he'd be a great guest to have at a party.🐛Here's my favorite paragraph from the article I linked to:
it so happened that a snake went through his nostril and stopped somewhere close to the larynx and refused to move past it. May be it was stuck. It could not be pulled out through the nostril back also, as it was one of the deadliest varieties and pulling it out back through the entry point made Manoharan more vulnerable for a quick bite. He was left with no option. Either the snake bites him or he bites the snake. He chose the later option and bit it into pieces. And he had found another item that would strike terror among his audience. Eating them alive!

Bring Me A Beer — Here's yet another photo from today's email. This one I refuse to believe is real, although I can't see any evidence that it's fake. I've been to those beer festivals in Germany where the waitresses carry around huge numbers of beer mugs steins in each hand, and I never saw one with six large steins in each hand. At least, I can't remember seeing anything like that (the whole beer-festival experience is a bit blurry in my mind). However, I don't know how such a thing could even theoretically be done. How could you position the steins so that you could grip six handles simultaneously? Unless she's supporting some of them against her body. (click the image to enlarge)

View From Airplane Window — I'm receiving a lot of strange photos in my email today. This one comes with the caption: 'Holy Crap' Engine. I have no idea where it originally comes from. But I would guess that it's real. If it's photoshopped, it's a very good photoshop job. Click on the image to enlarge.
Update: This is definitely a real photo. It was taken on July 13, 2004 aboard an AirTran flight from Atlanta to Orlando with 110 people on board. The left engine cowling came off soon after take off, but the plane managed to turn around and land safely. One of the passengers took this photo. It's not known which one.

Nuns on Stools — I just received this photo in my email. I suppose those stools the women are sitting on are real enough, though I have no idea if the women are really nuns, or if the whole scene was staged. It looks to me like the picture was taken somewhere in Europe, based on the drinks and signs behind the bar.


Update: I added the picture that Charybdis linked to, since it's evident they belong together in a series. It must have been some kind of 'nuns on stools' photo shoot. (click images to enlarge)

Islamic Hostage Barbie Hoax — The Islamic Hostage Barbie Hoax as Instapundit has dubbed it (i.e. that hoax photo of a captured U.S. soldier) is now all over the blogosphere. It seems quite clear that it was an action figure in the photo, not an American soldier. But it's not clear to me where this photo originally came from. Where is this mysterious Islamic website that the picture was posted on? If we knew that it would be a lot easier to tell if it was meant as a joke, or as a serious (though absurd) threat.

Anyway, as I've been browsing the web I've already come across a lot of photo parodies of the hoax. Here are a few that I've found so far:

From The Templar Pundit, Hostage Barbie:


From EtherHouse, Team America:


From Power Line, Elmo Captured:


And from Ludicrosity, Rumsfeld Decides:

Dog and Dolphin — Wm. Murray emailed me this interesting photo (click to enlarge). Can you guess if it's real or fake?

Answer: Apparently it's real (when I first looked at it I just assumed it was fake). From Wm.'s email: The dog and the bottle-nose dolphin were pals who "met" about every week or ten days at the beach in front of the Meridian Club on Pine Cay in the Turks & Caicos. My wife and I vacationed there in May 1990 and took many pictures of this strange pairing. We were told that it had been going on for some years prior to our visit. The dog (Taffy) would begin furious barking and race to the water's edge. Moments later the dolphin (JoJo) would come to the shore and they would romp together until enough people got into the water and the dolphin would swim away. Initially he(?) would move a ways along the shore away from the crowd with the dog following, then eventually leave after the people caught up to him a few times. JoJo would nip at Taffy's legs and Taffy would jump on the dolphin's back, leaving scratch marks. The whole thing would last 8-10 minutes and we saw it three different times over about twenty days. (I've since reused JoJo's image for a few of my hoax shots to simulate a shark in the pool or creek.)

Fat Dog — Kentaro Mori of Liquito sent me this picture (click thumbnail to enlarge) of a very fat dog. He says that he found it on a Japanese website. My hunch would be that there's no photo trickery involved here. It really is a very fat dog. Probably comes from the same household as Munchkin the Monster Cat.

Weird X-Rays — If this story wasn't in the NY Times, I wouldn't believe that it was true (though I do see that it's actually an AP story picked up by the Times). Patrick Lawler went to the dentist about a toothache and found out he had a four-inch nail lodged inside his head. It came from a nail gun he had been using a few days before. He hadn't realized that the gun had shot a nail inside his head! The x-ray of the nail inside his head (see thumbnail to right) reminds me of the x-ray picture (below) that I have on my Hoax Photo Test showing a fork inside a woman's stomach. In her case she swallowed the fork while inserting it down her throat in order to remove a cockroach that had somehow got lodged down there. True story.

Bill Gates Teen Idol — The Monkey Methods blog has posted pictures of a young Bill Gates supposedly posing for a Teen Beat photospread back in 1983. I'm willing to believe that the photos are real pictures of a young Bill. But I'm not willing to believe that they're from Teen Beat, not unless more evidence is provided, such as a scan of the article itself. Some of the people who have posted comments on the Monkey Methods blog have pointed out problems with the claim that these photos are from 1983. For instance, there's clearly an Apple Computer a Macintosh visible in the first picture. But the Apple Macintosh only began to be sold in 1984. Plus, why in the world would Teen Beat have wanted to do a photospread of Bill Gates?

Update: These pictures were taken in 1985 by celebrity photographer Deborah Feingold shortly after the release of Windows 1.0. This information comes from Corbis.com, which has these photos in their database. There's no evidence that they ever appeared in Teen Beat.

Still on Vacation! — I don't know if these pictures are real, in the sense of whether they really show tourists sunning themselves while people try to clean up tsunami damage around them. Maybe the pictures were taken at some other time, in a totally different context. But they certainly look like tourists trying to act as if nothing happened while all around them is a wasteland. Unbelievable.

Tsunami Seen From a High-Rise — Snopes posted a photo (click to enlarge) that's going around accompanied by this text:

Be sure and open the picture for a shock of your life to see what the tsunami looked like just before hitting Puket, Thailand. This picture is not a fake. It appears to have been taken from a hi-rise building window in downtown Phuket Thailand. The power of nature is hard to comprehend, especially the destructiveness of water.

Snopes says the status of the picture is undetermined, but I'd have a hard time believing it's real. First of all, is that actually downtown Phuket? I've never been there, so I couldn't say, but all the pictures of Thailand I've seen show it being a lot greener... a lot more vegetation. Second, almost every account of the tsunami I've read said that it didn't look like the classic hollywood image of a tidal wave towering above the land... which is exactly what this picture looks like. The wave in this picture is nearly as high as the tallest buildings, which would make it at least 100 feet high (or even higher). Of course, if this picture is real, it's pretty incredible.
Update: The cars are driving on the wrong side of the road for this to be a picture taken in Thailand.
Update 2 (1/19/05): This picture actually shows a harbor view of Antofagosta, Chile (as seen in the thumbnail to the right). The large wave has obviously been photoshopped in.

Real Tsunami, Wrong Ocean — A few days ago the Calgary Herald ran on its front page this dramatic photo of a tsunami wave crashing over a surprised group of people, along with the headline 'Tsunami death toll could pass 100,000'. The photo soon appeared elsewhere, such as on the start-up page of AOL. The problem is not that the photo itself is fake. It's not. It really does show a real tsunami wave. The problem is that it doesn't have anything to do with the recent Indian Ocean tsunami. As Nicole Bogdas of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel discovered:

This is a two-year-old Reuters photo of a tsunami in China. You might remember the event: a bunch of people went to watch the waves and it turned out to be bigger than they thought. Anyway, the doctor gave the photo to the mayor of Calgary--he'd saved it for fundraising purposes. The Mayor showed it during a presentation on tsunami aid and the herald asked if they could have it thinking it was from this tsunami.

The Herald apologized once it realized the error.
Update: Tamandua points out in the comments that this is a wave produced by a tidal bore, not a tsunami.

Soldier Cutting Grass Found — The Oregon Statesman Journal has an article about that photo of a soldier in Iraq tending a small plot of grass (which I posted here back in October). They identify the soldier as Warrant Officer Brook Turner stationed at Camp Cooke north of Baghdad. They even provide his email address in case you want to send him a happy New Year's message. Plus, they mention the Museum of Hoaxes in the article. The weird date on the photo which had everyone confused was apparently just a result of not resetting the camera's date after the batteries had been changed. So that's one mystery cleared up. Officer Turner, who's preparing to come home from Iraq soon to his home in Hawaii, seems pretty laid back about the whole episode, remarking that "Everyone seems to be a little more excited about it than me... I just planted some grass -- nothing big." (Thanks to Dwight Mears for forwarding me the article)

A Christmas Ghost — Here's a new ghost photo that's begun to do the email rounds. To me it looks like a simple double exposure... but maybe it really is the ghost of Mary's Grandfather. In which case, sell him on eBay!!
Here's the text that accompanies the photo. Click photo to enlarge (thanks to Jennifer for sending this to me):
This picture is soo freaky..... My co-worker Mary that lives in stockton bought her sister a digital camera for X-mas. Her sister took a picture of their niece and if you look behind the chair the niece is sitting on you will see Mary's Grandfather who past away 2 months ago in October 04. Remember this picture was took on X-mas day morning and I was also with Mary when she bought the camera at Circuit City the day after Thanksgiving. Her Grandfather was creamated and his ashes are at Mary's home. When I saw this picture it gave me the CHILLS!!! If you can make the picture bigger so you can get a better look at him.
Lydia

Near Collision — Here's a picture that's doing the email rounds. The picture is real (no digital manipulation). The only fake part about it is that the perspective of the shot makes the two planes look like they're about to hit each other, while in reality they're 750 feet apart. The photo was taken at San Francisco Airport on August 15, 2004. The photo can be found on Airliners.net. The photographer, Ben Wang, has added this note to it: "The two planes appear to be touching! The 757 is on final for 28L while the 747 is for 28R. The runways are 750 ft apart, so there is still plenty of room between them. Incidentally, Lufthansa 455 is seen here returning to SFO due to an oil leak and eventual shutdown of the number 2 engine. Note rudder is deflected to the right compensating for the failed engine on the left side." (via Liquito)

1954 Home Computer Claims Victim — There should be an award like the Darwin Awards, except instead of being given to people who die in stupid ways it would be given to people who display extreme gullibility. If there was such an award, Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, would be this week's candidate for it. During the keynote address at the Oracle OpenWorld Show he displayed a picture, supposedly from 1954, of what the RAND Corporation imagined that a home computer would look like in 2004 (see the thumbnail: click to enlarge). His point was that people fifty years ago could hardly imagine what the computers of today would look like, and we can't imagine what computers will look like fifty years from now. But the picture he showed wasn't fifty years old. It's a hoax photo that's been going around the internet for the past three months. It began its life as an entry in a Fark Photoshop contest (theme: "Photoshop this mock-up of a submarine's maneuvering Room"... this photo easily won the contest). Apparently, McNealy hadn't yet learned where the photo really came from. Now, I'm sure, he knows.
Update: Here's a Popular Mechanics article about the 1954 Home Computer image and its creator, a Danish software designer named Troels Eklund Andersen.

Meteorite Strike or Hoax? — Wayne Pryde believes that he has taken the first photograph ever to capture the image of a meteorite striking the earth. He was taking pictures of clouds when he happened to get this photograph of what might be a grain-of-sand-sized meteorite hitting the Earth. But meteor experts aren't so sure. They're not yet crying hoax (Mr. Pryde swears that he hasn't digitally altered the photo), but they don't think the photo shows a meteor impact. However, they have no idea what else it might be. The Astronomy Picture of the Day site has put up a hi-res version of the image and is asking for help from the internet community. Maybe somebody online can figure out what this thing is.

Tank Silencer — Here's another photo that's doing the rounds on the internet. It's captioned 'Tank Silencer'. I have no idea what this device is actually used for, but somehow I don't think it's a tank silencer. So this would be a case of 'real picture, false caption.' Click image for larger version. (via Hell in a Handbasket)