A photo described as a tanker approaching Hurricane Isabel at sea has been spreading around though email. And I have to admit, I've contributed to its spread, forwarding it on to friends and family. But David Emery informs us that it's a hoax. Well, the picture itself is real. But it doesn't show Hurricane Isabel. Instead, it shows a tanker approaching Tropical Cyclone Graham. But whether it's Isabel or Graham, it's still a really cool photo.
A newspaper in the Indian city of Tiruchirappalli published a picture of a boy with an eerie ghost hovering behind him. They claimed the boy had encountered the ghost while on a school picnic, and went into a coma. Now the ghost was stalking other boys. As a result, families throughout the region started keeping their kids home, out of school. The photo, of course, was a photoshopped fake. More details here.
Got an email from Kentaro Mori who runs a Brazilian weblog about hoaxes (he also translated my hoax photo test into Portuguese at one point). He took a look at the video of that guy ducking under the bus. Whereas I thought the guy must be on the opposite side of the bus, employing a trick of perspective to make it look like the bus was going over him, Kentaro analyzed some of the frames of the video a little more closely and suggests that the bus is actually going over him. Could be. If so, hopefully it was a staged stunt, otherwise I can imagine the heart attack the guy must have given the bus driver (who doesn't appear to even slow down).
Meet Munchkin the Monster Cat, who seems to be related to Snowball. Is Munchkin for real. Honestly, I don't know. I'm looking for answers. (Thanks to Mara, who thinks Munchkin is fake, for sending this image).
Does this photo that's been circulating through email really show the management of Microsoft as they looked back in 1978?
A visitor sent me this photo of the Real East Coast Blackout of 2003. It definitely represents an improvement over that phony blackout picture that was circulating last week.
It's a spectacular (and by now quite famous) photo. Two elks stand in a river as an inferno rages behind them. But is the picture real?
A photo of last week's blackout showing a startling dark patch in the northeast is going around. It looks like a fake to me.
Here are some images that have been circulating around of anorexically skinny fashion models. Are these models actually this skinny, or have the images been touched up by someone trying to make the fashion industry look like a gallery of horrors? I'm not sure. (Warning: one of the images may not be considered safe for work, though it's no racier than what you'd find in your average issue of National Geographic).
In response to a posting I made on July 16 questioning the authenticity of an image showing the pope sticking his tongue out, the webmaster of popeface.com has contacted me to insist that popeface is not a hoax. I'm still a little skeptical. It could be genuine, but it's such an odd picture that it immediately triggers my suspicions. Why were the negatives destroyed? Why is he selling it through a website, rather than through more normal channels such as an auction house or even eBay?
Here's the latest thing making the rounds in Italy. It's Popeface! Supposedly a picture of the Pope taken during the '80s in which he's sticking his tongue out and making a strange grimace. Prints of it are being offered for sale at popeface.com. Of course, the seller doesn't specify how much he's asking for it. He only tells you to email him for more info at his hotmail account. And strangely, he's also offering the domain name 'popeface.com' for sale. So this has all the markings of a hoax. (Thanks to an anonymous Italian visitor for alerting me to this).
I just got this cool photo in my email from a visitor (Amy Lothschutz-Hughes). When I first saw it I was sure that it was a hoax. Turns out it's real. But it's a dolphin in the water, not a shark. The photo was taken by photographer Kurt Jones.
Two days ago a giant blob-like creature washed up on a beach in Chile. Chilean scientists were baffled. They had no clue what the creature was. Based on the emails I've received, a lot of people immediately suspected it was some kind of elaborate hoax. But I don't think this was a hoax. Scientists now say that they believe the blobby thing was either the body of a giant octopus or discarded whale blubber.
A visitor named 'AJ' wrote in with this question:
Try to guess if this photo of a really big plane getting stuck as it crosses a ramp over a highway is real or fake. The answer's here.
Redbook draws fire from Julia Roberts for putting a picture of her on its cover in which a recent image of her head is pasted onto an old picture of her body. Ironically, the title of their article about her is "The Real Julia." Redbook also recently got in trouble for doing the same thing to Jennifer Aniston. The problem, of course, is not in their use of composite images (everyone does that), but in doing such a poor job of them.
