Hoax Museum Blog: Pseudoscience

The Zero G Day Hoax — January 4 will be "Zero G Day," according to a report trending online. Do a twitter search for #zerogday, and you can find people talking about it. The report originates from news-hound.net, which offers this explanation:


This is all nonsense, of course. Patrick Moore has been dead for over a year, so he hasn't been telling anybody anything.

Zero G Day is just a shameless recycling of Moore's famous 1976 April Fool's Day hoax about the "Jovian-Plutonian Gravitational Effect." Moore intended his joke to be a spoof of a book called the The Jupiter Effect, published in late 1974, which claimed that a rare alignment of the planets in 1982 was going to trigger massive earthquakes on Earth.


I've got a fairly long article about Moore's 1976 hoax in the April Fool Archive, and I couldn't help but notice that the language of news-hound.net's article is very similar to what I wrote in my article. (I can't remember how many years ago I wrote it, but it was a while.) For the sake of comparison, here's what I wrote:


I think it's fair to assume that at some point the news-hound.net writers read my article.

Bigfoot researcher finds novel way to get published — Good grief! This is kinda sad. Melba Ketchum fancies herself a bona fide scientist. But her subject-of-choice is Bigfoot, which immediately exiles her to the crackpot fringe of science. For which reason, she found that she couldn't get her paper on her "Sasquatch genome study" published anywhere. So what did she do? She created her own journal, the DeNovo Journal of Science. But instead of admitting she created it, she's pretending that it's some kind of independent journal. The problem: her Bigfoot-DNA paper is the one and only article this "journal" has ever published.

Krispy Kreme sponsors creation science? — I was walking through La Mesa last night (La Mesa, where I live, is a suburb of San Diego), when I came across a flyer for the Creation & Earth History Museum, which is down the road in Santee.



At the bottom of the flyer, as you can see, is a list of sponsors. Scantibodies, NOTW, 1:1, Christian Examiner, and KSDW didn't surprise me. They're all christian organizations. (The founders of the Creation Museum were also the founders of Scantibodies. KSDW is a bible radio station, and I don't know what 1:1 is, but I'm assuming it's some kind of reference to a biblical verse.)

But Krispy Kreme and Chick-fil-a surprised me. They're sponsoring creation science? Seems like an odd publicity move for them. Am I now going to have to boycott them? (Not that I go to either one much already.) I've sent their pr offices an email to confirm that this sponsorship is real.

Even odder is that I don't believe there's either a Krispy Kreme or a Chick-fil-a in Santee itself. So it's not like they're neighbors.

As I was contemplating this flyer, it occurred to me that a perfect location for the Museum of Hoaxes would be to park it right next door to the Creation Museum. I could work there and stay in San Diego.

Edit: Apparently Chick-fil-a is an openly Christian corporation, which leaves Krispy Kreme as the odd-man-out in the list of sponsors.

Healer knows all your problems before you even mention them to him — The Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa has determined that Dr. Abdallah Kiwa has been "'duping' people into paying for services that cannot possibly be delivered." Specifically, Kiwa has distributed advertising pamphlets in which he has made the following claims:

Happy 07/08/09! — USA Today points out that a "rare time/date alignment" occurs on July 8, 2009 at 4:05 a.m. and 6 seconds. The exact date then will be: 04:05:06 07/08/09.

Does this mean anything? Well, if you ask a tarot card reader, it does. And, of course, that's who USA Today asks:


As John Walkenbach notes, "the article doesn't mention that this is hokey nonsense. It quotes the numerology expert as if she's actually a credible person."

Ghost Meter — Amazon is selling a ghost meter for only $27.98. Sounds like a bargain. And according to the reviews it's "a reliable indicator of paranormal activity." Of course, what it really detects is electromagnetic fluctuations, such as the kind produced by any electrical device. So as a home repair tool for finding live wires, it could be useful.

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.

Forensic Astrology — What would Grissom have to say about this: Forensic Astrology


In its defense, I'm sure the guy gets results that are just as good as those psychics who try to solve crimes.