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         xmlns:georss="http://www.georss.org/georss"><docs>This is a RSS file. Copy the URL into your aggregator of choice. If you don't know what this means and want to learn more, please see: <span>http://platial.typepad.com/news/2006/04/really_simple_t.html</span> for more info.</docs>
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<title>Hoaxes</title>
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<item rdf:about="http://platial.com/post/41361">
<link>http://platial.com/post/41361</link>
<title>They Hit a Space Alien With their Truck</title>
<description>
        <![CDATA[
        It was a hot night on July 8, 1953 and police officer Sherley Brown and his partner were doing a routine patrol down a rural highway near Austell, Georgia. Up ahead they saw a pickup truck stopped in the middle of the road and pulled over to investigate. What they found was the most unusual scene they would ever encounter during their entire careers as officers.

Three frightened young men were waiting nervously by the side of the road. And lying there on the tarmac in front of the truck, illuminated by the vehicle's headlights, was a bizarre two-foot tall creature that looked for all the world like a space alien.

The young men spilled out a strange tale. They said they'd been out in their truck "honkey-tonking", around, when they came over a hill and suddenly found themselves careening towards a flying saucer that was 'glowing red all over.' Three small aliens were outside the craft wandering up and down the highway. The boys jammed on their brakes, but couldn't avoid hitting one of the aliens. The other two spacemen made it to the ship and blasted off.

At first the officers weren't sure whether to believe the tale, but they couldn't deny the physical evidence that backed it up: the long skid marks on the highway, and the body of the alien itself lying lifeless in the road—a hairless, two-foot tall humanoid creature with eerie, round, dark eyes.

Hours later, word of the capture of an extraterrestrial leaked out to the press, and the sleepy Georgia county found itself at the center of a media frenzy. Reporters from Atlanta descended on the small town, and news offices from around the country flooded the switchboard of the police station. Even representatives from the Air Force arrived to assess the situation.

A local veterinarian proclaimed that the body did indeed look like "something out of this world." But when officials from the Georgia Crime Lab showed up a day later, they soon deduced that the alien was nothing more than a shaved Capuchin monkey whose tail had been cut off.

When confronted with this expert opinion, the boys quickly confessed. They explained that it had all been nothing more than a prank inspired by a bet made during a card game. One of the boys had wagered his friends that he could get himself featured in the local paper within a week. So to win the bet he had bought a monkey at a local petshop, gave it a lethal dose of chloroform, shaved its hair, and chopped off its tail. The result was a creature that looked decidedly alien.

The good news for the young man was that he handily won his bet. He was profiled not only in local but also national papers. The bad news was that the police fined him $40 for obstructing the highway.

The boys dropped out of public view after this, but their caper has lived on in Georgia lore, remembered somewhat ambivalently by locals as the Great Monkey Hoax of 1953.
<br /><br /><a href="http://platial.com/post/41361">Map this on Platial</a><br /> 
        ]]>
        </description>
<georss:point> </georss:point>
<dc:creator></dc:creator>
<dc:date>2006-03-16 18:49:35.310322+00:00</dc:date>
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<item rdf:about="http://platial.com/post/41696">
<link>http://platial.com/post/41696</link>
<title>Insta-Color TV</title>
<description>
        <![CDATA[
        In 1962 there was only one tv channel in Sweden, and it broadcast in black and white. The station's technical expert, Kjell Stensson, appeared on the news to announce that thanks to a newly developed technology, all viewers could now quickly and easily convert their existing sets to display color reception. All they had to do was pull a nylon stocking over their tv screen, and they would begin to see their favorite shows in color. Stensson then proceeded to demonstrate the process. Reportedly, hundreds of thousands of people, out of the population of seven million, were taken in. Actual color tv transmission only commenced in Sweden on April 1, 1970.<br /><br /><a href="http://platial.com/post/41696">Map this on Platial</a><br /> 
        ]]>
        </description>
<georss:point> </georss:point>
<dc:creator></dc:creator>
<dc:date>2006-03-20 10:49:00.756339+00:00</dc:date>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://platial.com/post/41355">
<link>http://platial.com/post/41355</link>
<title>The Magic Inseminating Bullet</title>
<description>
        <![CDATA[
        n November 1874 an unusual article appeared in the introductory volume of The American Medical Weekly, a Louisville medical journal. It was written by Dr. LeGrand G. Capers and was titled, Attention Gynaecologists! Notes from the Diary of a Field and Hospital Surgeon, C.S.A." In the article Dr. Capers recounted a case of artificial insemination that he had witnessed on a Civil War battlefield in Mississippi. The event occurred on May 12, 1863 at around 3 p.m. at the "battle of R." (battle of Raymond), where "Gen. G's brigade" (Brigadier General John Gregg) of the Confederate forces fought Grant's army led by "Gen. L." (Major General John A. Logan).

According to Dr. Capers, who was an army doctor for the confederates, he was with his regiment as the fighting was occurring. A house stood about 300 yards behind the confederate lines, and the residents of the house (a mother, her two daughters, and their servants) were standing in front of it watching the battle and waiting to aid any fallen confederate soldiers. Suddenly Dr. Capers noticed a soldier fall to the ground, and at the same instant he heard a scream from the house. He attended the fallen soldier who had been hit in the leg by a minnie ball. Dr. Capers also noticed that the bullet had "ricochetted from these parts, and, in its onward flight, passed through the scrotum, carrying away the left testicle."

While dressing the soldier's wounds, the mother from the house ran up to him and urged him to attend her daughter. The doctor complied and found that the eldest daughter had been also wounded by a minnie ball. In her case, the bullet "had penetrated the left abdominal parietes, about midway between the umbilicus and anterior spinal process of the ilium, and was lost in the abdominal cavity, leaving a ragged wound behind."

The doctor only had time to prescribe the girl an anodyne before he was forced to retreat from the house with his regiment. However, over the course of the next two months, being stationed with the wounded at the nearby village of Raymond, he was able to visit the young woman regularly and watched her fully recover from her wound. Six months later he happened to be in the neighborhood of Raymond again and visited the girl. He found that her stomach had begun to swell. Three months further on she gave birth to an eight pound son.

The family, being of strict morality, was mortified that their unmarried daughter had given birth. The daughter, however, repeatedly insisted that she was a virgin and didn't know how such a thing could have happened. Dr. Capers examined her and found that her hymen was intact. Nevertheless he gave no credence, at the time, to her insistence that she was a virgin. But three weeks later the grandmother of the new child asked Dr. Capers to examine the boy because the child's scrotum was dangerously enlarged and sensitive. The doctor examined the boy, decided to operate and, to his astonishment, found a minnie ball embedded inside the child.

After much reflection, trying to figure out how a bullet could have become lodged inside the child, Dr. Capers figured out the incredible series of events that must have happened. He remembered treating the young man who had suffered from a bullet passing through his left testicle. This same bullet, he determined, must have then continued on its flight, carrying with it particles of semen, before it finally came to rest in the young women's abdomen, impregnating her, and afterwards working its way into the child's flesh. He explained the bizarre situation to the family, and they requested to meet the soldier. The soldier and the young woman ended up marrying each other and produced two more children in a more conventional manner.

After appearing in the American Medical Weekly, this Civil War story became something of a legend. Its origins and details became obscured, but the basic outline of the tale was frequently repeated. A medical journal repeated it as true as late as 1959 (F. Donald Napolitani, "Two Unusual Cases of Gunshot Wounds of the Uterus," New York State Journal of Medicine, 59, 1959, 491-93). But the story is not true. It was entirely invented by Dr. Capers who apparently wanted to poke fun at the numerous highly embellished, often spurious, Civil War stories then being told in the 1870s.

But the joke ended up being on Dr. Capers. The highly respectable doctor had submitted the story to the American Medical Weekly anonymously, not wishing his name to be forever attached to such a ridiculous tale. However, the editor of the journal, E.S. Gaillard, recognizing the doctor's handwriting and also recognizing that the story was a wild-eyed fiction, turned the tables on the doctor by printing the piece but listing Capers prominently as the author.<br /><br /><a href="http://platial.com/post/41355">Map this on Platial</a><br /> 
        ]]>
        </description>
<georss:point> </georss:point>
<dc:creator></dc:creator>
<dc:date>2006-03-16 18:29:11.352649+00:00</dc:date>
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<item rdf:about="http://platial.com/post/41347">
<link>http://platial.com/post/41347</link>
<title>The Cardiff Giant</title>
<description>
        <![CDATA[
        The Cardiff Giant, one of the most famous hoaxes in American history, was a 10-foot-tall "petrified man" discovered October 16, 1869 by workers digging a well behind the barn of William C. "Stub" Newell in Cardiff, New York. It is so famous that both it and an unauthorized copy made by P.T. Barnum are still on display.

The Giant was the creation of a New York tobacconist named George Hull. Hull, an atheist, who decided to create the giant after an argument with a fundamentalist minister Mr. Turk about a passage in Genesis that stated that there were giants who once lived on earth.

Hull hired men to carve out a 11-foot-long block of gypsum at Fort Dodge, Iowa, telling them it was intended for a monument of Abraham Lincoln in New York. He shipped the block to Chicago, where he hired a German stonecutter to carve it into likeness of man and swore him to secrecy. Then he transported the giant by rail to the farm of William Newell, his cousin, in November 1868. He had then spent $2,600 on the hoax.

When the giant had been buried for a year, Newell hired two men, Gideon Emmons and Henry Nichols, ostensiblly to dig a well. When they found the Giant, one of them has been attributed to saying "I declare, some old Indian has been buried here!"

There is also a replica of the giant at the Fort Dodge, IA Historical Fort Museum. The gypsum out of which the original giant was carved was mined in Fort Dodge.

<br /><br /><a href="http://platial.com/post/41347">Map this on Platial</a><br /> 
        ]]>
        </description>
<georss:point> </georss:point>
<dc:creator></dc:creator>
<dc:date>2006-03-16 17:04:44.914561+00:00</dc:date>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://platial.com/post/41350">
<link>http://platial.com/post/41350</link>
<title>Mary Tofts Give Birth to Rabbits</title>
<description>
        <![CDATA[
        Mary Tofts was a maidservant from Godalming, England who in 1726 became the subject of considerable controversy due to a hoax where she was alleged by her doctors to have given birth to at least 16 rabbits.

Tofts was 25 years old and married at the time, and despite a miscarriage in August still seemed pregnant. She went into apparent labor and the local doctor John Howard arrived to assist. Howard reported that he delivered several rabbits, all stillborn, and that afterward she still seemed pregnant. He sent letters to some of England's greatest doctors and scientists asking for help investigating the situation, and among those who came to his assistance were Nathaniel St. Andre, surgeon-anatomist to King George I, and Sir Richard Manningham, the most famous obstetrician in London. Toft gave birth to several more dead rabbits in their presence.

Tofts claimed that during pregnancy she had an intense craving for roast rabbit, that she tried to catch rabbits in the garden, that she had admired them in the village market, and that she had dreamed about rabbits. Based on this the doctors explained the births as a result of "maternal impressions", contending that a pregnant woman's experiences could be imprinted directly on the fetus at conception and cause birth defects.

Sir Richard Manningham eventually exposed the rabbit birthings as a hoax, but not before many of London's most eminent doctors had been thoroughly taken in by it. 

On November 29th Mary was brought to London. By now her case had become a national sensation, and huge crowds surrounded the house where she was kept. But when kept under constant supervision, Mary stopped giving birth to rabbits, and her case quickly began to unravel.

Witnesses came forward who claimed that they had supplied Mary's husband with rabbits. Then, when a famous London physician, Sir Richard Manningham, threatened that he might have to surgically examine Mary's uterus in the name of science, she wisely decided to confess.

She explained that she had simply inserted the dead rabbits inside her womb when no one was looking, motivated by a desire for fame and the hope of receiving a pension from the King. She was briefly imprisoned for fraud, but was released without trial. It is said that she managed to give birth to a normal, human child less than a year later.

John Howard and Nathanael St. Andre, the two surgeons who had most passionately believed and defended her, fared less well. Their medical careers were both ruined.

(information from wikepedia and themuseumofhoaxes)<br /><br /><a href="http://platial.com/post/41350">Map this on Platial</a><br /> 
        ]]>
        </description>
<georss:point> </georss:point>
<dc:creator></dc:creator>
<dc:date>2006-03-16 17:46:08.630829+00:00</dc:date>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://platial.com/post/41359">
<link>http://platial.com/post/41359</link>
<title>The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest</title>
<description>
        <![CDATA[
        On April 1, 1957 the British news show, Panorama, broadcast a segment about a bumper spaghetti harvest in southern Switzerland. The success of the crop was attributed to an unusually mild winter. The audience heard Richard Dimbleby, the show's highly respected anchor, discussing the details of the spaghetti crop as they watched a rural Swiss family pulling pasta off spaghetti trees and placing it into baskets.

"The spaghetti harvest here in Switzerland is not, of course, carried out on anything like the tremendous scale of the Italian industry," Dimbleby informed the audience. "Many of you, I'm sure," he continued, "will have seen pictures of the vast spaghetti plantations in the Po valley. For the Swiss, however, it tends to be more of a family affair."

The narration then continued in a tone of absolute seriousness:

"Another reason why this may be a bumper year lies in the virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil, the tiny creature whose depradations have caused much concern in the past."

Dimbleby anticipated some questions viewers might have. For instance, why, if spaghetti grows on trees, does it always come in uniform lengths? The answer was that "this is the result of many years of patient endeavor by past breeders who succeeded in producing the perfect spaghetti."

And apparently the life of a spaghetti farmer was not free of worries: "The last two weeks of March are an anxious time for the spaghetti farmer. There's always the chance of a late frost which, while not entirely ruining the crop, generally impairs the flavor and makes it difficult for him to obtain top prices in world markets."

But finally, Dimbleby assured the audience that, "For those who love this dish, there's nothing like real, home-grown spaghetti."

Of course, the broadcast was just an April Fool's Day joke. But soon after the broadcast ended, the BBC began to receive hundreds of calls from puzzled viewers. Did spaghetti really grow on trees, they wanted to know. Others were eager to learn how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. To this the BBC reportedly replied that they should "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best."

To be fair to the viewers, spaghetti was not a widely eaten food in Britain during the 1950s and was considered by many to be very exotic. Its origin must have been a real mystery to most people. Even Sir Ian Jacob, the BBC's director general, later admitted that he had to run to a reference book to check on where spaghetti came from after watching the show.

The prestige of the Panorama show itself, and the general trust that was still placed in the medium of television, also lent the claim credibility. The idea for the segment was dreamed up by one of the Panorama cameramen, Charles de Jaeger. He later said that the idea occurred to him when he remembered one of his grade-school teachers chiding him for being "so stupid he would believe spaghetti grew on trees."

<br /><br /><a href="http://platial.com/post/41359">Map this on Platial</a><br /> 
        ]]>
        </description>
<georss:point> </georss:point>
<dc:creator></dc:creator>
<dc:date>2006-03-16 18:44:01.960707+00:00</dc:date>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://platial.com/post/41362">
<link>http://platial.com/post/41362</link>
<title>The Sydney Iceberg</title>
<description>
        <![CDATA[
        On April 1, 1978 a barge appeared in Sydney Harbor towing a giant iceberg. Sydneysiders (as residents of Sydney are known) were expecting it. Dick Smith, a local adventurer and millionaire businessman (owner of Dick Smith Foods), had been loudly promoting his scheme to tow an iceberg from Antarctica for quite some time. Now he had apparently succeeded.

Smith said that he was going to carve the berg into small ice cubes, which he would sell to the public for ten cents each. These well-traveled cubes, fresh from the pure waters of Antarctica, were promised to improve the flavor of any drink they cooled. The cubes would be marketed under the brand name 'Dickcicles.'

A radio station reporter kept up a live broadcast from the iceberg (christened the Dickenberg 1) as it made its way into the harbor. Excitedly the entire city waited to catch a glimpse of the curiosity. Boaters who traveled out to meet the berg were given complimentary cubes.

Then it began to rain.

The water washed away the firefighting foam and shaving cream that the iceberg was really made of, exposing the white plastic sheets beneath. In this degraded condition the Sydney Iceberg sailed proudly on, floating past the opera house and city skyline. Boaters who now joined the procession were still given free cubes... though the cubes actually came from the onboard beer refrigerator.
<br /><br /><a href="http://platial.com/post/41362">Map this on Platial</a><br /> 
        ]]>
        </description>
<georss:point> </georss:point>
<dc:creator></dc:creator>
<dc:date>2006-03-16 18:53:31.651976+00:00</dc:date>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://platial.com/post/41707">
<link>http://platial.com/post/41707</link>
<title>Alabama Changes the Value of Pi</title>
<description>
        <![CDATA[
        The April 1998 newsletter of New Mexicans for Science and Reason contained an article claiming that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi to the "Biblical value" of 3.0.<br /><br /><a href="http://platial.com/post/41707">Map this on Platial</a><br /> 
        ]]>
        </description>
<georss:point> </georss:point>
<dc:creator></dc:creator>
<dc:date>2006-03-20 11:19:35.720085+00:00</dc:date>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://platial.com/post/41708">
<link>http://platial.com/post/41708</link>
<title>Sans Seriffe</title>
<description>
        <![CDATA[
        The Guardian printed a supplement in 1977 praising this fictional resort, its two main islands (Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse), its capital (Bodoni), and its leader (General Pica). Intrigued readers were later disappointed to learn that sans serif did not exist except as references to typeface terminology.<br /><br /><a href="http://platial.com/post/41708">Map this on Platial</a><br /> 
        ]]>
        </description>
<georss:point> </georss:point>
<dc:creator></dc:creator>
<dc:date>2006-03-20 11:24:37.302912+00:00</dc:date>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://platial.com/post/41710">
<link>http://platial.com/post/41710</link>
<title>Hotheaded Naked Ice Borers</title>
<description>
        <![CDATA[
        In its April, 1995 issue Discover Magazine announced that Dr. Aprile Pazzo, a noted wildlife biologist, had found a fascinating new Antarctic species: the hotheaded naked ice borer. These bizarre creatures were each about half a foot long, very light, and had a bony plate attached to their head that could become burning hot, allowing them to bore tunnels through ice at high speeds. They used this ability to hunt penguins. Packs of them would melt the ice beneath a penguin causing it to sink into the slush, at which point the borers would surround the hapless creature and consume it.

Dr. Pazzo discovered the borers by chance as a result of their predatory nature. While studying a group of penguins, she noticed one frightened member of the group rapidly sinking into the ice. When she pulled the hapless creature out of the fast-growing slush pool that surrounded it, she found a host of small creatures attached to it. These creatures turned out to be the Hotheaded Ice Borers.

After careful research of this fascinating new species, Dr. Pazzo theorized that the hotheads might have been responsible for the mysterious disappearance of noted Antarctic explorer Philippe Poisson in 1837. "To the ice borers, he would have looked like a penguin," the article quoted her as saying.

Discover received more mail in response to this article than they had ever received for any other article.

<br /><br /><a href="http://platial.com/post/41710">Map this on Platial</a><br /> 
        ]]>
        </description>
<georss:point> </georss:point>
<dc:creator></dc:creator>
<dc:date>2006-03-20 11:54:41.815102+00:00</dc:date>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://platial.com/post/41711">
<link>http://platial.com/post/41711</link>
<title>Guiness Mean Time</title>
<description>
        <![CDATA[
        In 1998 Guinness issued a press release announcing that it had reached an agreement with the Old Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England to be the official beer sponsor of the Observatory's millennium celebration. According to this agreement, Greenwich Mean Time would be renamed Guinness Mean Time until the end of 1999. In addition, where the Observatory traditionally counted seconds in "pips," it would now count them in "pint drips." The Financial Times, not realizing that the release was a joke, declared that Guinness was setting a "brash tone for the millennium." When the Financial Times learned that it had fallen for a joke, it printed a curt retraction, stating that the news it had disclosed "was apparently intended as part of an April 1 spoof."<br /><br /><a href="http://platial.com/post/41711">Map this on Platial</a><br /> 
        ]]>
        </description>
<georss:point> </georss:point>
<dc:creator></dc:creator>
<dc:date>2006-03-20 12:01:36.215095+00:00</dc:date>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://platial.com/post/51229">
<link>http://platial.com/post/51229</link>
<title>Chris Martin to Overthrow Tony Blair</title>
<description>
        <![CDATA[
        The Guardian reported that Rock star Chris Martin (Coldplay) has joined forces with the Conservatives to unseat Prime Minister Tony Blair, after his Hollywood wife Gwyneth Paltrow met the Tory leader's wife at yoga class.

 The Guardian came up with the tale of Martin -- vegetarian frontman for the rock band Coldplay -- joining forces with David Cameron, the trendy new face of the once-staid Conservative party.

A phoney photo showed Martin and Cameron sharing a microphone. Martin is quoted saying he had lost faith in Blair.

"I invited him round to explain himself to me and a group of likeminded friends -- about how he was going to make poverty history and all that. But he never turned up. Madonna walked out and Stella (McCartney) was totally gutted."

In his new song supposedly recorded to support the Conservatives, available from the paper for download, "Martin" sings that recent events "smashed my illusions about Tony Blair/ His shoes, his suits, his terrible hair."



The Guardain's April Fool 2006<br /><br /><a href="http://platial.com/post/51229">Map this on Platial</a><br /> 
        ]]>
        </description>
<georss:point> </georss:point>
<dc:creator></dc:creator>
<dc:date>2006-04-01 09:10:09.595385+00:00</dc:date>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://platial.com/post/41353">
<link>http://platial.com/post/41353</link>
<title>The Great Moon Hoax</title>
<description>
        <![CDATA[
        During the final week of August 1835, a long article appeared in serial form on the front page of the New York Sun. It bore the headline:

GREAT ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES LATELY MADE BY SIR JOHN HERSCHEL, L.L.D. F.R.S. &c. At the Cape of Good Hope [From Supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science]

The article began by triumphantly listing a series of stunning astronomical breakthroughs that the famous British astronomer, Sir John Herschel, had apparently made "by means of a telescope of vast dimensions and an entirely new principle." Herschel, the article declared, had established a "new theory of cometary phenomena"; he had discovered planets in other solar systems; and he had "solved or corrected nearly every leading problem of mathematical astronomy." Then, almost as if it were an afterthought, the article revealed Herschel's final, stunning achievement: he had discovered life on the moon!

The article continued on and offered an elaborate account of the fantastic sights viewed by Herschel during his telescopic observation of the moon. It described a lunar topography that included vast forests, inland seas, and lilac-hued quartz pyramids. Readers learned that herds of bison wandered across the plains of the moon; that blue unicorns perched on its hilltops; and that spherical, amphibious creatures rolled across its beaches. The highpoint of the narrative came when it revealed that Herschel had found evidence of intelligent life on the moon: he had discovered both a primitive tribe of hut-dwelling, fire-wielding biped beavers, and a race of winged humans living in pastoral harmony around a mysterious, golden-roofed temple. Herschel dubbed these latter creatures the Vespertilio-homo, or "man-bat".

The article, of course, was an elaborate hoax. Herschel had not really observed life on the moon, nor had he accomplished any of the other astronomical breakthroughs credited to him in the article. In fact, Herschel was not even aware until much later that such discoveries had been attributed to him. However, the New York Sun managed to sell thousands of copies of the article before the public realized that it had been hoaxed.

Although the Sun managed to sell many copies of the moon hoax, it is not clear whether people at the time actually believed the story, or simply found it to be an entertaining topic of debate. Various eyewitnesses to the hoax assure us that the credulity was general. For instance, one reporter, writing 18 years after the event, recalled how the hoax was received at Yale College:

"Yale College was alive with staunch supporters. The literati—students and professors, doctors in divinity and law—and all the rest of the reading community, looked daily for the arrival of the New York mail with unexampled avidity and implicit faith. Have you seen the accounts of Sir John Herschel's wonderful discoveries? Have you read the Sun? Have you heard the news of the man in the Moon? These were the questions that met you every where. It was the absorbing topic of the day. Nobody expressed or entertained a doubt as to the truth of the story."

Authorship of the hoax is usually attributed to Richard Adams Locke, a Cambridge-educated reporter who was working for the Sun. However, Locke never publicly admitted to being the author of the hoax, and rumors have persisted that others were also involved in the production of the story. Two men in particular have been mentioned in connection with the hoax: Jean-Nicolas Nicollet, a French astronomer who was travelling through America at the time (though he was in Mississippi, not New York, when the moon hoax appeared), and Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of the Knickerbocker Magazine. However, there is no real evidence to suggest that anyone but Locke was the author of the hoax.

Despite the intense public speculation about the moon story, the Sun never publicly conceded that it was a hoax. On September 16, 1835 the Sun did publish a column in which it discussed the possibility that the story was a hoax, but it never confessed to anything. Quite the contrary. It wrote that, "Certain correspondents have been urging us to come out and confess the whole to be a hoax; but this we can by no means do, until we have the testimony of the English or Scotch papers to corroborate such a declaration." This is the closest the Sun ever came to an admission of guilt.
<br /><br /><a href="http://platial.com/post/41353">Map this on Platial</a><br /> 
        ]]>
        </description>
<georss:point> </georss:point>
<dc:creator></dc:creator>
<dc:date>2006-03-16 18:14:49.057456+00:00</dc:date>
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<item rdf:about="http://platial.com/post/41354">
<link>http://platial.com/post/41354</link>
<title>The Feejee Mermaid</title>
<description>
        <![CDATA[
        Mid-July, 1842. An English gentleman named "Dr. J. Griffin", a member of the British Lyceum of Natural History, arrived in New York City bearing a remarkable curiosity: A real mermaid supposedly caught near the Feejee Islands in the South Pacific. The press were expecting him, since throughout the Summer they had been receiving letters from Southern correspondents describing the doctor and his mermaid. So when he checked in to his hotel, reporters were waiting for him, demanding to see the mermaid. Grudgingly he obliged. What they saw totally convinced them of the creature's authenticity.

Soon after this, the showman P.T. Barnum visited the offices of the major papers where he explained that he had been trying to convince Dr. Griffin to display the mermaid at his museum. Unfortunately, the doctor was unwilling to do so. So Barnum volunteered to give the papers use of a woodcut of a beautiful, bare-breasted mermaid that he had prepared, since it was now useless to him. The papers (each thinking they had an exclusive) happily accepted the offer, and on Sunday, July 17, mermaid woodcuts appeared in all the papers. Simultaneously, Barnum distributed ten thousand copies of a pamphlet about mermaids throughout the city. The mermaids in the pamphlet were also represented as seductive ocean maidens.

Dr. Griffin agreed to exhibit it for a week at Concert Hall on Broadway. 

Huge crowds showed up for the exhibit. Dr. Griffin lectured for these crowds about his experiences as an explorer and described his theories of natural history. These theories were a bit peculiar. For instance, his main argument was that mermaids must be real since all things on land have their counterpart in the ocean — sea-horses, sea-lions, sea-dogs, etc. So therefore, we should assume there are also sea-humans! Meanwhile, the press continued to lavish attention on the mermaid, with rave reviews appearing in papers, such as this from the New York Sun:

"We've seen it! What? Why that Mermaid! The mischief you have! Where? What is it? It's twin sister to the deucedest looking thing imaginable—half fish, half flesh; and 'taken by and large,' the most odd of all oddities earth or sea has ever produced." (The New York Sun, August 5, 1842.)

After the week-long engagement at Concert Hall, Dr. Griffin agreed to allow the mermaid to stay longer in New York City. So it was moved to Barnum's American Museum, where it was exhibited for a month "without extra charge." Ticket receipts at the museum promptly tripled.

Throughout all this, the deception of the public had been three-fold. First, although advertisements had shown the mermaid to have the body of a young, beautiful woman, the creature itself was far less attractive. It had the withered body of a monkey and the dried tail of a fish. As a correspondent from the Charleston Courier put it: "Of one allusion... the sight of the wonder has forever robbed us — we shall never again discourse, even in poesy, of mermaid beauty, nor woo a mermaid even in our dreams — for the Feejee lady is the very incarnation of ugliness." In his autobiography, Barnum later described the mermaid as "an ugly, dried-up, black-looking, and diminutive specimen... its arms thrown up, giving it the appearance of having died in great agony."

Second, Dr. Griffin was a fraud. He was no English gentleman. In fact, there was no such thing as the British Lyceum of Natural History. Griffin's real name was Levi Lyman, and he was Barnum's accomplice-in-deception. The mermaid's introduction and exhibit had been the brainchild of Barnum all along. Barnum had arranged for letters about Dr. Griffin to be sent to New York papers throughout the Summer, and had then carefully orchestrated the mermaid publicity once Dr. Griffin (Lyman) "arrived" in New York. This had all been done to give the mermaid a veneer of scientific respectability.

Museum-goers examine the Feejee Mermaid. Illustration from Barnum's Autobiography
Finally, the mermaid itself was a fake, and Barnum knew it. He had leased the mermaid from Boston showman Moses Kimball (who, in turn, had bought it from a seaman), but before doing so Barnum had consulted a naturalist to inquire about the mermaid's authenticity. The naturalist had assured him it was quite fake. Nevertheless, Barnum realized that it wasn't important whether or not the mermaid was real. All that was important was that the public be led to believe that it might be real. So he hired a phony naturalist (Dr. Griffin) to vouch for the creature's authenticity, placed pictures of bare-breasted mermaids in the newspapers, and thereby manipulated the public into wanting to see it. As Barnum's biographer A.H. Saxon puts it, the Feejee Mermaid was a classic example of Barnum's ability to "take a mildly interesting object that had been around for some time and to puff it almost overnight into an earthshaking 'event.'<br /><br /><a href="http://platial.com/post/41354">Map this on Platial</a><br /> 
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        </description>
<georss:point> </georss:point>
<dc:creator></dc:creator>
<dc:date>2006-03-16 18:23:01.661336+00:00</dc:date>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://platial.com/post/41364">
<link>http://platial.com/post/41364</link>
<title>Rosie Ruiz Wins Boston Marathon by Taking the Subway</title>
<description>
        <![CDATA[
        On April 21, 1980 Rosie Ruiz, a 23-year-old New Yorker, was the first woman to cross the finish line in the Boston Marathon. She had achieved the third fastest time ever recorded for a female runner (two hours, thirty-one minutes, and fifty-six seconds), which was made all the more remarkable by the fact that she looked remarkably sweat-free and relaxed as she climbed the winner's podium to accept her wreath. However, race officials almost immediately began to question her victory.

The problem was that no one could remember having seen her during the race. Monitors at the various race checkpoints hadn't seen her, nor had any of the other runners. Numerous photographs taken during the race failed to contain any sign of her. Her absence was overwhelming. Finally, a few members of the crowd came forward to reveal that they had seen her jump into the race during its final half-mile. Apparently she had then simply sprinted to the finish line.

As race officials prepared to announce her disqualification from the race, they discovered evidence that she had also cheated during the earlier New York marathon, where she had earned the time that had qualified her to run in the Boston marathon. She had apparently achieved her time in New York by riding the subway. Officials stripped her of her Boston victory and awarded the title to the real winner, Jackie Gareau.

Ruiz has not been the only marathon contestant to earn a victory dishonestly. In September 1991, spectators noticed that the winner of the Brussels marathon, Abbes Tehami, had somehow shaved his moustache off during the race. It turned out that Tehami had only finished the race. His coach had started it for him.
<br /><br /><a href="http://platial.com/post/41364">Map this on Platial</a><br /> 
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        </description>
<georss:point> </georss:point>
<dc:creator></dc:creator>
<dc:date>2006-03-16 18:56:23.581888+00:00</dc:date>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://platial.com/post/83327">
<link>http://platial.com/post/83327</link>
<title>"Idaho" is a fake, made-up Native Americanism</title>
<description>
        <![CDATA[
        The northwestern US state Idaho was named as the result of a hoax. Lobbyist George M. Willing suggested the name, claiming it was a Native American term meaning "gem of the mountains." It was later discovered that Willing had made up the word himself. As a result, the original Idaho Territory was renamed Colorado. Eventually, the controversy was forgotten and the made-up name stuck.<br /><br /><a href="http://platial.com/post/83327">Map this on Platial</a><br /> 
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        </description>
<georss:point> </georss:point>
<dc:creator></dc:creator>
<dc:date>2006-05-16 08:23:19.411577+00:00</dc:date>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://platial.com/post/41712">
<link>http://platial.com/post/41712</link>
<title>Arm the Homeless</title>
<description>
        <![CDATA[
        In the first week of December 1993 a press release was distributed to the Columbus, Ohio news media innocently announcing the formation of a new charity to benefit the homeless. There was just one catch. Instead of providing the homeless with food and shelter, this charity would provide them with guns and ammunition. It was named 'The Arm the Homeless Coalition.'

The press release declared that "The Arm the Homeless Coalition will be collecting donations to provide firearms for the homeless of Columbus." These firearms would "provide desperately needed protection for America's disadvantaged." The release ended on a cheery note: "Santas will be at area malls collecting money for this vital and charitable cause." A photograph accompanying the release showed a man in a santa suit waiting to accept donations. The media were instructed to address their queries to Jack Kilmer, the Coalition's director.

It didn't take long for this press release to stir up a hornet's nest of controversy. The Columbus Dispatch denounced the new Coalition in an angrily-worded article. Then the Charitable Solicitations Board of Columbus, inspired by the Dispatch article, fired off a cease-and-desist letter to the Arm the Homeless Coalition, forbidding them from engaging in any fund-raising activities. But things really began to heat up when the Associated Press managed to obtain an interview with the mysterious Jack Kilmer, who defended the Coalition's goal of arming the homeless by asking, "Who more needs to exercise their constitutional right to have a weapon for protection?" Soon newspapers throughout Ohio, as well as national media such as CNN and Rush Limbaugh, were covering the story.

That weekend, as promised, a man in a Santa Claus outfit showed up at the Columbus City Center claiming to represent the Arm the Homeless Coalition. But he declined to accept donations.

By this time the media was in a frenzy. Letters from the public were pouring in denouncing the charity, and editorial columns were buzzing with condemnation for the cause. But when a Dispatch reporter tracked down the owner of the post office box listed on the press release, he found that it belonged not to Jack Kilmer, but to to an Ohio State University graduate student named Paul Badger. In fact, no record of Jack Kilmer's existence could be found.

When contacted, Badger insisted that Jack Kilmer was real, but a few days later, in the company of two of his classmates and co-conspirators, Douglas Lloyd and Eric Zimmerman, Badger confessed that the Arm the Homeless Coalition was a hoax. There was no Jack Kilmer. There was only a post office box and a phony press release.

The three students explained that they had hoped to focus attention on the issues of violence, homelessness, and the media's love of sensationalism. But they had been unprepared for the savage backlash the hoax had received. After meeting with officials from both OSU and the Columbus Coalition for the Homeless, the students issued another statement explaining that the Arm the Homeless Coalition was nothing but a satirical hoax.

This might have seemed like the end of the Arm the Homeless Coalition, but the joke lived on and began popping up in other corners of the nation. In October 1996 it reemerged in San Luis Obispo, promoted by a man named David Gross who managed to completely fool his local TV station before the prank was exposed. Then in 1999 the Phoenix New Times ran a story about the Arm the Homeless Coalition on its front page as an April 1 gag. This time 60 Minutes II, the Associated Press, and numerous local radio stations fell for it. Whenever it shows up, the Arm the Homeless prank is inevitably denounced as a cruel and tasteless joke. But the Museum of Hoaxes views it in the same light as Jonathan Swift's classic A Modest Proposal. In other words, its cruelty is exactly what gives it a satirical bite (also see Bonsai Kittens). It ingeniously managed to offend simultaneously a broad swath of society, including liberal crusaders for the homeless, conservative opponents of gun control, and average middle-class people who were terrified by the vision of armed bands of homeless militants that it conjured up. Therefore, precisely because the Arm the Homeless Coalition proved so adept at beguiling the media and outraging the public, it earns a place in the top ten college pranks of all time. <br /><br /><a href="http://platial.com/post/41712">Map this on Platial</a><br /> 
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        </description>
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<dc:creator></dc:creator>
<dc:date>2006-03-20 12:06:45.193454+00:00</dc:date>
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