According to the description that frequently accompanies these images as they circulate via email, they show the home gun collection of Charlton Heston, housed beneath his 1860s Manor House. The images began to do the rounds online soon after Heston's death in April, 2008.

Heston was well known as a gun enthusiast. He was president of the National Rifle Association for many years. However, this is not his gun collection, nor even his home. The collection actually belonged to attorney Bruce Stern, who died in 2007. The guns have since been mostly auctioned off. It was one of the largest firearms collections ever to go up for auction.

The top photo, showing a flash of lightning that reveals a waterspout approaching an oil rig, has circulated online since early 2008. It is usually accompanied by the caption, "When the lightning flashes, this is not what you want to see." The image is not real. It is a composite of two photographs.

Amateur photographer Fred Smith photographed the waterspout and lightning on June 15, 1991 from his backyard overlooking Lake Okeechobee, Florida. He was taking pictures of a lightning storm when he got lucky and snapped a shot (bottom) of a waterspout illuminated by a flash of lightning. The photo subsequently appeared on a calendar, and in 2001 it became available for purchase online. Soon after it began circulating via email -- usually with incorrect captions that described it as a photograph of whatever tornado had most recently been in the news.

In early 2008 an unknown hoaxer pasted an oil rig into the picture and added the "not what you want to see" caption. This version has been circulating ever since.

The top photo was one of the most forwarded e-mail attachments of 2004. It purported to show a picture published in Popular Science magazine in 1954, imagining what a home computer might look like fifty years in the future. The caption read:

The photograph was actually created in 2004 by Danish software sales and support technician Troels Eklund Andersen as an entry in a Fark Photoshop contest. (Fark regularly challenges its readers to digitally alter images in amusing ways.)

Andersen took a photo of a submarine's maneuvering room on exhibit at the Smithsonian (bottom), made it black-and-white, then pasted in the teletype printer, the old-style television, and the man. Then he added the text at the bottom. He never imagined the image would generate the response it did, nor that it would start circulating by email and fool so many people. It even fooled Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, who displayed it at a computer conference as proof of the impossibility of predicting future technology.

Near the start of the second war in Iraq, a picture began circulating online showing two enormous spiders locked together and dangling from a soldier's uniform -- one of the non-human dangers that soldiers faced in the deserts of the Middle East. An accompanying caption read:


Camel spiders are real. They do live in Iraq. They are big and nasty looking. However, the caption was, for the most part, a collection of false rumors. Camel spiders (also known as Solifugae or Wind Scorpions) do not latch onto camels and feed on their flesh, nor do they feed on humans. They cannot inject anesthesia so that you do not feel it as they feed on you. In reality, camel spiders are non-venomous. They feed primarily on crickets, pillbugs, and other desert creatures their own size or smaller. They avoid humans, but they will bite if they feel threatened, and their bite can hurt. However, it is not fatal.

Although the picture was not digitally manipulated, the proximity of the camel spiders to the camera did exaggerate their size. The largest camels spiders are approximately six-inches long, with their legs outstretched -- plenty large enough to look terrifying.

President Bush made a surprise visit to the troops in Iraq on Thanksgiving Day, 2003. While there he helped serve them a traditional holiday dinner. The most widely published image from the trip showed him grinning as he carried a tray bearing a beautiful golden brown turkey. The photo was taken by pool photographer Pablo Martinez Monsivais. The president's popularity rose in polls conducted soon after the trip.

What news audiences were not immediately told (but which The Washington Post later revealed) was that the turkey Bush was carrying was not real. It was a plastic centerpiece prop known in the food service industry as a "trophy turkey." The food the soldiers actually got was served from cafeteria-style steam trays.

There were no allegations the photographer had staged the scene. Apparently Bush spontaneously picked up the plastic turkey (such props are common decorations on holiday food lines in the military), and the photographer snapped the picture. But the media was criticized for disseminating an image that gave a misleading view of the Thanksgiving event.

When the space shuttle Columbia exploded upon re-entry on February 1, 2003, no cameras recorded the event. That didn't stop the spread online of a dramatic series of images supposedly taken "from an Israeli satellite in space."

The pictures were actually screenshots from the opening scene of the Touchstone Pictures movie Armageddon (1998). In the movie the space shuttle Atlantis is struck by meteorite fragments. An unknown hoaxer lifted these images from a DVD of the movie, added the phony caption, and set the pictures loose on the web.

The picture of a deep-fried chicken head (top) was one of the most forwarded email attachments of 2001. The story that accompanied it claimed that a woman had ordered happy meals at McDonald's for her two children, and then:


The story is almost true, but not quite. On November 28, 2000 Katherine Ortega (pictured, bottom) bought a box of chicken wings at a McDonald's in Newport News, Virginia. They were "Mighty Wings," which were being test-marketed in the area -- not Chicken McNuggets. She took the meal home, and then discovered that it contained the fried chicken head. She contacted the restaurant, which offered her a refund or another box, and then she contacted the media.

Reporters who examined the head said the batter on it looked exactly like the batter on the wings, so it didn't seem to be something she had created herself. However, lawyers advised her against suing. She had found the head before biting down into it, and a chicken head in a box of chicken parts cannot not be considered a foreign object (unlike a rat's head, for instance). Both these factors lessened her ability to make a claim of psychological trauma.

The photo of the chicken head was taken by Sangjib Min for the Virginia Daily Press. It was never reported how the chicken head managed to make it through the manufacturing process to end up in Ortega's meal.

This image was created by professional photographer Ralph Clevenger. He's been quoted as saying:
Clevenger intended the photo to be a work of art. He never claimed it was an unmanipulated photo. However, it subsequently found its way online where someone appended a caption stating that the photo "came from a Rig Manager for Global Marine Drilling in St. Johns, Newfoundland. They actually have to divert the path of these things away from the rig by towing them with ships!" Global Marine Drilling is a real company, but it had nothing to do with this photo.

Ted Serios was a Chicago-area bellhop who claimed he could transfer his thoughts directly from his mind onto film. He called the process "thoughtography." The images were usually blurry but had recognizable objects in them such as buildings, cars, or even aircraft.

The process of creating a thoughtograph was highly theatrical. Serios would usually get extremely drunk. He would shout and wail and screw up his features. Then he would hold a small tube, which he called a "gismo," up against the lens of a polariod camera. When he felt a thoughtograph was ready to emerge, he would shout at the person behind the camera to trigger the shutter. He never handled the camera himself.

Serios attracted the attention of a psychiatrist named Jule Eisenbud who studied him extensively and became a firm believer in his powers. In 1967 Eisenbud published a book called The World of Ted Serios which brought Serios to a much wider audience. A 1967 article in Life also gained him enormous notoriety.

Serios produced hundreds of thoughtographs. Two of them are reproduced here. The top photo, taken in 1965, shows an unidentified building. The bottom one, taken in 1965, shows an unidentified street scene. Eisenbud claimed that Serios' eye could be seen mysteriously superimposed on top of the car.

Skeptics have dismissed Serios' powers as a fraud. James Randi argued that Serios could have created the thoughtographs by concealing a small lens with a photographic transparency attached to it inside the gismo. Randi was able to produce similar photographs in this way.

After 1967, Serios drifted into obscurity. He reportedly died in 2006.

Arthur Davis, head of the New York-based modeling agency Arthur Davis Associates, devised a novel way to get his models featured in newspapers. He submitted their pictures to the papers, accompanied by the claim that they had recently been awarded a title, such as "Miss Perfect Profile." He invented phony organizations, such as the "Plastic Surgeons Institute" to be the awarders of these titles.

Davis figured that the phony titles would make the photos seem newsworthy. Papers gladly took the bait, and his models received lots of publicity.

The top photo shows "Miss Perfect Profile." At other times she was "Miss Outdoor Girl." The bottom photo shows "Miss Water Conservation." More photos of Davis's models can be viewed in the Hoaxipedia.