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The Museum of Hoaxes is dedicated to promoting knowledge about hoaxes. (Click here for opening hours, etc.) On our blog we post about dubious- sounding claims, and whatever else strikes our fancy. The site is also home to the Hoax Photo Database, the Hoax Forum, the Hoaxipedia, and:
The Museum of Hoaxes is the sister site of Weird Universe.


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$100 BILL TOILET PAPER
Giant $100 Bills printed across two squares of toilet paper. You know you can afford to use two squares of toilet paper when you wipe, because you're worth it.
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Also available: the Monthly Dog Poop and Nuns Having Fun calendars.
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Examining dubious claims and mischief of all kinds
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Did Ismail the Bloodthirsty really father 888 children?
Status: Highly unlikely
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the 18th century Moroccan ruler Ismail the Bloodthirsty holds the record for being the most prolific father ever. He supposedly fathered 888 children, which means he had to father about 15 children a year for 60 years.

But Dorothy Einon, a researcher at University College London, argues in her article "How many children can one man have?" that even if Ismail had access to a steady supply of fertile women, it would have been impossible for him to father this many children.

Problem One: The infrequency of ovulation. Ismail would need to accurately time when the women were actually fertilizable, which is a fairly small window of time each month.

Problem Two: Women who mate infrequently have longer cycles and ovulate less frequently. So if there's this huge supply of women mating exclusively with Ismail the bloodthirsty, then each woman is mating infrequently, and thus the odds of mating when she's fertile become even slimmer.

Problem Three: The low incidence of conception. Even if Ismail managed to copulate with a woman at the ideal time, and an egg was fertilized, only 42% of fertilized eggs survive to the 12th day of pregnancy.

Problem Four: The high frequency of infertile women, especially in the developing world, which reduces Ismail's odds even more.

Problem Five: Not all women are chaste. It's not logical to assume that all those women were mating exclusively with Ismail. Therefore, one can't assume he was the father of them all.

Problem Six: If Ismail copulated with multiple women every day, his own sperm count would drop, further reducing his chances of impregnating a woman.

Einon concludes that, given all these problems "unless a man has an extensive harem and a good harem keeper, it is unlikely that the extreme range of male and female reproductive success is very different."
Posted By: Alex | Date: Mon Feb 23, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (18)
Category:

The Atlantic Swim Hoax
Status: miscommunication
A couple of people emailed me about this, though I think it's more a case of miscommunication rather than a deliberate hoax.

A little over a week ago the media reported that 56-year-old Jennifer Figge had become the first woman to swim the Atlantic. But then people started to do the math, and realized that if she had really swum 2100 in 25 days, then she had performed a superhuman feat.

Two days later the AP published a retraction, quoting Figge's spokesman who stated she swam only 250 miles, not 2100. Which is why it seems more like a case of miscommunication to me. Figge didn't appear to go out of her way to promote the claim she had swum the Atlantic.

To find a real long-distance swimming hoax, you need to go back to 1927 when Dorothy Cochrane Lange claimed to have swum the English Channel, but a few days later admitted she had only swum the first and last mile. Her motive, she said, was to prove how easy it was to pull off such a hoax.
Posted By: Alex | Date: Mon Feb 16, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (4)
Category: Sports

Love in the age of Facebook
Status: prank
It's hard to tell how much of this story is genuine. Stuart Slann supposedly learned the hard way part of the truth of the old joke that on the internet the men are men, the women are men, and the children are FBI agents. In Stuart's case, Emma, the woman he thought he met on Facebook, was actually two guys playing an elaborate prank on him. Apparently they lured him into driving nine hours to meet Emma in Aberdeen, and then they revealed the truth to him.

And since this is the age of YouTube, the pranksters also created a video (now widely viewed) to celebrate the humiliation of their victim.
Posted By: Alex | Date: Mon Feb 16, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (5)
Category: Pranks, Sex/Romance, Social Networking Sites

The Australian Spaghetti Harvest
Status: april fool hoax
Many thanks to Chris Keating, who has not only uncovered the long-lost Australian tribute to the BBC's Swiss Spaghetti Harvest hoax, but has posted it on youtube. The date when this was broadcast is still uncertain. Seems to have been in the early to mid-1960s. It aired on Melbourne station HSV-7. The presenter is Dan Webb.

Whereas the BBC's original broadcast described the bumper spaghetti crop that the Swiss were enjoying, the Australian version develops the story further by telling the story of a group of Sicilian farmers who were brought to Australia in the hope of developing the Australian spaghetti industry. Everything went well until their crop was blighted by the dreaded "spag worm":

This year, for the first time, the spaghetti crop has failed. Hundreds of tons of spaghetti hangs ruined on the palermo vines. The reason is a long, needle-like organism called Troglodytes pasta. or spag worm. This seemingly harmless creature does untold damage to the spaghetti vine.


Posted By: Alex | Date: Mon Feb 16, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (3)
Category: April Fools Day, Food

Prankplace.com
TOOTING ANGEL
This little angel ate too many beans the night before Christmas. When you walk past her, she lets 'em rip (because of a hidden motion sensor in her hand).

Fake Calls
Status: Techno-lies
James Katz, a professor of communication at Rutgers University, has studied the phenomenon of people who fake calls on cell phones. He's found that a very high number of people do this (above 90%). Reasons include: to avoid talking to someone nearby, to look important, or to look busier than they are. Katz has been quoted as saying: "They are taking a device that was designed to talk to people who are far away and using it to communicate with people who are directly around them."

Two apps available for the iPhone demonstrate the robustness of this trend: Fake Calls will make it look like you just received a call. Similarly, Fake Text will make it look like you just received an SMS text message.

Since I don't have a cell phone, let alone an iPhone, I won't be needing these.
Posted By: Alex | Date: Tue Feb 10, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (25)
Category: Technology

The Dalai Lama Twitters and then is gone
Status: Hoax
February 1: The Dalai Lama joins the micro-blogging service Twitter and starts posting updates, which soon almost 20,000 people are following.

February 9: Twitter announces that the Dalai Lama's account is a fake and cancels it. This explanatory message was posted on the Twitter blog:

One of the essential doctrines of Buddhism is Impermanence. The word expresses the notion that everything we can experience through our senses is in flux, constantly changing, and ceasing to be—nothing is permanent. Is there some meaning, therefore, in the sudden disappearance of a Twitter account thought to be the official account of The Office of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama?
There may be a higher meaning if you meditate enough but the account was suspended because it violated our Terms of Use regarding impersonation. Using Twitter to impersonate others in a manner that does or is intended to mislead, confuse, or deceive others is also cited in the Twitter Rules. Should His Holiness decide to take up Twittering for real, we'll be sure to Follow.

I have a Twitter account, but I never use it. I can't figure out what the point of Twitter is, especially for people who already have a Facebook account. (Thanks, Cranky Media Guy!)
Posted By: Alex | Date: Tue Feb 10, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (3)
Category: Identity/Imposters, Social Networking Sites

Baby Brain
Status: medical myth debunked
News from the frontiers of medicine: "Baby Brain" is a myth; that syndrome being the supposed decline in intelligence that women suffer while pregnant. A study led by Dr. Helen Christensen of the Australian National University in Canberra tracked 2500 women over ten years and "found no difference between their brainpower before and during their pregnancies."

Baby Brain reminds me of Josh Whicker's 2004 Hoosier Gazette hoax in which he claimed that a five-year Indiana University study had found that "having children significantly lowers parents’ IQs." If I remember, that fooled a lot of the media, including Keith Olbermann.

Anyway, I still believe there's such a thing as Internet Brain.
Posted By: Alex | Date: Mon Feb 09, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (5)
Category: Birth/Babies

Dildo Boulevard
Status: Unexplained mystery
First there was Shoe Corner (the place in New Jersey where shoes kept mysteriously getting dumped); next there was Pantyhose Corner in Massachusetts. Now we have Dildo Boulevard. That's the name that's been given to the street in Darwin, Australia where 30 sex toys were inexplicably found lying in the road. Where did they come from? Nobody knows:

One theory is that it is an elaborate - and expensive - practical joke. Another school of thought is that they fell off the back of a delivery truck. Some said the sex toys could have been inside somebody's rubbish bin, and fell onto the street on Thursday night when the garbage was collected.
Posted By: Alex | Date: Mon Feb 09, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (3)
Category: Places, Sex/Romance

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