Best Hoaxes and Pranks

Deir Yassin Massacre Hoax, originated by Israeli Leftists

2009-12-11T21:49:00.000-08:00

Wikipedia article Deir Yassin Massacre describes this sad page of the history of the Arab-Israel military conflict as follows:

The Deir Yassin massacre took place on April 9, 1948, when around 120 fighters from the Irgun and Lehi Zionist paramilitary groups attacked Deir Yassin near Jerusalem, a Palestinian-Arab village of roughly 600 people. The invasion occurred as Jewish militia sought to relieve the blockade of Jerusalem during the civil war that preceded the end of British rule in Palestine.

Around 107 villagers (245-from other sources), including women and children, were killed. Some were shot, while others died when hand grenades were thrown into their homes. Several were taken prisoner and may have been killed after being paraded through the streets of West Jerusalem, though accounts vary. Four of the attackers died, with around 35 injured. The killings were condemned by the leadership of the Haganah, the Jewish community's main paramilitary force, and by the area's two chief rabbis. The Jewish Agency for Israel sent King Abdullah of Jordan a letter of apology, which he rebuffed.

While Wikipedia is widely considered as informative and well-respected informational source, not all the posts are equally accurate and based on the real facts.

Facts and Commentaries

On April 2, 1948, the Arab inhabitants of Dir Yassin began sniping at the Jewish Quarters of Bet Hakerem and Yefe Nof. According to reports by the Shai (Haganah Intelligence), fortifications were being constructed in the village and a large quantity of arms being stockpiled. Several days before the attack on Dir Yassin, the presence of foreign fighters was reported, including Iraqi soldiers and irregular forces. An Arab research study conducted at Bir Zeit University (near Ramallah) relates that the men of Dir Yassin took an active part in violent acts against Jewish targets and that many of the men of the village fought in the battle for Kastel, together with Abd-el-Kadr el-Husseini. The report also stated that trenches had been dug at the entry to the village, and that more than 100 men had been trained and equipped with rifles and Bren guns. A local guard force had been set up and 40 inhabitants guarded the village every night.

On April 6, 1948, Operation Nachshon was launched by the Haganah with the aim of opening up the road to Jerusalem. The Palmach was part of this effort together with the Irgun (under Menachem Begin) and Lehi forces, their first combined operation. On Thursday, April 8, 1948 they launched an attack on Dir Yassin between 4 and 5 AM. A loudspeaker mounted on an armored car warned the Arabs and asked them to evacuate their women and children. Hundreds left, but hundreds stayed. A pitched battle ensued, and when the smoke cleared, 110 to 120 Arabs were killed, 40 Jews were seriously injured and four Jews were dead. The number killed has been confirmed even by Palestinian Arab researchers, such as Bir Zeit University professor Sharif Kanaana who puts the number no higher than 120. Another contemporary Arab source deflates the number killed to less than 100, stating, after a count, "that there were no more than 46 corpses". The head of the coroner unit, professor Yehoshua Arieli, testified that the number was 110.

The original claim of 254 dead was not based on any actual body count. The number was invented by Mordechai Ra'anan, leader of the Jewish soldiers who fought in Deir Yassin. He later admitted that the figure was a deliberate exaggeration in order to undermine the morale of the Arab forces, which had launched a war against the Jews in Mandate Palestine to prevent the establishment of Israel. Other eyewitnesses to the battle estimated that about 100 Arabs had died. Despite Ra'anan's admission, the figure 254 was circulated by Palestinian Arab leader Hussein Khalidi. His claims about Deir Yassin were the basis for an article in the New York Times claiming a massacre took place--an article that has been widely reprinted and cited as "proof" of the massacre throughout the past 50 years.

There were strict orders (documented) given in advance to the commanders and fighters not to harm the elderly, women and children. It was also stated explicitly that any Arab who surrendered was to be taken prisoner.

The use of the loudsepaker to warn the civilians to evacuate is a key point, certainly not the action of soldiers planning to murder the population. The loudspeaker is not in dispute. A publication of the Arab League titled Israeli Aggression states:

• On the night of April 9, 1948, the peaceful Arab village of Deir Yassin was surprised by a loudspeaker, which called on the population to evacuate it immediately.

The village was not peaceful, but the essential part of this quote agrees with Jewish accounts.

The massacre claim, meaning the killing of defenseless people, has long since been discredited by the Israeli government and every other historical study. The story persists because pro-Arab sources constantly repeat it, often inflating the number of dead to 250 or more. There are completely fictional accounts written about Arabs being marched to the mosque and shot against the walls, or even worse stories of torture, rape or any other shocking aspect the storyteller invents. As an example, here is how one Arab website describes the scene:

• [The Jews used] machine guns, then grenades and finished of with knives. Women's bellies were cut open and babies were butchered in the hands of their helpless mothers. Around 250 people were murdered in cold blood. Of them 25 pregnant women were bayoneted in the abdomen while still alive. 52 children were maimed under the eyes of their own mothers, and they were slain and their heads cut off.

To say there is not a shred of evidence for these embellishments is giving them too much credit.

On the contrary, there are eyewitness accounts from the time, Jewish and Arab, which tell the story as it happened. For example, according to the Daily Telegraph, April 8, 1998, Ayish Zeidan, a resident of the village and a survivor of the fighting there, stated:

• The Arab radio talked of women being killed and raped, but this is not true... I believe that most of those who were killed were among the fighters and the women and children who helped the fighters. The Arab leaders committed a big mistake. By exaggerating the atrocities they thought they would encourage people to fight back harder. Instead they created panic and people ran away.

Dir Yassin was a reasonable military target for Jewish forces, there was warning given before the battle, a fierce battle was fought with casualties on both sides. No massacre, no mutiliations, no atrocities.

Palestinian Arab eyewitnesses have recently admitted that some of their claims about Dir Yassin were deliberate fabrications. The issue of the Jerusalem Report dated April 2, 1998 describes a BBC television program in which Hazem Nusseibeh, an editor of the Palestine Broadcasting Service's Arabic news in 1948, admits that he was told by Hussein Khalidi, a prominent Palestinian Arab leader, to fabricate claims of atrocities at Dir Yassin in order to encourage Arab regimes to invade the expected Jewish state.

According to the Jerusalem Report:
• Nusseibeh "describes an encounter at the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem's Old City with Deir Yassin survivors and Palestinian leaders, including Hussein Khalidi... 'I asked Dr. Khalidi how we should cover the story,' recalled Nusseibeh. 'He said, "We must make the most of this." So we wrote a press release stating that at Deir Yassin children were murdered, pregnant women were raped. All sorts of atrocities.' "

The BBC program then shows a recent interview with Abu Mahmud, who was a Dir Yassin resident in 1948, who says:

• ... the villagers protested against the atrocity claims: We said, "There was no rape." [Khalidi] said, "We have to say this, so the Arab armies will come to liberate Palestine from the Jews."

Khalidi was one of the originators of the "massacre" allegation in 1948. It was Khalidi's claims about Jewish atrocities in Dir Yassin that were the basis for an article in the New York Times by its correspondent, Dana Schmidt (on April 12, 1948), claiming a massacre took place. The Times article has been widely reprinted and cited as "proof" of the massacre throughout the past 50 years.

Nusseibeh, who is a member of one of Jerusalem's most prominent Arab families and presently lives in Amman, told the BBC that the fabricated atrocity stories about Dir Yassin were:

• "...our biggest mistake," because "Palestinians fled in terror" and left the country in huge numbers after hearing the atrocity claims.

Origin of the Hoax

Distinguished military historian, Dr. Uri Milstein, believes that the Israeli left in 1948 or Mapai, the party of Ben-Gurion in order to smear its 'right' camp, or the 'Irgun' and its commander Menachem Begin, used Dir Yassin, the battle. The party inflated the story and distorted the truth to build a weapon against the Right opposition to Mapai, the ruling Labor party. The person who invented the massacre is Israel's famous military historian, Col. (Ret.) Meir Pail, today, a defender of Mapai's history or military history. Also, a guardian angel of the Palmach's legacy, Dr. Pail, a military scholar has always argued that the Irgun's leaders and fighters should express regrets for this massacre and ask Israel for forgiveness. Dr. Pail developed the myth since 1948. Dr. Milstein argued that the Palmach also was not always clean.

In 1948, Labor Zionist leaders initially claimed there was a massacre, in order to score points against the rival Irgun Zvai Leumi and Stern Group, the fighters who conquered Deir Yassin. But Israel's Labor-led governments have, over the years, gradually rescinded the massacre accusation. A little-known 1952 Defense Ministry judicial court ruled that Deir Yassin was a legitimate military target. Official Israeli government statements about Deir Yassin, in 1960 and 1969 (under Foreign Ministers Golda Meir and Abba Eban), formally rebuked the Labor Zionist officials who had made the false massacre accusation in 1948, and officially declared that there was no basis for the "massacre" charge.

Sources and Additional Information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Yassin_massacre
http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_independence_war_diryassin.php
http://www.jewishpost.com/archives/news/dr-uri-milstein-dir-yassin-massacre-was-a-hoax.html

Military Hoaxes

2008-10-19T00:09:00.000-07:00

Military intelligence is a military discipline which informs the commanders’ decision making process by providing analysis of available data from a wide range of sources and forecasting of environmental changes and opposing force intentions. To provide that informed analysis the commanders information requirements are identified and input to a process of gathering, analysis, protection, and dissemination of information about the operational environment, hostile, friendly and neutral forces and the civilian population in an area of combat operations, and broader area of interest. Intelligence activities are conducted at all levels from tactical to strategic, in peacetime, the period of transition to war, and during the war.

Military hoaxes are probably the most useful category among all, since its intentions are to provide “reliable” but false information to the enemy or any other third parties in order to make the unexpected moves the most efficient way.

Military Aicrafts

Category Table of Content

1. The Man Who Never Was
2. The Flypaper Reports
3. Deir Yassin Massacre Hoax

Male Pregnancy: True or False?

2009-11-22T16:33:00.000-08:00

About Male Pregnancy

Male pregnancy refers to the incubation of one or more embryos or fetuses by the male of any species. Almost all pregnancies in the animal kingdom are carried by female organisms. In all heterogamous species, the males produce the spermatozoa and rarely, if ever, host the zygote (the pipefish and seahorse are notable exceptions). The Syngnathidae family of fish has the unique characteristic where females lay their eggs in a brood pouch on the male's chest, and the male incubates the eggs. Fertilization may take place in the pouch or before implantation in the water. Included in Syngnathidae are seahorses, the pipefish, and the weedy and leafy sea dragons. Syngnathidae is the only family in the animal kingdom to which the term "male pregnancy" has been applied.

Male Pregnancy in Mythology

Various mythologies feature male characters giving birth, but such events typically take place in an entirely different fashion than an ordinary female pregnancy, such as Athena springing fully-formed from Zeus's forehead, or Dionysus being born from his thigh. In Hindu mythology, Lord Vishnu gives birth to Lord Brahma thus: a lotus emerges from his navel, like an externalplacenta and womb, carrying Brahma within. Male mythological figures may become pregnant when rendered female in some way, such as the shapeshifter Loki turning into a mare to distract a stallion and ending up giving birth to Sleipnir.

Male Pregnancy in Humans

There is wide-spread urban legend that the first pregnant male will get a huge prize from the international community, but are there any real documented cases?

The website MalePregnancy.com (http://www.malepregnancy.com/), which first appeared online in 1999, claimed to document the case of Mr. Lee Mingwei, who was supposedly the first human male to become pregnant. Visitors to the site could inspect a variety of documentary evidence about Mr. Mingwei's pregnancy. There were news reports, pictures, video clips, Mr. Mingwei's EKG, ultrasound images, and blood-pressure measurements. The site stated that the delivery date of Mr. Mingwei's child had not yet been determined. The site has now stated this for nine years (as of 2009).

The site was a hoax created by artist/filmmaker Virgil Wong, who described it as an "art installation." Wong's work, especially his art projects on the internet, often explores themes arising from contemporary medicine. The site received extensive media attention in 2000. Wong has claimed that it fooled thousands of people, and that he was contacted by numerous men seeking to become the next pregnant man.

Is male pregnancy possible?

The malepregnancy.com site provided a detailed description of exactly how Mr. Mingwei supposedly became pregnant. First, the site said, he received large oral doses of female hormones in order to make his body receptive to a pregnancy. Then a fertilized embryo was implanted into his abdominal cavity. The embryo itself secreted hormones to maintain its growth and development. Finally, when the fetus was ready, doctors would deliver it by caesarean section.

Medical doctors have speculated for decades about the possibility of male pregnancy, and the procedure detailed by malepregnancy.com is the one that is typically envisioned. Basically, it would involve creating an ectopic pregnancy in a man — an ectopic pregnancy being the term to describe the development of a fetus outside the uterus. Such conditions do, very rarely, occur in women. However, they are considered to be very dangerous. For a man to attempt to have an ectopic pregnancy would involve very high risks, which is why it has never been attempted.

However, there have been rumors of doctors experimenting with male pregnancy. During the 1960s, Dr. Cecil Jacobson, a researcher at George Washington University Medical School, was said to have claimed that he successfully implanted a fertilized egg into a male baboon and allowed the egg to develop for four months before terminating the pregnancy. However, Dr. Jacobson never showed his pregnant male baboon to other scientists, nor did he publish his results.

In 2002 a Beijing doctor, Chen Huanran, based at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, apparently recruited volunteers to participate in a "male mother" study. He said his goal was to help transsexuals realize their dreams of giving birth. However, his project had not been approved by Chinese authorities.

It has been officially announced that modern men already have a possibility to become pregnant. Leading IVF specialist, Robert Winston, says that his medical technique allows implanting artificially grown human embryos in the abdominal cavity of a man. Pregnant men will have to deliver their children by means of Cesarean section, of course. The technique implies the junction of placenta with one of internal abdominal organs, which will be nourishing the fetus. A pregnant man will also be receiving female hormones that will make for the development of mammary glands. Winston set forth and described the male pregnancy theory in his book titled “IVF Revolution.” Proponents of the theory say that there are actually no reasons that can stop a man from becoming pregnant and giving birth to a child.

Swedish professor Mats Brannstrom also thinks that male pregnancy is an absolutely possible phenomenon to happen in modern life. The professor believes that it will also be possible to implant female uterus in a man's body. Scientists have already conducted successful experiments on animals. One just has to realize what practical use can be derived from such blatant violation of natural laws.

Male Pregnancy Syndrome

While the male pregnancy continues to be a hoax, the male pregnancy syndrome (sympathetic pregnancy, or Couvade Syndrome) as a medical condition is a clinical fact.

Couvade in its narrowest sense refers to the practice in which a father simulates labor and childbirth shortly after the birth of his child to demonstrate his role in reproduction or to ease the mother's pain by sharing in it. It has come to mean, however, the father's sharing of sundry pregnancy symptoms with his wife anytime during the pregnancy or shortly thereafter.

With Couvade Syndrome, males can develop the symptoms of pregnancy just like their wives. The frequency of Couvade is unknown, but some researchers estimate that it affects from 11 to 65 percent of expectant fathers. The onset of male "pregnancy" symptoms usually starts near the end of the first trimester and generally stops with the birth of the child. Couvade also seems to be a universal phenomenon, with cases reported across cultures, continents and centuries.

But what causes Couvade? For years, researchers have sought the answer to that question using cultural or psychological reasoning. For example, in a 1994 article, a group of Italian researchers wrote that Couvade appears "to be the psychosomatic equivalent of primitive rituals of initiation into paternity." And in a 1991 article, Dr. H. Klein of the University of Texas Medical Branch reviewed some of the possible causes of Couvade such as "somatized anxiety, psuedo-sibling rivalry, identification with the fetus, ambivalence about fatherhood or parturition envy."

Perhaps it's something simpler, something closer to home and closer to the heart. That's what Robinson thinks. "I firmly believe that these 'symptoms' were the result of something a little more spiritual," he says. "A kind of symbiotic connection that she and I felt not only toward each other, but to our little girl growing inside of her."

Or, maybe it's not in their heads or in their hearts – but in their hormones.

Sources and Additional Information:
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/archive/permalink/malepregnancy.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_pregnancy
http://www.pregnancytoday.com/articles/fatherhood/feeling-her-pain-2045/
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/weekly/aa100400a.htm
http://english.pravda.ru/science/19/94/377/15004_pregnant.html

Medical Hoaxes

2008-10-12T22:24:00.000-07:00

Medicine and its significance for the human well-being, in combination with general population close to zero understanding of the internal biological processes, produce multiple opportunities for the hoaxers. This category includes practical jokes, public myths, and wide-spread misconceptions.

Several Examples:

Spiders under the toilet seat...Three women die after eating at the same restaurant. The "South American Blush Spider" - found under the rim of the restaurant’s toilet seat - is blamed for their deaths. This same venomous spider is also discovered in airplane toilets.

There is no such spider. The restaurant and medical journal mentioned in the e-mail do not exist.

Don’t drink from the can...A woman drinks from a Coke can infected with dried rat urine, then dies a few days later from Leptospirosis.

Rat urine is not toxic, unless the rat is diseased. Leptospirosis can be spread to humans from a diseased rat, but the most common way is by eating or drinking contaminated food or water. Soda cans, once manufactured, are packaged in cardboard boxes almost immediately, then shipped out. For sanitary reasons, though, it’s still a good idea to wipe them off before drinking from them.

Antiperspirants cause breast cancer... Antiperspirants contain harmful, cancer-causing substances that can enter the body through nicks caused by shaving.

Researchers conducted two studies, but found no conclusive evidence linking the use of antiperspirants to the development of breast cancer.

How to take medicine

Category Table of Content

1. The girl who gave birth to rabbits
2. Trilby's Trance Publicity Hoax

3. Metalosis Maligna Hoax
4. Male Pregnancy

Hugh Troy and The Flypaper Reports

2009-10-25T21:50:00.000-07:00

During World War II, the illustrator Hugh Troy was given a desk job stateside. He found it excruciatingly boring. So to amuse himself he began preparing Daily Flypaper Reports in the style of standard army regulations. These were counts, printed on official-looking paper, of all the flies trapped on flypaper in the mess hall during the last twenty-four hours. He analyzed the results according to wind direction, nearness to windows, nearness to the kitchen, length of the flypaper, etc. He then would mimeograph the report and slip it in among the other official forms submitted to headquarters each day.

After keeping this up for a month, he received a call from an officer in another company: "Lieutenant, Can you tell me the proper procedure for filing fly reports? We’ve been catching hell from the Pentagon for not sending them in."

The story goes that the Pentagon indeed demanded that other units send theirs as well. Just when Hugh was sure that everyone was wasting time with these flypaper reports, he sent another letter to the Pentagon mentioning that counts might be inaccurate due to the counting of old flies from previous counts. To counter this, he suggested that each fly be daubed with a little ketchup using a toothpick. By doing so, previously counted flies would now have a marking for the next count. This task was then added to the roster.

Sources and Additional Information:
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/archive/permalink/the_flypaper_report/
http://sniggle.net/troy.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Troy

I, Rigoberta Menchú, Nobel Prize Winner and Nobel Liar

2009-10-08T12:45:00.000-07:00

On December 10, 1992, Mayan Indian Rigoberta Menchú Tum was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work opposing US-sponsored military dictatorships, terrorism and genocide in Guatemala.

The prize was given to one of the greatest hoaxers of the 20th century "in recognition of her work for social justice and ethno-cultural reconciliation based on respect for the rights of indigenous peoples". While it is not the only questionable Nobel Committee nomination, it is definitely one of the most scandalous.

Wikipedia tells us that Rigiberta's prize was based in part on her 1987 autobiography I, Rigoberta Menchú. Several years later anthropologist David Stoll conducted a series of interviews with Menchú's former acquaintances for a follow-up book. During this time he discovered that her account was largely fabricated.

Stoll's book, "Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans," is based on archival research and nearly a decade of interviews with more than 120 people, and some of them were witnesses for the described events. Most of Menchu's relatives, neighbors, friends and former classmates reportedly said main episodes of her book had been fabricated or exaggerated.

A land dispute, central to the book, was a family quarrel, they said, not a fight against rich landowners. A younger brother who Menchu said starved to death never existed, they said. And Menchu, who claimed she never went to school, attended two private boarding schools on scholarships, they said.

In response to Stoll's findings, Menchú initially accused him of defending the Guatemalan military and seeking to discredit all victims of the violence, but later she acknowledged making certain changes in her story. The Nobel Committee has dismissed calls to revoke her Nobel Prize because of the reported falsifications; however, Geir Lundestad, the secretary of the Committee, said her prize "was not based exclusively or primarily on the autobiography". Nobel Prize Committee position of denial might be related to the simple fact, that even if the committee wished to revoke a prize, there is no provision in the Nobel rules for doing so.

The 'autobiography' was was in fact written by a French leftist, Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, wife of Marxist Regis Debray, "who provided the foco strategy for Che Guevara's failed effort to foment a guerrilla war in Bolivia in the 1960s", according to well-known author and Salon.com columnist, David Horowitz ('I, Rigoberta Menchú, liar').

Her defenders claim that any dishonesty is offset by the overarching importance of her tale of US-funded Guatemalan suppression of the Indian people.

Menchú's response to her critics: she suggests that their charges should be dismissed as political, while falsehoods in her account should be forgiven … because they're political.

Her own excuse when confronted: "It tells my personal testimony, but it also has parts of the testimony of the collectiveness of Guatemala," she said. "For common people such as myself, there is no difference between testimony, biography, and autobiography ... What we do is tell what we have lived, not just alone."

Sources and Additional Information:

http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/hoaxes_and_frauds.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigoberta_Menchú

http://articles.latimes.com/1998/dec/16/news/cl-54384

Political Hoaxes

2008-11-01T00:13:00.000-07:00

“Politics is more difficult than Physics”. This is a quote of Albert Einstein, inscribed on the Social Sciences Building, City University, London.

Einstein Qoute

Yes, politics is a very complicated game, where the stack for the winner might be huge. The history of politics is full of elaborated lies, mystifications, and complicated hoaxes, usually focused on achieving practical advantage internally or international arena. Many of them will never be uncovered or over the time become nonsense. In this category we will place those that are interesting and funny.

Category Table of Content

1. Electric Chair Immunity Hoax
2. I, Rigoberta Menchú, Nobel Prize Winner and Nobel Liar

Dangerous Fraud of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

2009-09-15T22:53:00.000-07:00

It has been proved that these ‘Protocols’

are a fraud, a clumsy plagiarism. . . made for

the purpose of rendering the Jews odious...

Father Pierre Charles,

Professor of Theology,

Jesuit College in Louvain,

France

, 1938

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, by "Jewish elders". Written by Hermann Goedsche in the 1860s, and redacted by Matvei Golovinski in the 1890s. First printed in 1897. Debunked by Lucien Wolf in 1920. But these anti-Semitic legends of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world (and using the blood of Christian children for passover) continued to find adherents, mostly because the hoax played on prejudice more than gullibility per se.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a tract alleging a Jewish and Masonic plot to achieve world domination. The book purports to be derived from "protocols" written by a secret group of Jews known as the Elders of Zion, and underlies 24 protocols that are supposedly followed by the Jewish people. The Protocols has been proven to be a literary forgery and hoax as well as a clear case of plagiarism.

History

The original source has been identified as an 1864 book by Maurice Joly titled The Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, which was written as a satirical attack against the ambitions and methods of French Emperor Napoleon III. In the book, Machiavelli represented Napoleon III, and described a series of steps that he intended to take to become ruler of the world. The Joly book was in turn based on material borrowed from a popular novel of the time by Eugène Sue titled The Mysteries of the People, in which those plotting to rule the world were the Jesuits instead of Napoleon III. Neither the Joly book nor the Sue book mentioned either Jews or Masons.

Based on evidence repeatedly corroborated by British, German, Ukrainian, Polish and Russian sources over a 75 year period, The Protocols, far from being a "discovered" document as it was claimed to be, was in fact deliberately fabricated sometime between 1895 and 1902 by Russian journalist Matvei Golovinski. In a Swiss lawsuit in the late 1930s concerning circulation of the Protocols, "Two of the Russian witnesses gave testimony pointing to the involvement of Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky in the forgery".Rachkovsky was head of the Paris branch of the Russian secret police.

The source material for the forgery was a synthesis between Joly's book and a chapter from a work of fiction titled Biarritz, which was written in 1868 by antisemitic German novelist Hermann Goedsche and translated into Russian in 1872. In creating the Protocols, Golovinski took Joly's novel and changed the plotters from Napoleon III to the Jews, just as Joly had changed the plotters from the Jesuits to Napoleon III in his version of the story. The current belief is the forgery was initiated and authorized by factions of the Russian aristocracy opposed to the political and social reforms initiated by the previous Tsar, (Alexander II). The fabricated document was meant to convince the antisemitic Tsar Nicholas II not to allow additional reforms, since all reforms would play into the hands of this just uncovered "secret Jewish plot". Once the Russian Revolution began in 1905, however, the use of the forgery changed. The same group, now part of the White movement, disseminated the document during their 18 year fight against the Bolsheviks in an attempt to link the Red Army, which had a few Jews in its leadership, to the fictitious conspiracy.

First fraud investigation, 1905

A secret investigation ordered by the newly appointed chairman of the Council of Ministers Pyotr Stolypin came to the conclusion that the Protocols are definitely a fraud, and that they first appeared in Paris in anti-Semitic circles around 1897-1898. When Nicholas II learned of the results of this investigation, he requested, in spite of his natural anti-Semitic beliefs: "The Protocols should be confiscated, a good cause cannot be defended by dirty means." Despite the order, or because of the "good cause", numerous reprints proliferated.

The Russian Revolution, 1920s

After the Russian Revolution, factions connected to the White movement used the Protocols to perpetrate hatred and violence against the Jews. The idea that the Bolshevik movement was a Jewish conspiracy for world domination, plus the fact that some top Bolsheviks, particularly Leon Trotsky, were Jews, sparked worldwide interest in the Protocols.

The Times exposes a forgery, 1921

The Times exposed the Protocols as a forgery on August 16–18, 1921. In 1920-1921, the history of the concepts found in the Protocols was traced back to the works of Goedsche and Jacques Crétineau-Joly by Lucien Wolf, and published in London in August 1921. But a dramatic expose occurred in the series of articles in The Times by its Constantinople reporter, Philip Graves, who discovered the plagiarism from the work of Maurice Joly.

According to writer Peter Grose, Allen Dulles, who was in Constantinople developing relationships in post-Ottoman political structures, discovered 'the source' of the documentation ultimately provided to The Times. Grose writes that The Times extended a loan to the source, a Russian émigré who refused to be identified, with the understanding the loan would not be repaid. Colin Holmes, a lecturer in economic history of Sheffield University, identified the émigré as Michael Raslovleff, a self-identified antisemite, who gave the information to Graves so as not to "give a weapon of any kind to the Jews, whose friend I have never been."

In the first article of Graves' series, titled "A Literary Forgery", the editors of The Times wrote, "our Constantinople Correspondent presents for the first time conclusive proof that the document is in the main a clumsy plagiarism. He has forwarded us a copy of the French book from which the plagiarism is made." The New York Times reprinted the articles on September 4, 1921. In the same year, an entire book documenting the hoax was published in the United States by Herman Bernstein. Despite this widespread and extensive debunking, the Protocols continued to be regarded as important factual evidence by anti-Semites.

The Nazi propaganda, 1930s-1940s

The Protocols also became a part of the Nazi propaganda effort to justify persecution of the Jews. It was made required reading for German students. In The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry 1933–1945, Nora Levin states that "Hitler used the Protocols as a manual in his war to exterminate the Jews":

“Despite conclusive proof that the Protocols were a gross forgery, they had sensational popularity and large sales in the 1920s and 1930s. They were translated into every language of Europe and sold widely in Arab lands, the United States, and England. But it was in Germany after World War I that they had their greatest success. There they were used to explain all of the disasters that had befallen the country: the defeat in the war, the hunger, the destructive inflation”.

Hitler refers to the Protocols in Mein Kampf:

... To what extent the whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews. They are based on a forgery, the Frankfurter Zeitung moans and screams once every week: the best proof that they are authentic. [...] the important thing is that with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims.

Hitler endorsed it in his speeches from August 1921 on, and it was studied in German classrooms after the Nazis came to power. At the height of World War II, the Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels proclaimed: "The Zionist Protocols are as up-to-date today as they were the day they were first published." In Norman Cohn's words, it served as the Nazis' "warrant for genocide".

Interesting is that the not all the Nazi leaders supported the Protocols existence at the time. In contrast to Hitler's rantings, Nazi leader Erich von dem Bach-Zelewsky admitted that there really was no "Jewish menace" (judische Gefahr) -- to use Hitler's own phrase in Mein Kampf -- or conspiracy for world domination:

“I am the only living witness but I must say the truth. Contrary to the opinion of the National Socialists, that the Jews were a highly organized group, the appalling fact was that they had no organization whatsoever. The mass of the Jewish people were taken complete by surprise. They did not know at all what to do; they had no directives or slogans as to how they should act. This is the greatest lie of anti-Semitism because it gives the lie to that old slogan that the Jews are conspiring to dominate the world and that they are so highly organized. In reality, they had no organization of their own at all, not even an information service. If they had had some sort of organization, these people could have been saved by the millions, but instead, they were taken completely by surprise. Never before has a people gone as unsuspectingly to its disaster. Nothing was prepared. Absolutely nothing”.

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Verdict, 1964

In 1961 Richard Helms, then Assistant Director of the CIA, stated at a Senate subcommittee hearing: "The Russians have a long tradition in the art of forgery. More than 60 years ago the Czarist intelligence service concocted and peddled a confection called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee issues a report titled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A “Fabricated” Historic Document. The committee concludes: “The subcommittee believes that the peddlers of the Protocols are peddlers of un-American prejudice who spread hate and dissension among the American people.”

Contemporary usage and popularity

While there is continued popularity of The Protocols in nations from South America to Asia, since the defeat of Nazi Germany and fascist

Italy

in WWII, governments or political leaders in most parts of the world have generally avoided claims that The Protocols represent factual evidence of a real Jewish conspiracy. The exception to this is the Middle East, where a large number of Arab and Muslim regimes and leaders have endorsed them as authentic. Past endorsements of The Protocols from Presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat of Egypt, one of the President Arifs of Iraq, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, and Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya, among other political and intellectual leaders of the Arab world, are echoed by 21st century endorsements from the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Ekrima Sa'id Sabri, and Hamas, to the education ministry of Saudi Arabia.

Aftermath

Yes, many literary hoaxes were exposed and became the occasional source of a good laughter. But not this one… There are many people around the World, including the free Western Countries, who actually believe that everything is a pure truth, well hidden by the conspiracy. Most of these people never read a book, that just got few “terrible” facts, and that is virtually enough to get factual justification to their anti-Semitic views and beliefs. Why? It is, probably, a topic for another discussion, another place, another time. Not here, on the pages of a “light” blog.

Sources and Additional Information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion

http://lorenrosson.blogspot.com/2005/10/top-20-literary-hoaxes.html

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread54862/pg1

http://www.scamtypes.com/the-protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion.html

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10007244

http://www.adl.org/special_reports/protocols/protocols_condemnation.asp

Literary Hoaxes

2008-10-22T23:04:00.000-07:00

In recent years, the Literary World was stricken by multiple literary fakeries. In 2006, an exhaustive expose on the Smoking Gun website alleged that bad-boy writer James Frey exaggerated and fabricated details in his best-selling addiction-and-redemption memoir and Oprah Book Club pick - A Million Little Pieces. It seems Frey’s violent and drug-addled youth - which the book at once embraces with a macho swagger and denounces with pious contrition - might not have been as harrowing or eventful as written.

The same year, the New York Times reported that HIV-positive, androgynous author JT Leroy was himself a fictional creation. It appears 25-year-old Leroy’s “autobiographical” fiction about his life as a truck-stop hustler and homeless drug addict is actually the work of Laura Albert, the 40-year-old woman Leroy claims rescued him from the street.

Meanwhile, Albert’s sister-in-law, Savannah Knoop, has been exposed as the mysterious figure in wigs and sunglasses that makes public appearances as Leroy, who along the way has befriended celebrities like Courtney Love, Billy Corgan and writer Mary Gaitskill.

Writers with a hard-luck memoir in the works may want to wait until the dust settles before approaching a publisher. With both of these swindles, industry insiders have spent the week alternately claiming they “suspected all along” that something was up and nervously defending their fact-checking processes.

But literary hoaxes are nothing new. From the beginning, here and there appeared fake authors, fake books, and even fake readers.

Literary Hoaxes

Category Table of Content

1. I, Libertine
2. Hitler’s Diary Discovered
3. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

True Amazing Stories

2009-01-11T11:36:00.000-08:00

The best creepy campfire stories are always the ones that end with the words, "...And it’s all true, because I have the damned documentation here to prove it!"

We will present to you the stories that really happened to the real people, proving once and for all that nothing is more amazing or terrifying than everyday life. The most genius hoax developer would not ever be able to make up the stories that real life invents on everyday basis.

Buried Alive

Category Table of Content:

1. Dead Body under your Mattress
2. 25 True Amazing Facts
3. Plants as Mine Detectors
4. Strange and Funny United States Laws
5. Strange and Funny UK Laws
6. Bizarre Suicide of Ronald Opus
7. Cow Falling from the Sky

Can the falling from the sky cow kill you?

2009-08-17T16:20:00.000-07:00

Charles and Linda Everson were driving back to their hotel when their minivan was struck by a falling object — a 600-pound rodeo cow, landed on their bonnet.

The Eversons were unhurt, but the cow, which had fallen off a cliff, had to be euthanized.

The year-old cow fell about 200 feet from the cliff and landed on the hood of the couple's minivan, causing heavy damage.

A Chelan County fire chief, Arnold Baker, said the couple missed being killed by a matter of inches in the accident Sunday on a highway near Manson.

The Eversons were visiting the area from their home in Westland, Mich., to celebrate their first wedding anniversary. The pair, who was visiting the area to celebrate their first wedding anniversary, was taken to a Lake Chelan Community Hospital as a precaution, but later released.

Mr Everson, 49, said he was in shock as he watched the bovine bounce off his battered bonnet.

He told the Detroit Fee Press: "I'm just glad to be alive. It's raining cows out here, man!"

The chauffeur said he saw something hit his vehicle but amazingly kept on driving for a mile before pulling over.

"Wham! It happened so fast I actually thought it was a deer," he told the paper.

"All of a sudden I'm looking at it, and I tell my wife, 'It's a cow,'" he said.

"I kept saying, 'I don't believe it.' I must have said that 20 or 30 times."

Chelan County Sheriff's Sergeant Mike Harris said the animal was a Professional Bull Rider-registered cow that had escaped its ranch about a month ago.

"It was bred for rodeo," Sgt Harris told the paper. "It was not your normal cow in a field."

Aftermath

The falling cow incident made local and national news, then like most bizarre news stories faded quickly into the dust bin of cyber space. But not for everyone…

A winemaker Ray Sandidge with an overactive entrepreneurial streak said, “Hey! This is marketing opportunity.” He has introduced the world to Falling Cow Wine. Ray even held a grand opening celebration with the owner of Michelle (the deceased cow) on hand.

Sources and Additional Information:

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Sky-News-Archive/Article/20080641291913

http://proudauntofamarine.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!6C4B18C7817ADED9!1787.entry

http://heblogssheblogs.com/innovative-marketing-ideas/

Urban Legends, or Urban Myths

2009-01-23T12:19:00.000-08:00

An urban legend or urban myth is a form of modern folklore consisting of stories thought to be factual by those circulating them. The term is often used to mean something akin to an "apocryphal story." Like all folklore, urban legends are not necessarily false, but they are often distorted, exaggerated, or sensationalized over time.

Despite its name, a typical urban legend does not necessarily originate in an urban setting. The term is simply used to differentiate modern legend from traditional folklore in preindustrial times. For this reason, sociologists and folklorists prefer the term "contemporary legend".

Urban legends are sometimes repeated in news stories and, in recent years, distributed by e-mail. People frequently allege that such tales happened to a "friend of a friend"-so often, in fact, that "friend of a friend," ("FOAF") has become a commonly used term when recounting this type of story.

Some urban legends have passed through the years with only minor changes to suit regional variations. One example is the story of a woman killed by spiders nesting in her elaborate hairdo. More recent legends tend to reflect modern circumstances, like the story of people ambushed, anesthetized, and waking up minus one kidney, which was surgically removed for transplantation.

Category Table of Content

1. Money from Microsoft for email forwarding
2. Neiman Marcus cookie recipe
3. Sewer Alligators
4. Kelly-Hopkensville Goblin Encounter
5. "Good Luck, Mr. Gorsky!"

"Good luck, Mr. Gorsky." Truth or Urbam Legend?

2009-07-23T12:19:00.000-07:00

Original Story

When Apollo Mission Astronaut Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon, he not only gave his famous "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" statement but followed it by several remarks, usual com traffic between him, the other astronauts and Mission Control. Just before he re-entered the lander, however, he made the enigmatic remark "Good luck, Mr. Gorsky."

Many people at NASA thought it was a casual remark concerning some rival Soviet Cosmonaut. However, upon checking, there was no Gorsky in either the Russian or American space programs. Over the years many people questioned Armstrong as to what the "Good luck, Mr. Gorsky" statement meant, but Armstrong always just smiled.

On July 5, 1995 (in Tampa Bay, FL) while answering questions following a speech, a reporter brought up the 26-year-old question to Armstrong. This time he finally responded. Mr. Gorsky had finally died and so Neil Armstrong felt he could answer the question.

When he was a kid, he was playing baseball with a friend in the backyard. His friend hit a fly ball which landed in the front of his neighbor's bedroom windows. His neighbors were Mr. & Mrs. Gorsky.

As he leaned down to pick up the ball, young Armstrong heard Mrs. Gorsky shouting at Mr. Gorsky, "Oral sex! You want oral sex?! You'll get oral sex when the kid next door walks on the moon!"

True or False?

This legend, seemingly an obvious joke, began circulating on the Internet in mid-1995 and was picked up by the media a few months later. The inclusion of specific details (the name of the person or the date of the press conference) apparently was added for the better perceived credibility of the story.

We can take the statement by Eric M. Jones, editor of NASA's Apollo 11 Lunar Surface Journal, as the official and final word on the Gorsky affair:

During November 1995, a clever (and slightly risqué) story was widely circulated on the Internet concerning a statement Neil is supposed to have made during the Apollo 11 EVA. At the suggestion of several readers, let me state that Neil never said "Good luck, Mr. Gorsky" at any time during the mission. Indeed, on November 28, 1995, Neil wrote, "I understand that the joke is a year old. I first heard it in California delivered by (comedian) Buddy Hackett."

If that still doesn't satisfy, review the audio recordings of the first moonwalk verify that Armstrong's exact words were: "That's one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind."

I like the story and it is a bit disappointing that it is not true. But, how many laughs and smiles it has already inspired!

It has also inspired Louise Wener to write a song that is performed by Sleeper:

Good Luck Mr Gorsky

Makes him ten feet tall and drives him anywhere
Dreams of rockets and home run heroes
Takes the brakes off on the big hills for a dare
Oh when it's dark here
There's a voice that will always call you in
But you don't care
You still sleep without thinking

Best of luck Mr Gorsky all the world's waiting for you
There's a clock on the wall
And it ticks when you're small
Counting for you
Best of luck Mr Gorsky all the world's waiting for you
There's a plaque on the wall
That your wife won at school
Cleans it for you

Making holes in the tall white fences
And a hundred curtains flicker as you pass
Think that man must be ninety seven
Built a telescope he focused on the stars
Models in boxes never look like the pictures on the front
But that's o.k.
They still fly on elastic

Best of luck Mr Gorsky all the world's waiting for you
There's a clock on the wall
And it ticks when you're small
Counting for you
Best of luck Mr Gorsky all the world's waiting for you
There's a plaque on the wall
That your wife won at school
Cleans it for you

Good luck Mr Gorsky all the world's waiting for you
Best of luck Mr Gorsky all the world's waiting for you
Good luck Mr Gorsky all the world's waiting for you
Good luck Mr Gorsky all the world's waiting for you

Man on the Moon - Buzz Aldrin, Apollo landing

Did you know that the man on this picture is not Neil Armstrong? But it is Neil, who is making this picture and can be seen in the helmet face glass reflection…

Sources and Additional Information:

http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/dubiousquotes/a/ask_ul_gorsky.htm

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/mrgorsky.asp

Practical Jokes

2008-10-07T01:19:00.000-07:00

When most people think of practical jokes, they envision pranks that entail elaborate schemes, which are hatched with a certain victim in mind. These types of jokes take some forethought and planning to pull off but can be the most rewarding. Often with practical jokes of this nature, half of the fun comes during the planning stage because you are able to envision and laugh to yourself as you think about how your friends or family are going to react. You also derive pleasure from seeing the victim working their way through the joke. In some cases, the joke may unfold over the course of hours or days, giving you more chances to laugh as the victim struggles to understand what is happening to them.

Category Table of Content

1. John Barrimore Resurrection
2. Roman Emperor Gallenius Revenge
3. Blinky the Friendly Hen
4. MIT Police Cruiser on the Great Dom
5. Arthur Conan Doyle and Piltdown Hoax

Arthur Conan Doyle - Perpetrator of the Piltdown Man Hoax

2009-07-07T14:43:00.000-07:00

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, enjoyed practical jokes. He is said to have once sent a telegram to twelve of his friends, all people of great significance and power. The telegram said: 'Flee at once, the secret is discovered'. Within 24 hours all twelve had left the country.

On December 18, 1912, Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward announced to the Geological Society of London and the world the discovery of the remains of an early human fossil, Eoanthropus dawsoni. It was found in a shallow unimpressive gravel pit near the village of Piltdown in the County of Sussex. It became known as the Sussex Man, Dawn Man, and then Piltdown Man, the name that stuck.

In an age when the Empire was still expansive and the great antiquity of human evolution was still a fresh idea, the find seemed to confirm British primacy, or at least British longevity. For Piltdown Man was widely regarded as the earliest known human fossil, older than anything the French or Germans or anyone else had yet dredged up.

Some 40 years later J. S. Weiner and his colleagues published an equally startling discovery. Piltdown Man, once the pride of British science, was an out-an-out fake, fabricated by a party or parties unknown. Its mandible wasn't human at all, coming instead from a juvenile female orangutan. The molars and canine tooth associated with it had been artificially filed, and the condyle, or hinge, was apparently broken to prevent the discovery that it did not properly articulate with the skull. The skull fragments recovered from the site were, on the other hand, definitely human, although of unusual thickness and construction.

The bones, teeth, and antlers of a variety of extinct mammals were also found at Piltdown - elephants, mastodons, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, and beavers. Blatantly enough, in retrospect, they ranged in age from the early to late Pleistocene, a stretch of approximately half a million years. Many were typically British fossils, but a few now appear to derive from the Mediterranean area. There were also a number of primitive tools and crudely flaked flint stones known as eoliths, which were then being found in great numbers at various sites in southern England. All in all, the Piltdown find was an extraordinarily mixed bag.

Once the hoax was uncovered, Charles Dawson, the discoverer and one of the two principal excavators of the site, became the prime suspect. Woodward, his co-excavator, was the British Museum's leading paleontologist and therefore considered above reproach, as was Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit who had assisted in excavation on several occasions and who went on to become a geologist, a paleontologist, and a philosopher. Each was properly credentialed. Dawson, on the other hand, was a solicitor by profession. Although knowledgeable and enthusiastic in geology and paleontology, he was nevertheless regarded as an amateur, a status that made him all the more vulnerable to innuendo when the hoax was finally announced, some 37 years after Dawson's death.

His reputation suffered further with the publication in 1955 of Weiner's book, The Piltdown Forgery. Weiner amassed a great deal of information that led him to point the finger directly at Dawson, although he was careful to leave an escape clause:

... our verdict ... must rest on suspicion and not proof. In the circumstances, can we withhold from Dawson the one alternative possibility, remote though it seems, ... that he might, after all, have been implicated in a "joke," perhaps not his own, which went too far?

Since Weiner's book, several other individuals have been proposed as the hoaxer, either as a co-conspirator with Dawson or independent of him. These include Sir Grafton Elliot Smith, a neuroanatomist; W. J. Sollas, a geologist; and Teilhard, who has been favored by Louis Leakey and, more recently, by Stephen Jay Gould. There is little doubt, however, that in the eyes of many experts Charles Dawson is still the frontrunner.

But there was another interested figure who haunted the Piltdown site during excavation, a doctor who knew human anatomy and chemistry, someone interested in geology and archeology, and an avid collector of fossils. He was a man who loved hoaxes, adventure, and danger; a writer gifted at manipulating complex plots; and perhaps most important of all, one who bore a grudge against the British science establishment. He was none other than the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

That Doyle has not been implicated in the hoax before now not only is a testament to the skill with which he appears to have perpetrated it, but it also explains why the case against him is circumstantial, intricate, even convoluted. For to be on Doyle's trail is, in a sense, to be on the trail of the world's greatest fictional detective himself, Sherlock Holmes. And Holmes, as his admirers know, was not only a master of deduction, he was also a forensic genius as expert in chemistry as he was in pharmacology, as familiar with human pathology as he was with anthropology. His exploits would become required reading for the police forces of several nations, and his creator, Doyle, is still regarded as a pioneer of modern criminology.

What led one of us, Winslow, to first embark on that labyrinthine trail was an earlier hoax that contained similar elements. It had been perpetrated by the eccentric English naturalist Charles Waterton many years before Piltdown. In 1825 in Wanderings in South America, Waterton claimed to have come across and killed an apeman, a sketch of which graced the book's frontispiece. It showed the humanlike face and apelike head and shoulders of the creature, which he called Nondescript. Because of the beast's burdensome weight, Waterton explained tongue in cheek, he had severed its body and carried only the head and shoulders out of the rain forest and back to England. These he had then preserved using his own unique methods of taxidermy. Anyone doubting the veracity of his tale was welcome to gaze upon this apeman of the woods in the flesh.

Waterton actually had taken the head and shoulders of a red howler monkey and shaped its facial features to give it a humanoid appearance. His creation stirred some mirth and some indignation.

Another of Waterton's typical whimsies was to combine the parts of two entirely different animals into a single creature, something one of his biographers categorized as a "taxidermic frolic".

Could there be a connection between Waterton's ruses and the hoax at Piltdown? Piltdown Man too ended up being a composite creature, a concoction, perhaps even a "frolic".

Because of the great gap in time between the hoaxes there is clearly no direct link. Waterton was long gone by 1912. But an indirect connection provided the first notion that Doyle was more than casually exposed to the Waterton tradition and might be involved in Piltdown as well. It turned out that he attended the same Jesuit preparatory school from which Waterton had graduated many years before. This was Stonyhurst College, located in a fairly remote part of Lancashire. Waterton had been one its most illustrious alumni. Indeed, many of his taxidermical productions were frequently put on display in the school's halls.

That Doyle's name surfaced in this way seemed, at first, merely coincidental. But in reviewing the limited roster of those who enjoyed access to the Piltdown site during excavation, and who knew Dawson and Woodward beforehand, his name came up again and again. Not only did he live in Crowborough at the time, only seven or eight miles from the site, he also appears to have visited it openly in 1912. Dawson seemed gratified by his attention. In a note to Woodward, he stated, "Conan Doyle has written and seems excited about the skull. He has kindly offered to drive me in his motor anywhere."

A medical doctor who no longer practiced, Doyle was at this stage reaping the rewards of being a successful author. Moreover, his interest in paleontology had recently been stimulated by his discovery of several fossilized dinosaur footprints and bones close to his house in Crowborough. Dawson and Woodward met with Doyle to examine these discoveries. In addition, Doyle was financially involved in a project of find coal in Kent, a project that had penetrated into strata rich in dinosaur remains, which excited him greatly.

Doyle was also a prodigious walker who thought nothing of setting forth on long jaunts, "geologizing" as he went along. There can be little doubt that he often visited the relatively unguarded site either by walking up the driveway that passed next to it or by peering over the hedge to observe the progress of excavation. Since most of the remains were found on or near the surface, it required no great feat on the part of the hoaxer to insert them into recently exposed cuts or toss them onto the spoil heaps where their discovery could be assured. All one had to do was keep an eye on the excavators. The real trick was to concoct a convincing creature, stain it to match the color of the Piltdown gravel, and surround it with acceptably appropriate fossil remains and implements. Unquestionably, Doyle possessed the anatomical competence, knew sufficient paleontology and chemistry, and had more than ample opportunity to do so. The case against Doyle, however, becomes more convincing in light of associations that can be established between him and the actual remains found at Piltdown.

Perhaps the single most expertly contrived part of the plot is the selection and modification of an orangutan's jawbone to make it resemble a primitive human mandible, one that appeared to "fit" the skull. Not only were the condyle and chin areas broken off, but the remaining molars were filed in such a way as to simulate patterns of human wear. During his first days as a practicing doctor in Southsea, a suburb of Portsmouth, Doyle moved into a house whose previous occupant had been a dentist. Heaped about in great numbers were the casts of human jaws. It may be partly for this reason and partly because many of his first patients had jaw ailments - having been referred by a dentist neighbor - that Doyle developed an abiding interest in human jaws. In a story about the life of a doctor, which is clearly autobiographic, he refers to one of his protagonists as a generalist who had one minor specialty: He was a "jawman"; that is, a doctor who treated abscessed jaws and the like.

When it was dated many years later, the Piltdown jaw proved to be young, but not that young - 500 or 600 years old. Where could the hoaxer have obtained the jaw of an orangutan who lived somewhere in the East Indies and died approximately in the 12th or 13th century?

Among several possible sources, East India travelers and collectors whom Doyle may have known, Cecil Wray is the most likely. A former neighbor of Doyle's, Wray in 1906 had just returned from the Malay Peninsula where he had worked both as a magistrate and a collector. He was also a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society. Wray's brother, moreover, was head of the Malay museums and specialized in excavating caves, an ideal environment for preserving bone remains. One of his museums had recently purchased a large collection of animal specimens from Borneo. Orangutans live only in Borneo and Sumatra.

Doyle's fascination with jaws extended to skulls as well. His special interest is reflected in a famous passage from The Hound of the Baskervilles in which a medical man meets Sherlock Holmes:

"Glad to meet you, sir," said Mortimer. "I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development. Would you have any objection to my running finger along your parietal fissure? A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum."

Doyle was also fascinated with the field of phrenology and had made the acquaintance of the leading phrenologist in London, the American Jessie Fowler, who had an immense number and variety of skulls in her collection. Like Doyle, Fowler was intrigued with the occult. In the late 1890's, she "read" Doyle's skull and stayed as a guest in his house.

Since the skull planted at Piltdown was exceptionally thick and constructed in a manner that had rarely, if ever, been observed before, it is almost certain that the hoaxer had access to a large and varied collection of skulls. Fowler was in the practice of selling her skulls.

Several of the fossil mammal remains that were salted into the Piltdown gravel pit have since been identified as coming from the Mediterranean. The likely sites include Malta and a fossil cache in the Ichkeul area of Tunisia, which was not known to paleontologists until 1946. Whoever was the hoaxer had to have access to such exotic materials. In 1907, some two years before any fossils were discovered at Piltdown, Doyle visited archeologist Joseph Whitaker, one of the few scientists who had frequently been to the Ichkeul region.

A few months after that meeting, Doyle and his bride - it was his second marriage - honeymooned for two months in the eastern Mediterranean. In all probability they went ashore at Malta, a British port, in late November or early December on their return voyage. Coincidentally, the Daily Malta Chronicle announced on November 16 the discovery of the fossilized remains of a hippopotamus by workmen excavating a limestone fissure on the island. One of the planted items at Piltdown was a hippopotamus tooth whose form and chemical content indicate it came from a limestone chamber in one of the Mediterranean islands, Malta being regarded as the most likely.

Two years later, in 1909, before the discovery of any of the Mediterranean fossils at Piltdown, Doyle and his wife cruised the western Mediterranean. They visited Algeria and almost certainly Tunisia. Shortly after, Doyle wrote a story about Carthage, located not far from Ichkeul. Several of the fossil elephant teeth are known to have come from Ichkeul. The ship also stopped at Malta and Corsica, another possible source of the hippopotamus tooth. None of the other individuals suspected of being the hoaxer is known to have visited these islands or Tunisia. The timing of Doyle's travels was perfect.

Most of the flints that were planted at Piltdown and uncovered in 1912 were similar but slightly different from those ordinarily found in Britain. Some had a rather unusual white cortex, most of the larger ones were thought to be rejects from some unknown paleolithic flint factory, several were worked only on one side, and some were very old for their edges were rounded by weathering, while others had much sharper edges. The flint from which one had been chipped included the fossil shell Inoceramus. These characteristics are especially typical of the artifacts found in abundance in the desert town of Gafsa, also in Tunisia, site of the largest paleolithic flint factory in North Africa.

If he did not collect them himself, there is another conduit through which Doyle could have obtained such flints. In 1910 Norman Douglas, distinguished author and a friend of Doyle's, left Italy for England. On his way he spent several months in Tunisia, mostly in Gafsa. Douglas was an inveterate collector and had a special interest in paleolithic implements. He referred to himself as a "flint maniac," and he collected some 400 pieces, which he carried to England and sold or gave away.

Finally, there are the other fossil mammal fragments, including beaver teeth, that were salted into Piltdown but most likely came from Norfolk and Suffolk. For years prior to Piltdown, Doyle vacationed in Norfolk near towns that boasted excellent golf courses, as golf was one of his favorite games. These included the Sheringham Golf Course, which abutted the East Runton deposit, a confusing collection of fossils ranging from a late Pleistocene beaver to a variety of early Pleistocene animals, the same unusual kind of mix found in the Piltdown gravel pit. It is not unlikely that the beaver fossils as well as some of the older fossils found at Piltdown were picked up between rounds of golf.

It is possible then to link Doyle with virtually all the physical fragments that, taken together, comprise the find at Piltdown - from jaw and skull to fossil animal remains and flints. Unsurprisingly, it is also possible to link the hoax with what Doyle did best: fiction.

In his exposé of the Piltdown hoax, Weiner mentions Doyle only incidentally, speculating that perhaps Doyle had gained some inspiration for his novel, The Lost World, from witnessing the excavation. To be sure, an examination of that book, the first of several in which Professor Edward Challenger appears as the central character, reveals many suggestive points of resemblance. But it is the timing of its conception and publication that is particularly relevant. Indeed, The Lost World may offer a unique twist to Byron's observation that truth is stranger than fiction.

Consider a few touch points between Doyle's fictional adventure story and the Piltdown hoax:

The statement by one his characters that "if you are clever and you know your business you can fake a bone as easily as you can a photograph."
The observation by another character that the practical joke "would be one of the most elementary developments of man."
The occurrence of a time-mix in the living fossil animals of the story and those at Piltdown. When Dawson learned of the imminent publication of The Lost World from Doyle, he wrote Smith Woodward: "C. Doyle is writing a sort of Jules Verne book ... I hope someone has sorted out his fossils for him!"
In the story, a tribe of shaggy, red-haired, nest-building apemen is discovered not too far from where Waterton's red-haired Nondescript apeman was supposed to have lived. The description of these creatures makes them appear to be most closely allied with the orangutans of Borneo and Sumatra. There are also several references to early man and the "missing link" in the story.
The plateau that makes up "the lost world" is described as an area "as large perhaps as Sussex, [which] has been lifted en bloc with all its living contents." A map of the basin-topped plateau shows it to bear a fairly close resemblance to the horseshoe-rimmed basin known as the Weald in southeastern England. The Weald, which includes most of Sussex and parts of Surrey and Kent, is where Piltdown Man was found.
The main characters in the book can be identified as acquaintances of Doyle, although some of the characters appear to be composites of two or more people. For example, Lord Roxton, the handsome bachelor who explores the upper reaches of the Amazon, is mainly derived from Doyle's friend, Sir Roger Casement. The dry, goat-bearded, and acerbic geologist, Professor Summerlees, bears a close resemblance to Woodward. Others are equally traceable.

Weiner did not consider the possibility that instead of Doyle's book being inspired by the Piltdown excavation, the Piltdown hoax was inspired by, or developed hand-in-hand with, the plot of The Lost World. On August 5, 1910, at a time when the Piltdown site had yielded nothing but a single skull fragment and no public announcements had yet been made, Doyle outlined his plans for The Lost World in a letter to his friend Casement. He completed the novel in December of 1911, at which time he sent it to The Strand Magazine. There is no known record of Doyle having visited the Piltdown site before then. In April 1912 his story came out as a serial in The Strand, and in December Dawson and Woodward made the first announcement of their momentous discovery. The timing is crucial, for the seeds of The Lost World appear to have been planted in Doyle's mind long before Piltdown was a site of recognized significance in anyone's mind.

Doyle, it must be said, genuinely believed in the scientific significance of the evidence pointing to the existence of early man. Indeed he composed a manuscript entitle "Human Origins," though it was never published. He even wrote part of The Lost World on the inside cover of an archeological journal. What then could prompt him to perpetrate a hoax and, as it proved, to make fools of the individuals who discovered, excavated, and interpreted the Piltdown remains?

Besides being fascinated with science, Doyle was also a believer in Spiritualism. He so declared himself as early as 1887 in a letter to the journal Light, and he spent much of his time, energy, and money furthering the Spiritualist cause. He came, for example, to believe in such things as the existence of fairies and other diminutive folk, as well as in the idea that an apocalypse would be brought about by a wrathful "Central Intelligence," resulting in the death of most of the world's population.

These spiritualist and unorthodox views are central to the question of motive. Here again, by way of an answer, fiction and reality merge. For fiction we may look to Doyle's Professor Challenger; for reality, the formidable figure of Edwin Ray Lankester.

Professor Challenger of Doyle's stories was another composite character. One of Doyle's medical school professors contributed the Assyrian beard and the booming voice emanating from an enormous chest. Lankester also provided some physical traits, but his greatest contributions were to the development of the personality and background of the almost inimical Professor Challenger.

Lankester was a dedicated Darwinian evolutionist. As a boy it had been his privilege to meet Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley at the home of his parents. It was he, if anyone, who succeeded Huxley as "Darwin's bulldog," becoming evolution's staunchest defender. But he not only defended, he attacked, and mercilessly so. Besides holding Spiritualists up to ridicule, he encouraged scientists to wage war on them and in doing so to forgo gentlemanly rules of conduct. In a letter to The Times he wrote:

To convict the spiritualist impostor one must not approach him with theories based on "recondite principles of modern science," nor should one put him on his guard as though an honorable contest were at hand, but his habits and methods should be minutely and covertly investigated as those of the elusive wild beast, and then at the right moment he may be seized and brought to light "taken in the act."

As a man of action as well as of words, this is precisely what Lankester had already done. The elusive wild beast he had stalked and bagged was the American medium, "Doctor" Henry Slade, the rage of the Spiritualists of Britain in the mid-1870s. Lankester had arranged to attend a seance with Slade, the purpose of which was to communicate with a spirit. The spirit would manifest itself by writing on a blank slate. Suspecting Slade of having tampered with the slate, Lankester decided "to test my hypothesis ... by [conducting] a crucial experiment." After the slate was presented as clean, but before he heard any noise of writing, Lankester snatched it and found a message on its surface. Lankester viewed this as certain evidence of an intent to cheat and defraud him of the fee he had paid Slade, evidence that "would be convincing to persons not already lost to reason." A magistrate agreed, though Slade was released on a technicality and left England as expeditiously as he could. In a single stroke, Lankester had become the Spiritualists' bête noir.

Doyle first made reference to the Lankester-Slade affair in a short story, "The Captain of Pole-star," published in 1883. The message was that even if mediums such as Slade had been guilty of fraud, one does not condemn Spiritualism for this reason alone. But Lankester had used just this kind of reasoning. Piltdown would provide a chance to reverse the tables by applying the same kind of logic: If science swallowed a scientific fraud like Piltdown Man, then all of science, especially the destructive and arrogant evolutionists, whom Doyle called the Materialists, could be condemned. They would, in other words, be hoisted by their own petard.

In a number of subsequent writings Doyle made frequent reference to his adversaries, the Materialists, and he singled out Lankester as one of its most flagrant representatives. Not long before the hoax was set in motion, Lankester retired from his lofty perch as director of the British Museum of Natural History, a position he had held for nine years. That same year, 1907, he chose to remind the Spiritualists of his unabated contempt for them. Cerebral disease, he stated in his book The Kingdom of Man, may account for their beliefs.

Ironically enough, it was Lankester who provided the hoaxer with the recipe for what would prove a believable and long-lasting paleontological meal. Between 1906 and 1909 Lankester had made known his views on the kind of discoveries the prehistorians of the future might be expected to make. Man he declared, emerged quite early, "perhaps in Lower Miocene times." Furthermore, he believed the cranial capacity of early man, contrary to the prevailing view, most likely would be remarkably large. He arrived at this prediction by extrapolating the results of a comparison of paleolithic skulls and those of contemporary "savage races." Also, in his regular column in The Daily Telegraph, "Science from an Easy Chair," he stoutly defended his belief that certain crudely chipped flints found in many sites were not only of great antiquity but were shaped by human hands.

Lankester also predicted that other less crude man-modified rocks would shortly be found in pre-Pleistocene deposits. In 1911, he argued in a paper presented before the Royal Society that such rocks had indeed been discovered. He referred to some novelly-shaped flint implements, which he called rostro-carinate or eagle's beak, and some scrapers, hammers, and large one-sided picks recently found both in Suffolk and Norfolk. He dated them from the Pliocene or possibly earlier.

Unwittingly, Sir Ray had set himself up. He provided a list of objects to be discovered or verified as being man-made, and the hoaxer had obliged him on every count. The Piltdown flints included the eoliths he believed in, some early paleolithic implements, and at least one of the unusual rostro-carinate type (which a well-known antiquities dealer had been selling for six months). Piltdown Man's skull turned out to have a large brain capacity considering its apparent antiquity as determined from the age of the fossil mammals with which it was associated. Some of the fossils were identified by Lankester as being of Pliocene and possibly even of Miocene age. Piltdown Man, as he saw it, represented a large step in the direction of his hypothetical Lower Miocene apeman. It was a case of self-fulfilling prophecy, with the hoaxer providing the wherewithal.

So the case against Doyle is made. Besides the necessary skill, contacts, knowledge, and opportunity to qualify as the hoaxer, Doyle also had sufficient motive and an inviting target, Lankester.

That the blame for the Piltdown hoax fell largely on the shoulders of Dawson can now be regarded as an injustice. Perhaps Weiner was more correct than he knew when he left Dawson an escape clause: Had Dawson "been implicated in a 'joke,' perhaps not even his own, which went too far?" On the other hand, it appears that Dawson was not the butt at all, merely a patsy and later the scapegoat for a deeply embarrassed segment of the scientific community.

To have fooled science for so long may thus be regarded as something of a Holmesian triumph, though perhaps a dubious one considering how much time was wasted, how much confusion was created in our understanding of human evolution, and how many reputations were tainted as a result. Dawson, Woodward, Lankester, Teilhard du Chardin - they were all duped. But why didn't Doyle ever reveal - anonymously at least - so exquisite a hoax?

He may well have tried to do so, for Doyle was a sportsman as well as a jokester. As he was an expert cricketer who had played on some of the country's top amateur teams, what could be better than to place a cricket bat "in the hands of" Piltdown Man? In 1914 a portion of a fossil elephant femur was discovered at the site. When it was formally described at a Geological Society meeting, a scientist rose to state that "he could not imagine any use for an implement that looked like part of a cricket bat." He further believed in the possibility "of the bone having been found and whittled in recent times." But most of the scientists either ignored it or preferred to believe that the object was a genuine paleolithic tool, though no one could assign it a plausible function.

The following year, 1915, another fossil deposit was discovered by Dawson one or two miles from the original site. Called Piltdown II, this site also may represent an attempt by Doyle to strain the credulity of scientists to the point where they would question the authenticity of both deposits. Among other oddities, Piltdown II contained a skull fragment and a molar tooth that appeared closely related to the jaw found at Piltdown I. (In fact, it is now known to have come from that jaw.) Ales Hrdlicka, the doyen of American physical anthropology, went so far as to suggest of the molar that "... the account of its having been discovered at a considerable distance away [from Piltdown I] might be mistaken." But for many believers, the tooth confirmed that Piltdown Man was not an aberration but a legitimate early fossil - and that apparently there was more than one. Even some who had doubted that the human skull and apelike jaw at the first site belonged to a single creature were convinced when they saw the same combination - an apelike tooth and human skull - at the second site. The effect of the tooth, like that of the cricket bat, was probably the reverse of what Doyle had intended.

Such gullibility must have exasperated Doyle, or made him howl with laughter.

Sources and Additional Information:

http://www.tiac.net/~cri_a/piltdown/winslow.html

http://www.tiac.net/~cri_a/piltdown/piltdown.html

http://www.clarku.edu/~PILTDOWN/pp_map.html

http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/caah/landscapeandtownscapearchaeology/piltdown_man_a.html

Kelly-Hopkensville Goblin Encounter

2009-06-23T22:12:00.000-07:00

Overview

The Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter, also known as the Kelly Green Men case, is an alleged close encounter with supposed aliens and one of the most well-known and well-documented cases in the history of UFO incidents, and a favorite for study in ufology. The incidents began on the evening of August 21, 1955 and continued through to the dawn of the next morning. The incident occurred mostly around a rural farmhouse at the time belonging to the Sutton family, which was located near the small town of Kelly and the small city of Hopkinsville, both in Christian County, Kentucky, United States. Witnesses include policemen and state troopers, and the incidents were taken seriously enough as to be officially investigated by the United States Air Force.

Details

On the evening of Sunday, August 21, 1955, present at the Sutton farmhouse at Kelly were eleven people: widowed family matriarch Glennie Lankford (50); her children, Lonnie (12), Charlton (10), and Mary (7); two sons from her previous marriage, Elmer "Lucky" Sutton (25) and John Charley "J.C." Sutton (21), and their respective wives, Vera (29) and Alene (27); Alene's brother, O.P. Baker (30 or 35); and a Pennsylvania couple, Billy Ray Taylor (21) and June Taylor (18). The Taylors, along with "Lucky" and Vera Sutton, had been visiting for a while, being occasional carnival workers.

Not all of the eleven were eyewitnesses to the most significant events. One of the women, apparently June Taylor, had been "too frightened to look", and Lonnie Lankford said that, during the fracas, his mother had hidden him and his brother and sister under a bed.

About seven o'clock, Billy Ray Taylor was drawing water from the well when he saw a bright light streak across the sky and disappear beyond a tree line some distance from the house. According to researcher Isabel Davis, who investigated the case in 1956, Billy Ray Taylor was different from the other eyewitnesses: He had looked at the creatures with extravagant success. He was the only member of the group who appeared to arouse immediate doubt in everyone who talked to him. Even among the family he had a low standing; when he first came into the house and reported a "spaceship," they paid him no attention. Later, during the investigations, he basked in the limelight of publicity. He elaborated and embroidered his description of the creatures (though not his description of the "spaceship") and eventually produced the most imaginative and least credible of the little-men sketches. Several skeptics who labeled the story a hoax referred to him as the probable originator. His behavior was in sharp contrast to that of the other witnesses, none of whom aroused such prompt suspicion in the investigators.

About an hour after Taylor reported his "flying saucer" sighting, a barking dog attracted him and "Lucky" Sutton outside. Spotting a creature, they darted into the house for a .22 rifle and shotgun, thus beginning a series of encounters that spanned the next three hours.

Sometimes, the men fired at a scary face that appeared at a window; sometimes, they went outside, whereupon, on one occasion, Taylor's hair was grabbed by a huge, clawlike hand. Once, the pair shot at a little creature that was on the roof and at another "in a nearby tree" that then "floated" to the ground. Either the creatures were impervious to gun blasts or the men's aim was poor, since no creature was killed.

After a lull in the "battle," everyone piled into their cars and drove eight miles south to Hopkinsville's police headquarters. Soon, more than a dozen officers--from city, county, and state law-enforcement agencies--had converged on the site. Their search yielded nothing, apart from a hole in a window screen. There were "no tracks of 'little men,' nor was there any mark indicating anything had landed at the described spot behind the house." By the following day, reportedly, the U.S. Air Force was involved but ultimately listed the case as "unidentified".

Partial Police Corroboration

There might have been partial corroboration of the Taylor-Sutton tale: at about 11 p.m., a state highway trooper near Kelly independently reported some unusual "meteor-like objects" flying overhead, "with a sound like artillery fire coming directly from them."

Hendry writes that Sutton family matriarch "Mrs. Lankford … counseled an end to the hostilities," noting that the creatures had never seemed to try harming anyone nor had they actually entered the house. Between appearances from the creatures, the family tried to temper the children's growing hysteria. At about 11.00 p.m., the Taylor-Sutton crew decided to flee the farmhouse in their automobiles and after about 30 minutes they arrived at the Hopkinsville police station. Police Chief Russell Greenwell judged the witnesses to have been frightened by something "beyond reason, not ordinary." He also opined "[t]hese were not the sort of people who normally ran to the police … something frightened them, something beyond their comprehension." A police officer with medical training determined that Billy Ray's pulse rate was more than twice normal.

Twenty police officers accompanied the Taylor-Suttons back to the farmhouse, and several entered it to assess the damage. According to Daniels et al., "[t]he official response was prompt and thorough." In 1998, Karal Ayn Barnett wrote, "By all accounts, the witnesses were deemed sane, not under the influence [of drugs or alcohol], and in such a state of terror, no one involved doubted that they had seen something beyond far their ken." Police and photographers who visited the home saw many bullet holes and spent shells, and further discovered what Clark describes as "an odd luminous patch along a fence where one of the beings had been shot, and, in the woods beyond, a green light whose source could not be determined." Though the investigation was inconclusive, Daniels et al. writes, "Investigators did conclude, however, that these people were sincere and sane and that they had no interest in exploiting the case for publicity. The patch sample, although photographed, was never collected and had mysteriously disappeared by the noon the next day. "

Police left at about 2:15 a.m., and not long afterwards, the witnesses claimed that the creatures returned. Billy Ray fired at them once more, ruining yet another window. The last of the creatures was allegedly sighted just before dawn, at about 4:45 a.m. on August 22.

Possible Explanations

1. In 1957, U.S. Air Force Major John E. Albert concluded that the Kelly-Hopkinsville case was the result of the witnesses seeing a "monkey painted with silver [that] escaped from a circus," and that Mrs. Lankford's imagination had exaggerated the event. Isabel Davis, for one, rejected this explanation as not only entirely speculative, but absurd: "[m]onkeys are hairy creatures, monkeys have long tails, monkeys are notorious chatterboxes, and monkeys struck by bullets bleed and die ... no amount of 'optical illusion' can explain a mistake of this magnitude."

2. An explanation for the case has been proposed recently by Renaud Leclet, a French Ufologist. It could be a misidentification of a pair of Great horned owls, which are nocturnal, fly silently, have yellow eyes, and aggressively defend their nests. Leclet argues that this explanation fits well with the details of the case, including the appearance and behavior of the "humanoids". The metallic sound of the striking bullets can be explained by the fact that some bullets hit some metallic objects of the farm, such as the fence. This misidentified bird hypothesis was echoed by Joe Nickell in a Skeptical Inquirer article.

Sources and Additional Information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly-Hopkinsville_encounter

http://www.mail-archive.com/mythfolk@yahoogroups.com/msg00900.html

http://www.alienhub.com/showthread.php?t=2965

Sewer Alligators in New York

2009-06-12T21:34:00.000-07:00

It was once a fad among New Yorkers vacationing in Florida to bring back baby alligators for their children to raise as pets. These infant gators eventually grew up and outlived their cuteness, sad to say, at which point their desperate owners flushed them down the toilet to get rid of them.

Some of these hastily disposed-of creatures managed to survive and breed in the dank Manhattan sewer system, so the story goes, producing colonies of giant, albino alligators beneath the streets of New York City. Their descendants thrive down there to this day, completely hidden (apart from the rare heart-stopping encounter between sewer gator and sewer worker, that is) from human eyes.

Analysis: Believe it or not there is a grain of truth behind this legend, namely the documented capture of an eight-foot alligator at the bottom of an East Harlem manhole in 1935 (though no one at the time assumed it actually lived down there). It was theorized at the time that the creature must have tumbled off a steamer visiting the northeast "from the mysterious Everglades, or thereabouts," and swam up the Harlem River. It met an unfortunate end at the hands of the teenage boys who found it.

Birth of an urban legend

The earliest published reference to alligators in the sewer — in what Jan Harold Brunvand refers to as the "standardized" form of the urban legend ("baby alligator pets, flushed, thrived in sewers") — can be found in the 1959 book, The World Beneath the City, a history of public utilities in New York City written by Robert Daley. Daley's source was a retired sewer official named Teddy May, who claimed that during his tenure in the 1930s he personally investigated workers' reports of subterranean saurians and saw a colony of them with his own eyes. He also claimed to have supervised their eradication. May was a colorful storyteller, if not a particularly reliable one.

'New York White'

The tale was well known throughout the United States by the late 1960s, when, according to folklorist Richard M. Dorson, it came to be associated with another icon of sewer lore, the mythical "New York White" — an especially potent, albino strain of marijuana growing wild from seeds spilled out of baggies hastily flushed down toilets during drug raids. Not that anyone had ever actually seen the stuff, much less smoked it. It was impossible to harvest, you see, because of all the alligators down there.

The reason we speak of all this as folklore, not fact, is that herpetologists pooh-pooh the very idea of alligators thriving in the New York City sewer system. It's cold down there most of the time, they point out — freezing cold during the winter — and alligators require a warm environment year-round to survive, much less reproduce and burgeon into colonies. And if the cold didn't kill them off, the polluted sewer water certainly would.

Actual New York City gator sightings:

Adding fodder to the legend is the intriguing fact that wayward alligators — escaped or abandoned pets, we assume — do occasionally turn up in the streets of New York City, never failing to cause a ruckus. For example:

• June 2001 - A small alligator (actually a caiman, as it turned out) was spotted and eventually captured in Central Park.

• November 2006 - A two-foot-long caiman is captured outside an apartment building in Brooklyn. Police say it "snapped and hissed" at them.

When Indiviglio was a child in the '60s, the street he lived on in the Bronx was broken up due to construction, he says. It was summer, he had lots of time, and the street repair gave him an easy entrance to the sewers.

Expert Note

"I would bring leftovers from lunch, a long line and a hook, and spend a part of each day in the sewers looking for alligators," he remembers. "I saw rats, cockroaches — probably caught a lot of sicknesses — but I never saw anything like an alligator."

Today Indiviglio, 40, is a herpetologist who is responsible for the reptiles — among them alligators — at the Staten Island Zoo. He can walk into the cage of the four full-grown American alligators living in the zoo when he wants.

He says people believed that the sewers would be a good place for alligators to live — because it should be hot and steamy down there. Furthermore, there should be plenty of rats for the alligators to eat. But Indiviglio says the sewers are not for alligators — they are too polluted, too cold and there is not enough sunlight.

The temperature of an Alligators blood follows the temperature of the environment. "They can take the cold for a while — but not a four month New York winter," Indiviglio says.

He explains that alligators cannot digest their food when it is cold. If they eat anyway, the food will rot — and kill them.

Furthermore, it was believed to be baby alligators that were flushed into the sewers. But without the sun — and the D vitamin their skin produces when in the sun — they could not utilize calcium and their bones would get soft.

He says the pollution level in the sewers would kill anything that lives in the water.

Sources and Additional Information:

http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/alligators/a/sewer_gators.htm

http://www.nyc24.org/2001/issue04/story01/page3.html

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_339.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewer_alligator

Neiman Marcus cookie recipe

2009-05-09T00:16:00.000-07:00

You, probably, got already this story in your mailbox more than once, but let’s repeat it again for those, who somehow missed it in the filtered trash messages folder.

Original Story

Okay, everyone....a true story of justice in the good old U.S. of A. Thought y’all might enjoy this; if nothing else, it shows internet justice, if it can be called that.

My daughter & I had just finished a salad at Neiman-Marcus Cafe in Dallas & decided to have a small dessert. Because our family are such cookie lovers, we decided to try the "Neiman-Marcus Cookie". It was so excellent that I asked if they would give me the recipe and they said with a small frown, "I’m afraid not." Well, I said, would you let me buy the recipe? With a cute smile, she said, "Yes." I asked how much, and she responded, "Two fifty." I said with approval, just add it to my tab.

Thirty days later, I received my VISA statement from Neiman-Marcus and it was $285.00. I looked again and I remembered I had only spent $9.95 for two salads and about $20.00 for a scarf. As I glanced at the bottom of the statement, it said, "Cookie Recipe - $250.00." Boy, was I upset!! I called Neiman’s Accounting Dept. and told them the waitress said it was "two fifty," and I did not realize she meant $250.00 for a cookie recipe.

I asked them to take back the recipe and reduce my bill and they said they were sorry, but because all the recipes were this expensive so not just everyone could duplicate any of our bakery recipes....the bill would stand.

I waited, thinking of how I could get even or even try and get any of my money back.

I just said, "Okay, you folks got my $250.00 and now I’m going to have $250.00 worth of fun." I told her that I was going to see to it that every cookie lover will have a $250.00 cookie recipe from Neiman-Marcus for nothing. She replied, "I wish you wouldn’t do this." I said, "I’m sorry but this is the only way I feel I could get even," and I will.

So, here it is, and please pass it to someone else or run a few copies....I paid for it; now you can have it for free.

(Recipe may be halved):
2 cups butter, 4 cups flower, 2 tsp. soda, 2 cups sugar, 5 cups blended oatmeal**, 24 oz. chocolate chips, 2 cups brown sugar, 1 tsp. salt, 1 8 oz. Hershey Bar (grated), 4 eggs, 2 tsp. baking powder, 3 cups chopped nuts (your choice), 2 tsp. vanilla

** measure oatmeal and blend in a blender to a fine powder. Cream the butter and both sugars. Add eggs and vanilla; mix together with flour, oatmeal, salt, baking powder, and soda. Add chocolate chips, Hershey Bar and nuts. Roll into balls and place two inches apart on a cookie sheet. Bake for 10 minutes at 375 degrees. Makes 112 cookies. Have fun!!! This is not a joke --- this is a true story..

Neiman Marcus cookie recipe

True Story or Urban Myth?

There are at least two reasons, why the story should be considered as Urban Myth:

Prior to the emergence of the legend, the store did not have a chocolate chip cookie.
A similar story has been around since the 1940s, originally involving a red velvet cake recipe from the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the story’s focus shifted to cookies. The cookie version of the story originally was attached to Mrs. Fields cookies, causing that company eventually to post disavowals of the notices at all its stores.

Consequences

Although the story is untrue, Neiman Marcus nonetheless published the cookie recipe to quell rumors. It was perfected in 1995 by Kevin Garvin and is featured on the company’s website for free. It also is in the Neiman Marcus Cookbook (Clarkson Potter, $45) by Mr. Garvin and John Harrisson.

Neiman Marcus cookie recipe

Recipe

Ingredients

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, softened
1 cup light brown sugar
3 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 large egg
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1-3/4 cups all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1-1/2 teaspoons instant espresso coffee powder
1-1/2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Cream the butter with the sugars using an electric mixer on medium speed until fluffy (approximately 30 seconds)
2. Beat in the egg and the vanilla extract for another 30 seconds.
3. In a mixing bowl, sift together the dry ingredients and beat into the butter mixture at low speed for about 15 seconds. Stir in the espresso coffee powder and chocolate chips.
4. Using a 1 ounce scoop or a 2 tablespoon measure, drop cookie dough onto a greased cookie sheet about 3 inches apart. Gently press down on the dough with the back of a spoon to spread out into a 2 inch circle. Bake for about 20 minutes or until nicely browned around the edges. Bake a little longer for a crispier cookie.

Yield: 2 dozen cookies

Sources and Additional Information:
http://virtual.park.uga.edu/~clandrum/example_html/urban.example.html
http://www.neimanmarcus.com/store/service/nm_cookie_recipe.jhtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neiman-Marcus
http://www.howstuffworks.com/urban-legend.htm/printable

Successful Bizarre Double Suicide of Ronald Opus

2009-04-09T23:26:00.001-07:00

At the 1994 annual awards dinner given for Forensic Science, AAFS President Dr. Don Harper Mills astounded his audience with the legal complications of a bizarre death. Here is the story:

On March 23, 1994 the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald Opus and concluded that he died from a shotgun wound to the head. Mr. Opus had jumped from the top of a ten story building intending to commit suicide. He left a note to that effect indicating his despondency. As he fell past the ninth floor his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast passing through a window which killed him instantly. Neither the shooter nor the decedent was aware that a safety net had been installed just below at the eighth floor level to protect some building workers and that Ronald Opus would not have been able to complete his suicide the way he had planned.

"Ordinarily," Dr. Mills continued, "A person who sets out to commit suicide and ultimately succeeds even though the mechanism might not be what he intended" is still defined as committing suicide. That Mr. Opus was shot on the way to certain death nine stories below at street level that probably would not have been successful because of the safety net, caused the medical examiner to feel that he had a homicide on his hands.

The room on the ninth floor whence the shotgun blast emanated was occupied by an elderly man and his wife. They were arguing vigorously, and he was threatening her with a shotgun. The man was so upset that when he pulled the trigger he completely missed his wife and the pellets went through the window striking Mister Opus.

When one intends to kill subject A but kills subject B in the attempt, one is guilty of the murder of subject B. When confronted with the murder charge the old man and his wife were both adamant. They both said they thought the shotgun was unloaded. The old man said it was his long standing habit to threaten his wife with the unloaded shotgun. He had no intention to murder her. Therefore the killing of Mr. Opus appeared to be an accident; that is, the gun had been accidentally loaded.

The continuing investigation turned up a witness who saw the old couple's son loading the shotgun about six weeks prior to the fatal accident. It transpired that the old lady had cut off her son's financial support and the son, knowing the propensity of his father to use the shotgun threateningly, loaded the gun with the expectation that his father would shoot his mother. The case now becomes one of murder on the part of the son for the death of Ronald Opus.

Now comes the exquisite twist. Further investigation revealed that the son was in fact Ronald Opus. He had become increasingly despondent over the failure of his attempt to engineer his mother's murder. This led him to jump off the ten story building on March 23rd, only to be killed by a shotgun blast passing through the ninth story window. The son had actually murdered himself so the medical examiner closed the case as a suicide. Very tidy of him.

(Allegedly a true story from Associated Press, by Kurt Westervelt)

20 Strange and Funny UK Laws

2009-02-12T18:27:00.000-08:00

In 1965, the United Kingdom began to update its legal system. Over two thousand obsolete, outdated and strange laws have been repealed since then, but plenty of funny laws are still on the books today.

Below are 20 randomly chosen strange U.K. laws.

1. Dying is illegal in the Houses of Parliaments.
A law prohibiting anyone from dying while inside the Houses of Parliament has been voted as the most ridiculous law by the British citizens.

2. Put Stamps properly.
Placing a postage stamp bearing the monarch’s head upside down on an envelope is considered as act of treason.

Also, defacing or destroying anything bearing a likeness of the monarch is illegal. This includes burning paper money or tearing a stamp apart.

3. The Library Offences Act of 1898 makes it illegal to gamble in a library.
The law also prohibits obscene or abusive language. Misbehavior carries a fine of Ј200.

4. No cannons or bear-baiting.
The Metropolitan Police Act of 1839 states that no one, “except persons acting in obedience to lawful authority, may discharge any cannon or other firearm of greater caliber than a common fowling-piece, within 300 yards of any dwelling house, to the annoyance of any inhabitant thereof”.

Under the same Act, those who “keep or use or act in the management of any house, room, pit or other place for the purpose of fighting or baiting lions, bears or other animals” can be fined Ј2,500.

5. Scolding was illegal for almost 400 years.
A law passed in 1585, making it illegal for women to “cause a nuisance with abusive or argumentative language”. A woman guilty of scolding had to wear a scold’s bridle, or metal cage, enclosing her head. The Criminal Law Act of 1967 finally abolished the punishment, and women may now scold freely.

6. Trespassing is illegal, except by huers and baulkers.
An Act of 1603 comes from an ancient custom in Cornwall. People known as “huers and baulkers” would stand on the cliffs and shout to fishing boats, directing them toward schools of fish. The Act gives those on the cliffs the right of entry onto the lands of others, and a defense against trespassing.

7. The Town Police Clauses Act of 1847 threatens a Ј1,000 fine for hanging washing across the street.
Beating or shaking carpets, rugs or mats is also illegal. Doormats may be beaten, but not after eight in the morning.

This Act also outlaws the singing of profane or obscene songs or ballads, wantonly discharging firearms, making bonfires, flying kites, sliding on ice or snow, extinguishing a lamp or willfully and wantonly disturbing residents by ringing their doorbells.

8. It is illegal for two adult men to have sex in the same house as a third person.
Henry VIII outlawed homosexuality in 1533. "Molly houses" began to appear in England in the late 16th century. These brothels offered gay men a place to have sex, and also catered to sado-masochistic and transvestite tastes. Lawmakers saw molly houses as a threat to public morality. Police monitored the houses to entrap male prostitutes, especially during the 1840’s, as Victorian moral standards rose.

9. The Queen’s Corset
From a statute of 1324 called the Prerogativa Regis, any whale or sturgeon found on the United Kingdom coastline, or caught in seas adjoining the coast, must be offered to the Crown.

Traditionally, the head belongs to the King. The tail goes “to furnish the Queen’s wardrobe with whalebone” for her corsets. These days, in practice, the Natural History Museum deals with beached whales.

All wild deer, swans and bears are also the property of the royal family.

10. One may not drive a cow while drunk.
The Licensing Act of 1872 explains that operating a horse, cow or steam engine while intoxicated carries a prison sentence or a Ј200 fine.

11. London hackney carriages must carry a bale of hay and a sack of oats.
The London Hackney Carriage Laws have stayed the same for over a hundred years, and still apply to modern-day taxis. The oats and hay were for the horse, of course. Disputes still arise, and some firms have manufactured tiny bales of hay, so taxi drivers can stay within the law.

In London, it is illegal for a person with the Plague to flag down a taxi. No cab may carry corpses or rabid dogs.

12. Ancient security laws.
A lot of the laws refer to medieval wars such as the conflicts that England had with Scotland or Wales hundreds of years ago, and are to do with the fact that no foreigner during these times was ever seen in the country, so that if one were to be seen then it might mean they were invading. Here are some more bizarre laws:

In York it is perfectly legal to shoot a Scotsman with a crossbow upon seeing one, except for on Sundays. However any Scotsman caught drunk or with a weapon can still be shot on a Sunday, except with a bow and arrow.

Similarly in Chester it is legal to shoot a Welsh person with a crossbow, as long as it is within the city walls and is done after midnight.

In Chester, Welsh people aren’t allowed to enter the city grounds before sunrise and from staying after sunset.

13. Some kind laws towards women.
In London it has been illegal for a man to hit his wife after 9pm. Indeed, wife also needs some time for rest. This law is very humanistic.

By law it is legal for a pregnant woman to relieve herself anywhere she wishes.

14. The eating of Mince pies on Christmas day is illegal.
It was once also illegal to celebrate Christmas altogether because it wasn’t considered puritan enough even though it was a religious celebration.

15. Do not pretend you are older than you are.
It is illegal to impersonate old age pensioners in the London area of Chelsea.

16. Your pet should behave as well.
It is an executable offense to allow your pet to mate with a pet of the royal house without permission.

17. It is illegal to leave your car keys in an unoccupied vehicle.

18. Suicide is a capital crime.

19. It is illegal to either shave, work or to mow your lawn on a Sunday.

20. Tarot card readings and fortune telling are illegal as these are classed as forms of witchcraft.

Additional Reading:
http://www.wayodd.com/uk-votes-for-most-ludicrous-laws/v/8426/
http://www.purpleslinky.com/Trivia/Random/Strange-Laws-in-the-UK.135594
http://www.helium.com/items/732255-strange-and-funny-laws-in-the-great-brittain-area

Strange and Funny United States Laws

2009-02-02T01:00:00.000-08:00

The United States is a country with well developed legal system. However, you still can find some strange and funny laws that has some meaning long ago in the historical perspectives, but they never been changed by state lawmakers.

Console yourself with these real standing laws from around the United States of America that nobody pays attention to either.

USA Funny Maps

Alabama:
1. It is illegal for a driver to be blindfolded while operating a vehicle.
2. You may not drive barefooted.
3. Dominoes may not be played on Sunday.
4. It is illegal to wear a fake moustache that causes laughter in church.
5. You may not have an ice cream cone in your back pocket at any time.

Alaska:

1. While it is legal to shoot bears, waking a sleeping bear for the purpose of taking a photograph is prohibited.
2. It is considered an offense to push a live moose out of a moving airplane.

Arizona:

1. Any misdemeanor committed while wearing a red mask is considered a felony.
2. Donkeys cannot sleep in bathtubs.
3. When being attacked by a criminal or burglar, you may only protect yourself with the same weapon that the other person possesses.
4. It is unlawful to refuse a person a glass of water.

Arkansas:

1. A man can legally beat his wife, but not more than once a month.
2. Oral sex is considered to be sodomy.
3. Alligators may not be kept in bathtubs.

California:

1. Community leaders passed an ordinance that makes it illegal for anyone to try and stop a child from playfully jumping over puddles of water.
2. Women may not drive in a house coat.
3. No vehicle without a driver may exceed 60 miles per hour.

Colorado:

1. It is illegal to ride a horse while under the influence.
2. Tags may be ripped off of pillows and mattresses.

Connecticut:
1. You can be stopped by the police for biking over 65 miles per hour.
2. You are not allowed to walk across a street on your hands.
3. It is illegal to dispose of used razor blades.

Florida:

1. Women may be fined for falling asleep under a hair dryer, as can the salon owner.
2. A special law prohibits unmarried women from parachuting on Sunday or she shall risk arrest, fine, and/or jailing.
3. If an elephant is left tied to a parking meter, the parking fee has to be paid just as it would for a vehicle.
4. One may not commit any “unnatural acts” with another person.
5. Men may not be seen publicly in any kind of strapless gown.
6. It is illegal to sell your children.
7. It is illegal to sing in a public place while attired in a swimsuit.
8. When having sex, only the missionary position is legal.
9. You may not fart in a public place after 6 PM.
10. Oral sex is illegal.
11. You may not kiss your wife’s breasts.

Georgia:

1. All sex toys are banned.
2. No one may carry an ice cream cone in their back pocket if it is Sunday.

Hawaii:

1. All residents may be fined as a result of not owning a boat.
2. Coins are not allowed to be placed in one’s ears.

Idaho:

1. Riding a merry-go-round on Sundays is considered a crime.

Illinois:
1. It is illegal for anyone to give lighted cigars to dogs, cats, and other domesticated animal kept as pets.
2. You must contact the police before entering the city in an automobile.

Indiana:

1. Bathing is prohibited during the winter.
2. Citizens are not allowed to attend a movie house or theater nor ride in a public streetcar within at least four hours after eating garlic.
3. Anyone 14 or older who profanely curses, damns or swears by the name of God, Jesus Christ or the Holy Ghost, shall be fined one to three dollars for each offense, with a maximum fine of ten dollars per day.
4. A three dollar fine per pack will be imposed on anyone playing cards in Indiana under the Act for the Prevention of Gaming.
5. Oral sex is illegal.
6. A man over the age of 18 may be arrested for statutory rape if the passenger in his car is not wearing her socks and shoes, and is under the age of 17.

Iowa:
1. Kisses may last for as much as, but no more than, five minutes.
2. A man with a moustache may never kiss a woman in public.
3. One-armed piano players must perform for free.

Kansas:

1. No one may catch fish with his bare hands.

Kentucky:
1. By law, anyone who has been drinking is "sober" until he or she "cannot hold onto the ground."
2. It is illegal to transport an ice cream cone in your pocket.
3. It is illegal to fish with a bow and arrow in Kentucky.
4. No female shall appear in a bathing suit on any highway within this state unless she be escorted by at least two officers.

Louisiana:
1. It is illegal to rob a bank and then shoot at the bank teller with a water pistol.
2. Biting someone with your natural teeth is "simple assault," while biting someone with your false teeth is "aggravated assault."
3. Persons could land in jail for up to ten years for stealing an alligator.
4. One could land in jail for up to a year for making a false promise.

Maine:

1. You may not step out of a plane in flight.
2. After January 14th you will be charged a fine for having your Christmas decorations still up.

Massachusetts:
1. Mourners at a wake may not eat more than three sandwiches.
2. Snoring is prohibited unless all bedroom windows are closed and securely locked.
3. An old ordinance declares goatees illegal unless you first pay a special license fee for the privilege of wearing one in public.
4. Shooting ranges may not set up targets that resemble human beings.
5. Taxi drivers are prohibited from making love in the front seat of their taxi during their shifts.
6. It is illegal to go to bed without first having a full bath.
7. A woman can not be on top in sexual activities.

Michigan:

1. No man may seduce and corrupt an unmarried girl, or else he risks five years in prison.
2. A woman isn’t allowed to cut her own hair without her husband’s permission.

Minnesota:

1. It is illegal to stand around any building without a good reason to be there.
2. It is illegal to sleep naked.
3. Oral sex is prohibited.
4. It is illegal for any man to have sexual intercourse with a live fish.

Mississippi:

1. If one is a parent to two illegitimate children, that person will go to jail for at least one month.
2. It is illegal to teach others what polygamy is.
3. A man may not seduce a woman by lying, and claiming he will marry her.
4. Adultery or Fornication (living togeather while not married or having sex with someone that is not your spouse) results in a fine of $500 and/or 6 months in prison.
5. Unnatural intercourse, if both parties voluntarily participate, results in a maximum sentence of 10 years and $10,000.

Missouri:

1. It is illegal to have oral sex.
2. It is not illegal to speed.

Montana:

1. One may not pretend to abuse an animal in the presence of a minor.
2. It is a felony for a wife to open her husband’s mail.
3. In Montana, it is illegal for married women to go fishing alone on Sundays, and illegal for unmarried women to fish alone at all.
4. It is illegal for a man and a woman to have sex in any other position other than missionary style.

Nebraska:

1. Persons with gonorrhea may not marry.
2. It is illegal for a mother to give her daughter a perm without a state license.

Nevada:

1. It’s still “legal” to hang someone for shooting your dog on your property.

New Hampshire:

1. You cannot sell the clothes you are wearing to pay off a gambling debt.
2. You may not tap your feet, nod your head, or in any way keep time to the music in a tavern, restaurant, or cafe.

New Jersey:

1. It is illegal to wear a bullet-proof vest while committing a murder.
2. One must yield a phone line to a person if it is an emergency.
3. All motorists must honk before passing another car, bicyclist, skater, and even a skateboarder.
4. It is against the law for a man to knit during the fishing season.
5. It is illegal to delay or detain a homing pigeon.

New York:

1. Women may go topless in public, providing it is not being used as a business.
2. Citizens may not greet each other by “putting one’s thumb to the nose and wiggling the fingers”.
3. The penalty for jumping off a building is death.
4. While riding in an elevator, one must talk to no one, and fold his hands while looking toward the door.

North Carolina:

1. Elephants may not be used to plow cotton fields.
2. While having sex, you must stay in the missionary position and have the shades pulled.
3. If a man and a woman who aren’t married go to a hotel/motel and register themselves as married then, according to state law, they are legally married.
4. It is illegal to have sex in a churchyard.
5. Oral sex is considered a crime against nature.
6. A marriage can be declared void if either of the two persons is physically impotent.
7. Persons in possession of illegal substances must pay taxes on them.

North Dakota:

1. It is illegal to lie down and fall asleep with your shoes on.

Ohio:

1. It is illegal to get a fish drunk.
2. Breast feeding is not allowed in public.
3. It is illegal for more than five women to live in a house.
4. No one may be arrested on Sunday or on the Fourth of July.

Oklahoma:

1. It is illegal for the owner of a bar to allow anyone inside to pretend to have sex with a buffalo.
2. Females are forbidden from doing their own hair without being licensed by the state.
3. Oklahoma will not tolerate anyone taking a bite out of another’s hamburger.
4. People who make “ugly faces” at dogs may be fined and/or jailed.
5. Oral sex is a misdemeanor and is punishable by one year in jail and a $2,500 fine.
6. Anyone arrested for soliciting a hooker must have their name and picture shown on television.
7. It is illegal to wear your boots to bed.
8. It is illegal to have sex before you are married.

Oregon:

1. It is illegal to place a container filled with human fecal matter on the side of any highway.
2. It is illegal to whisper “dirty” things in your lover’s ear during sex.
3. Ice cream may not be eaten on Sundays.
4. Canned corn is not to be used as bait for fishing.

Pennsylvania:

1. It is illegal to have over 16 women live in a house together because that constitutes a brothel.
2. Any motorist driving along a country road at night must stop every mile and send up a rocket signal, wait 10 minutes for the road to be cleared of livestock, and continue.
3. A special cleaning ordinance bans housewives from hiding dirt and dust under a rug in a dwelling.
4. You may not sing in the bathtub.
5. Any motorist who sights a team of horses coming toward him must pull well off the road, cover his car with a blanket or canvas that blends with the countryside, and let the horses pass.
6. You may not catch a fish by any body part except the mouth.

Rhode Island:

1. No one may bite off another’s leg.
2. Any marriage where either of the parties is an idiot or lunatic is null and void.
3. One must make a loud noise before passing a car on the left.

South Carolina:

1. By law, if a man promises to marry an unmarried woman, the marriage must take place.
2. Fortune tellers are required to obtain a special permit from the state.
3. No work may be done on Sunday.
4. It is considered an offense to get a tattoo.
5. Horses may not be kept in bathtubs.
6. It is perfectly legal to beat your wife on the court steps on Sundays.
7. It is a capital offense to inadvertently kill someone while attempting suicide.
8. A person must be eighteen years old to play a pinball machine.

South Dakota:

1. Movies that show police officers being struck, beaten, or treated in an offensive manner are forbidden.
2. If there are more than 5 Native Americans on your property you may shoot them.

Tennessee:

1. It is illegal to use a lasso to catch a fish.
2. More than 8 women may not live in the same house because that would constitute a brothel.
3. Stealing a horse is punishable by hanging.
4. No Christian parent may require their children to pick up trash from the highway on Easter day.
5. Driving is not to be done while asleep.
6. Interracial marriages are illegal.
7. Skunks may not be carried into the state.

Texas:

1. It is illegal to take more than three sips of beer at a time while standing.
2. It is illegal to milk another person’s cow.
3. A recently passed anticrime law requires criminals to give their victims 24 hours notice, either orally or in writing, and to explain the nature of the crime to be committed.
4. Homosexual behavior is a misdemeanor offense.
5. The entire Encyclopedia Britannica is banned in Texas because it contains a formula for making beer at home.

Utah:

1. It is illegal not to drink milk.
2. It is illegal to detonate any nuclear weapon.
3. A husband is responsible for every criminal act committed by his wife while she is in his presence.
4. No one may have sex in the back of an ambulance if it is responding to an emergency call.

Vermont:

1. Women must obtain written permission from their husbands to wear false teeth.
2. It is illegal to deny the existence of God.

Virginia:

1. Not only is it illegal to have sex with the lights on, one may not have sex in any position other than missionary.
2. If one is not married, it is illegal for him to have sexual relations.
3. You may not have oral or anal sex.
4. It is illegal to tickle women.

Washington:

1. No person may walk about in public if he or she has the common cold.
2. All lollipops are banned.
3. A law to reduce crime states: “It is mandatory for a motorist with criminal intentions to stop at the city limits and telephone the chief of police as he is entering the town.
4. It is illegal to pretend that one’s parents are rich.

West Virginia:

1. Unmarried couple who live together and “lewdly associate” with one another may face up to a year in prison.
2. It is legal for a male to have sex with an animal as long as it does not exceed 40 lbs.
3. If you wear a hat inside a theater, you may be fined.

Wisconsin:

1. The state definition of rape stated that it was a man having sex with a woman he knows not to be his wife.
2. It is illegal to kiss on a train.
3. It is illegal to cut a woman’s hair.

Wyoming:

1. It is illegal for women to stand within five feet of a bar while drinking.
2. You may not take a picture of a rabbit from January to April without an official permit.
3. Skiing under the influence of alcohol is prohibited.

Sources and Additional Information:

http://people.bu.edu/wwildman/WeirdWildWeb/jokes_truth.htm
http://www.dumblaws.com/laws/united-states/
http://www.lectlaw.com/files/fun23.htm
http://www.ahajokes.com/strlaw.html

Plants as Mines Detectors

2009-01-26T20:56:00.000-08:00

When I told the story to my friend, who is a respected scientist, his reaction was “Yeh! Right!’, so I decided that it fits the category of the true amazing stories and facts.

The landmine is one of the most insidious devices ever created by human hands. There are more than 100 million landmines buried and active in the world today. Another 100 million are stockpiled and ten million are produced annually. More than a million people have been killed or maimed by landmines since 1975. Half of all adults who stand on a mine die before they reach hospital. Children, being smaller, are more likely to die from their injuries, though there are still more than 300,000 children alive who have been severely disabled by landmines.

Clearing mines is a dangerous and very costly job. Mines can cost as little as $3 to produce yet the necessary care involved in clearing a landmine costs more than US$2000 a mine. Even then, one accident occurs for every 1800-2000 mines cleared. For every one hour spent in laying mines, over 100 hours are spent de-mining to remove the same number of mines. If we stopped laying mines NOW and continued clearing at current rates, the world would be free of mines in the year 3100. One estimate of the cost of clearing the world’ landmines is US$33 Billion. Unfortunately, mines are being laid 25 times faster than they are being cleared.

A Danish biotech company has developed a genetically modified flower that could help detect land mines and it hopes to have a prototype ready for use within a few years.

"We are really excited about this, even though it’s early days. It has considerable potential," Simon Oestergaard, chief executive of developing company Aresa Biodetection, told Reuters.

The genetically modified weed has been coded to change color when its roots come in contact with nitrogen-dioxide (NO2) evaporating from explosives buried in soil.

Within three to six weeks from being sowed over land mine infested areas the small plant, a Thale Cress, will turn a warning red whenever close to a land mine.

Images below show how the underground mine is clearly marked with the surface plants.

Thale Cress

Sources and Additional Reading:
http://home.golden.net/~dhobson/gardnews.html
http://www.gizmag.com/go/2568/
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/03/08/landmines.plant/index.html
http://popularlogistics.com/2007/09/13/land-mine-detection-via-plants-from-goodmagazinecom/

Did you get already fat check from Microsoft?

2009-01-23T12:48:00.000-08:00

SUMMARY: Sorry, folks. Microsoft and AOL have not merged, they’re not conducting an email beta test, nor has Bill Gates decided to share his hard-earned fortune with people who forward silly chain letters.

Description: Email hoax
Circulating since: Sep. 1999 (this version)
Status: False
Source: http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blmsaol.htm

Bill Gates

Example #1:

Subject: FW: Microsoft and AOL merger
Date: Fri, 24 Sep 1999

I’m forwarding a forwarded message...read on, it works you may get $$ from Microsoft. Certainly Bill has enough to share-maybe today we’ll be blessed financially!

I am forwarding this because the person who sent it to me is a good friend and does not send me junk. Microsoft and AOL are now the largest Internet company and in an effort make sure that Internet explorer remains the most widely used program, Microsoft and AOL are running an e-mail beta test. When you forward this e-mail to friends, Microsoft can and will track it (if you are a Microsoft Windows user) for a two week time period. For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay you $5.00, for every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $3.00 and for every third person that receives it, you will be paid $1.00. Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a check. I thought this was a scam myself, but two weeks after receiving this e-mail and forwarding it on, Microsoft contacted me for my e-mail and within days, I received a check for $800.00.

Example #2:

Sent: Friday, September 24, 1999 1:33 PM
Subject: Microsoft and AOL merger.

I am forwarding this because the person who sent it to me is a good friend and does not send me junk. Microsoft and AOL are now the largest Internet company and in an effort make sure that Internet explorer remains the most widely used program, Microsoft and AOL are running an e-mail beta test. When you forward this e-mail to friends, Microsoft can and will track it (if you are a Microsoft Windows user) for a two week time period. For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay you $245.00, for every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $243.00 and for every third person that receives it, you will be paid $241.00. Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a check. I thought this was a scam myself, but two weeks after receiving this e-mail and forwarding it on, Microsoft contacted me for my e-mail and within days, I received a check for $24800.00.

Example #3:

Sent: February 11, 2002 10:24 AM
Subject: Fw: THIS IS NOT JUNK LETTER. BILL GATES IS SHARING HIS FORTUNE.

Dear Friends,

Please do not take this for a junk letter. Bill Gates is sharing his fortune. If you ignore this you will repent later. Microsoft and AOL are now the largest Internet companies and in an effort to make sure that Internet Explorer remains the most widely used program, Microsoft and AOL are running an e-mail beta test.

When you forward this e-mail to friends, Microsoft can and will track it (if you are a Microsoft Windows user) for a two week time period. For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay you $245.00, for every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $243.00 and for every third person that receives it, you will be paid $241.00. Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a cheque.

Regards. Chinu! I thought this was a scam myself, but two weeks after receiving this e-mail and forwarding it on, Microsoft contacted me for my address and within days, I received a cheque for US$24,800.00. You need to respond before the beta testing is over. If anyone can afford this Bill Gates is the man. It’s all marketing expense to him. Please forward this to as many people as possible. You are bound to get at least US$10,000.00.

Comments: This is a hoax, and a recycled one at that. Bill Gates isn’t sharing his fortune with random folks who habitually forward Internet chain letters. No merger between Microsoft and AOL has been announced -- indeed, it’s hard to imagine an unlikelier event. Two of Microsoft’s biggest competitors, America Online and Netscape, merged in 1998, making AOL Microsoft’s main rival. Trust me, if these two behemoths were to merge, you’d have seen it in the headlines a thousand times over.

Moreover, Microsoft cannot track the chain letters you forward, nor will Bill Gates pay you for replicating this insipid message. Why on earth would he?

Official statement from Microsoft:

REDMOND, Wash., May 12, 1999 - Recently an email has been circulating on the Internet about a new "email tracking system" from Microsoft.

As you may have suspected, this is a hoax and did not originate from Microsoft.

Microsoft does try to investigate the source of these hoaxes and take appropriate action. However, many times the hoaxers take elaborate steps to shield their true identities and we cannot identify them. Privacy and security are very important to us here at Microsoft, and we work every day to build great software for the Internet that keeps information safe, secure and private.

We regret any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Bill Gates

Official statement from Bill Gates:

Even more annoying than spam, in some respects, are hoaxes. I’m acutely aware of this because my name was recently attached to a hoax email message that was widely distributed.

People embellished the fraudulent email over time, as it was forwarded from electronic mailbox to electronic mailbox, but an early version read this way:

"My name is Bill Gates. I have just written up an e-mail tracing program that traces everyone to whom this message is forwarded to. I am experimenting with this and I need your help. Forward this to everyone you know and if it reaches 1000 people everyone on the list will receive $1000 at my expense. Enjoy. Your friend, Bill Gates."

The bogus message was widely forwarded, which surely led to some disappointment from people who hoped to receive $1,000 for passing along what was essentially a chain letter.

-- From "On Spam: Wasting Time on the Internet," published in 1998

Hoaxes Classification

2008-09-29T14:13:00.000-07:00

To apply structural approach to the topic investigation, we should offer some kind of the classification to the hoaxes according to the well-defined characteristics. It can be done from the different perspectives: in terms of the geographical spread, time, or character of hoax distribution. We are offering the thematic hoaxes categories presented below.

Categories of Hoaxes:

April’s Fool Day Hoaxes

This category includes famous April’s Fool Day Hoaxes throughout the history, many of those have already became classic. Some of them are so successful, that they are coming back round after round in different places.

Music Hoaxes

This category reviews all the hoaxes, related to music and musicians.

Political Hoaxes

The history of world politics is full with lies and hoaxes. Not many of them become the public knowledge, even over the time.

Military Hoaxes

The category represents the hoaxes and tricks of the miliatry and military intelligence in its efforts to let enemy forces (or any other group of people) believe in something that is not true.

Literary Hoaxes

This category represents the literature related Hoaxes and Jokes, like the famous authors impersonation.

Medical Hoaxes

This category collects the medicine related Hoaxes, which usually not directed to profit from fraud (otherwise, they would be called medical fraud scams), but rather popular jokes, urbam myths, and popular misconceptions.

Practical Jokes

A practical joke or prank is a stunt or trick to purposely make someone feel foolish or victimized, usually for humor.

Urban Myths

This category contains interesting modern legends as warnings and stories about bad things happening to people and animals that never really happened. These are the poodle in the microwave and needles in movie theater seats variety.

True Legends

This group includes real stories and messages that are not hoaxes, and look like hoaxes, and they are still making round after round in the media.

MIT campus cruiser on the great dome

2009-01-19T12:55:00.000-08:00

MIT Students are famous for their practical jokes, which they call hacks. A particularly well-known practical joke, or hack, at MIT resulted in the appearance of a campus police cruiser on top of their "Great Dome" building 10 on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Campus.

MIT Practical Jokes

In May of 1994, inspired hackers created what might just become one of the most famous Dome hacks of all time, by placing what appeared to be a real MIT Campus Police cruiser on top of the dome, complete with flashing lights. It was complete with a dummy police officer, a toy foam disc gun, and a box of donuts inside of the makeshift vehicle as well as flashing siren lights on top. The car, numbered ``pi,’’ also sported a pair of fuzzy dice, the license number ``IHTFP,’’ an MIT Campus Police parking ticket (``no permit for this location’’), and a yellow diamond-shaped sign on the back window proclaiming ``I break for donuts.’’ Every detail was considered on this practical joke proving why MIT is such a difficult school to be accepted to.

The car turned out to be the outer metal parts of a Chevrolet Cavalier attached to a multi-piece wooden frame, all carefully assembled on the roof over the course of one night. People first began noticing the hack early in the morning, just before sunrise, when passers by spotted the flashing lights on top of the building. Local people, reporters, and camera crews began to gather around 8, smiling, talking, taking pictures, and just generally watching as MIT Physical Plant began the slow dismantling of the car. Several helicopters even came to look, circling close around the Great Dome.

MIT Practical Jokes

It took campus authorities a few hours to disassemble the makeshift campus cruiser and remove it from the Great Done. It was finally gone by 10:00 AM, but the legend of this famous MIT Hack lives on! Not only did the local TV stations air footage of the car --- some of which later wound up on national news --- but the AP story (available on the Web to MIT people via Athena) spread to newspapers around the globe, from California to Korea and even Israel.

Sources and Additional Reading:

http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/1994/cp_car/
http://tech.mit.edu/Bulletins/hack.html
http://www.practicaljokeinstitute.com/FamousPranks/MITCampusCruiserontheDome.htm