My New Years' resolution was to start posting regularly again here, since it makes me feel sad and guilty when I neglect the hoax museum. It's just too easy, when other things demand my attention, to fail to look after the site, given that there's no boss (except my conscience) to tell me to get back to work.

Now I didn't post any updates for the first 24 days of the year, so it may seem like I already broke my resolution. But not quite. I took the time to give the Hoax Archive a big makeover, which was sorely needed, though it turned out to be a lot more work than I had anticipated. Since the Hoax Archive was the original core of the site... how this all got started and out of which emerged the book version of the Museum of Hoaxes... I have a strong, sentimental attraction to it and hated seeing it grow increasingly disorganized. Also, since I recently reacquired the full rights to the Museum of Hoaxes book, I can now legally have everything in the book up on the site.

My goal was to make the Archive look more like galleries that could easily be browsed, and less like a blog. So people can now click through the time periods, from the middle ages to the present, and get a quick visual sense of the character of each period. It's also now much easier to quickly find a hoax, if you know roughly when it occurred. Check it out and let me know what you think.

And now (hopefully) back to regular blogging! (Yeah, I say this every time I resume blogging after a long break, and each time I mean it. With any luck, this'll be the time I stick to my commitment.)

Rust Spot Jesus
Spotted by Marcy Marksberry on top of her farm's corn silo. She says, "I just kinda veered my head to it and I saw it and it was there. It was weird." [myfoxdc.com]



Cloud Jesus
Filmed in the sky above Egypt (by someone incapable of holding the camera steady). [allnewsweb.com]



Angels Above Swiss Lake
Captured by Google Street view. [gawker.com]



Cookie Monster Crater on Mars
Or, as NASA explains, "the superposition of younger craters on older craters (in this case two smaller craters upon the rim of an older crater)." [nasa.gov]

Recently the "202 Market" bar in Roanoke, VA advertised that it was going to be hosting the famous Chippendales dancers. But soon it had to retract its announcement and admit that it had fallen victim to a scam. It had been deceived by a group of frauds posing as the Chippendales — Chippenfakes, you might call them. [roanoke.com]

Apparently the Roanoke bar isn't alone in falling for this scam. Kevin Denberg, manager of the real Chippendales, warns that there are a number of fraudulent groups trying to pass themselves off as the Chippendales. The official Chippendales website even has a form that allows fans to report any fakes.

What I find interesting is that if a bar books one of these Chippenfakes, a group of men actually does show up and perform. Denberg insists that they are a "subpar product" when compared to the real deal, but you have to wonder how bad are they? Really bad? Or would most people not notice the difference?


Denberg also reveals that these imposters are usually the same handful of individuals. So perhaps it's a group of ex-Chippendales dancers gone rogue. Or a group of bitter men who tried out for the Chippendales but didn't make the cut.

The good news for Chippendales fans in Roanoke is that the real ones have agreed to stage a performance there in December. The scheduled date is 12/12/12, which, coincidentally, is the day the world ends. So it should be quite a show.

The Nigerian Nation reports that a woman gave birth to a horse during a service at the World Liberation Ministry in Edo State:


Assuming that the story is true — to the extent that a horse fetus really did emerge (or appear to emerge) from a woman during the church service — then we have to assume the incident was faked. That is, a horse fetus didn't really grow inside the woman's womb, because that would be impossible.

So what we have is a modern-day version of Mary Toft, the Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (back in 1726).

Mary faked giving birth to rabbits in the hope of receiving a pension from the King. But why this Nigerian woman has faked giving birth to a horse is not yet known. Perhaps she's trying to help the World Ministry Church acquire a reputation for miracles.

Kenya's Daily Nation newspaper reports that Mzee Julius Wanyondu is having trouble getting coverage under the National Hospital Insurance Fund. The reason is that he's 128 years old, having been born in 1884. However, the NHIF's computers will only accept birthdates later than 1890.

Remarkably, the article doesn't address the obvious question: Does this guy have any proof that he's really 128? He has some kind of ID card that displays 1884 as his birthdate. But what evidence did he present to get this card?

The article says that Mzee Wanyondu has a son who's 70. Based on that, I'd say it's likely that he's in his 90s. Or maybe slightly over 100. 128? No way.

For 100 years, a package marked "May Be Opened in 2012" has been sitting in a museum in Otta, Norway. It was given to the town of Otta by a local resident, Johan Nygaard, back in 1912. There's been enormous speculation about what the package might contain. Money? A diary? Stock certificates?



Finally, last Friday, the 100-year-mark arrived, and the town gathered to open the package. There was a live video feed, so the entire world could share in the excitement. The mayor carefully opened the package, peeked inside... and it turned to contain: "not-too-valuable notebooks, newspaper clippings, community council papers, a letter, small drawing and other bits of paper." In other words, nothing of any value. [time.com].

Some of the newspapers were dated 1914 and 1919, which means someone must have opened the package after 1912 to put them in there. Perhaps they removed whatever was in there and inserted junk in its place.

The affair reminds me the bequest of Francis Douce. When he died in 1834, Douce, who was a wealthy collector, willed a box to the British Museum with instructions that it be opened on January 1, 1900 — in 66 years. The British Museum did wait, as instructed, but when they finally opened the box, it contained nothing but a bunch of worthless papers. According to rumor, there was also a note from Douce in the box explaining that he thought it would be a waste to leave anything of greater value to the philistines at the British Museum.

I wonder if Nygaard had heard of Douce's bequest? He might have read about it in 1900 and decided to do something similar. Probably not. But it's a possibility.

Virginia news station WSLS 10 recently ran a 'myth buster' segment on whether putting a bar of soap between your sheets can ease nighttime leg and foot cramps. To my surprise, they concluded that, yes, a bar of soap does seem to help some people, even though there is "no scientific evidence" for why this would work.


Just to clarify, the claim is that merely having a bar of soap near your muscles at night can stop them from cramping. The brand of soap doesn't seem to matter much, though some people express individual preferences. (Irish Spring is a favorite.) The soap should also be in close proximity to the cramping muscle. Some people say that if cramping starts, they simply adjust their position so that the soap is making contact with the muscle, and the cramping and pain stops.


To say that there's "no scientific evidence" for this claim seems like an understatement. The idea sounds totally absurd. However, a quick google search reveals a large number of people who, despite initial skepticism, now swear by the method. Even Snopes lists the claim as 'undetermined'. So what could be going on here? Could soap actually have muscle-calming properties?

The most obvious theory is that the cramp relief is simply a placebo effect. People believe that it'll work, so it does. But it seems premature to dismiss the phenomenon in this way. Perhaps there is some strange bio-chemical effect at work.

Unfortunately, there's been very little scientific investigation of the soap phenomenon. The one relevant study I could find was published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. Dr. Yon Doo Ough (of Beloit Memorial Hospital in Wisconsin) and colleagues investigated whether soap-scented skin patches could ease menstrual cramps. Their study was directly inspired by soap's use in preventing nocturnal leg cramps. They theorized that it was the smell of the soap, not the soap itself, that was having the antispasmodic effect. So they applied soap-scented oil to skin patches and tested them on women with a history of severe menstrual cramps. The women reported that the patches did help.

The researchers might be on to something with their scent theory. A few years ago, over at Weird Universe, I posted about a study published in the journal Clinical Neurology and Neurosurgery that looked at whether stinky shoe smell could be an effective treatment for epilepsy. For centuries, it's been part of folk medical practice in India to arrest epileptic seizures by forcing the person having the seizure to smell stinky shoes. The researchers concluded, to their surprise, that the technique worked. They wrote, "strong olfaction applied in the form of 'shoe-smell' did definitely play a suppressive role and thus exerted an inhibitory influence on epilepsy."

If a strong smell can suppress an epileptic seizure, perhaps it can also suppress the perception of pain and cramps. The brain works in mysterious ways. It would be interesting to test whether sleeping with a stinky shoe also eases cramps. In fact, will any strong smell have the same effect?

So until a better theory comes along, I'm willing to accept the possibility that soap between the sheets might ease cramps — perhaps because the smell somehow tricks the brain into ignoring the pain and suppressing the cramping response. Though the mystery is why applying the soap directly to the muscle seems to help. Would it be equally efficacious to put the soap directly to your nose?

As the WSLS myth-buster segment pointed out, the technique is cheap and harmless. So if you suffer from nocturnal leg cramps, I guess it's worth a try. There's nothing to lose. Though, inevitably, there are people trying to make a buck off this home remedy. Last year, one guy filed a patent for a pain-relief "soap cushion" (depicted below) that has compartments into which pieces of hard soap can be inserted. Is that really patentable?

Gullibility sometimes increases as people grow old. For which reason, the elderly are victims of financial scams in disproportionately high numbers. New research, published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, has now linked this age-related gullibility to deterioration of a specific area in the brain — the vmPFC (ventromedial prefrontal cortex).


The researchers showed a series of ads to 18 patients with damage to the vmPFC. Some of the ads were deceptive (and contained clues to that effect). For instance, one ad for a (fictitious) product named NatureCure described a 'natural' pain reliever that supposedly provided headache relief "without the side effects of over-the-counter pain relievers." But a disclaimer at the bottom of the ad noted, "This product can cause nausea in some consumers when taken regularly."

The patients with damage to the vmPFC proved twice as likely to believe the deceptive ads, compared to a control group of people who had damage to other parts of their brain and a group with no brain damage.

At the end of their article, the researchers point out an interesting implication of their study — that skepticism and doubt require far more mental work than belief:


The article doesn't discuss the legal implications of the study, but I wonder if it might be helpful in cases where courts need to determine whether someone is no longer competent to manage their own affairs. For instance, middle-aged children often become worried about their elderly parents falling prey to scammers, and so they try to acquire guardianship over them. However, current legal tests of mental competence tend to focus on things such as arithmetic skills, not gullibility. So a test that could demonstrate deterioration of the vmPFC might have relevance in objectively assessing if guardianship is necessary.

A Lausanne-based researcher, Pedro Pinto, has developed an algorithm that can quickly trace rumors back to their original source. From eurekalert.org:


I wonder if this algorithm will finally confirm what's long been suspected — that the folks at Snopes have been the ones all along starting the internet rumors.

Indian newspapers are reporting the exposure of a major scam involving emu farming. Thousands of people were promised that in return for a modest investment in an emu farm, they soon would be earning thousands of rupees every month. They were led to believe this on the basis of the supposedly massive demand for emu meat and emu-oil cosmetics. The scam was exposed when investors realized that their monthly payments were failing to materialize. [thehindu.com, indiatimes.com]