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The Hoax Museum Blog
Examining dubious claims and mischief of all kinds.
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A picture (top) has been doing the rounds showing Piper Palin, Gov. Palin's six-year-old daughter, apparently giving a boy the finger. Yes, it's a hoax. In the original (bottom), which can be found on the Alaska state website, it's clear that Piper has two fingers raised.




Recently the Delray Beach Public Library arranged an exhibition of photographs taken by 71-year-old Milt Goldstein. The pictures were taken immediately following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and showed rescue workers searching for victims. Goldstein told anyone willing to listen how he had gained access to ground zero by buying an NYPD hat and jacket from a vendor on Canal Street. Goldstein was offering to sell individual pictures for prices ranging from $200 to $350.

But it turned out that the pictures hadn't been taken by Goldstein. He had simply collected them together from sources such as the Associated Press, the military, and other government agencies. When Goldstein's hoax was exposed, the library cancelled the exhibition.

But it seems the news didn't reach Atlantic Ave magazine in time, which features an article by Milt Goldstein in its current issue. (pdf link to the magazine.) In the article, Goldstein writes:


What he should have said was, "it is only recently that I downloaded the pictures from the internet..."

The thumbnail shows Goldstein posing with "his" pictures.
What I've added during the past week to the Hoax Photo Database:

U.S. Army Releases Doctored Photographs
Bob Owen of the San Antonio Express-News noticed that these two photos released by the U.S. Army of soldiers recently killed in Iraq were almost identical, except for the soldiers' face, name, and rank.

Oswald's Backyard Photo
This photo of Lee Harvey Oswald posing with a rifle in his backyard is one of the most hotly debated photos in history. Conspiracy theorists continue to argue that it's fake, though government photo experts insist it's real. I agree with the government experts, but whatever the case, the photo definitely was retouched by newspapers upon initial publication.

Giant Human Skeleton
This image of the "skeletal remains of a human of phenomenal size," supposedly unearthed in Saudi Arabia, has been circulating online since 2004.

Francis Hetling's Victorian Waifs
In 1974 London's National Portrait Gallery exhibited photographs of Victorian waifs supposedly taken during the 1840s by a previously unknown photographer, Francis Hetling. Four years later the photos were revealed to be a hoax created by the artist Graham Ovenden.
This is obviously fake. For a start, the smoothness of the arms don't match the age of the face. And then there's the more obvious clue. Still, I thought it was amusing.

I think it first appeared a month ago on the b3ta message boards.


I've been a bit lazy about posting on the blog for the past few days, but that doesn't mean I haven't been working on the site! I've actually been adding lots of content to the Hoax Photo Database. Here are a few of the photos I've added recently:

The Vanishing Belly Button
Back in 1964 the LA Times ran an ad for Scandinavian Airlines showing a blonde model posing on top of a rock. Strangely, the Times felt the need to remove the model's belly button... because a belly button might have been too provocative for its readers!

Dickens in America
Back in 1867 the Mathew Brady studio in New York produced this doctored image of Charles Dickens. We'd call this photoshopping today, but back then everything had to be done in a darkroom. It's a good example of image doctoring from early in the history of photography.

The Peppered Moth
H.B.D. Kettlewell's photos of (dead) moths on trees are probably the most famous example of scientific photo fakery.

Bloody Sunday, 1905
For decades this image was included in Soviet textbooks, where it was described as an actual photo of the "Bloody Sunday" massacre that occurred in St. Petersburg, 1905, when the police opened fire on workers marching toward the Tsar's Winter Palace. In reality, the photo was a still from a 1925 movie.
The Telegraph recently came out with a list of "20 memorable picture fakes." And the Museum of Hoaxes is listed as one of the sources they used to do their research... along with a few of the other usual suspects.

It strikes me as a bit of a random list. They leave out some classics, such as the Surgeon's Photo (which I would think would be in the top 10 or 20 on any list of famous picture fakes) as well as National Geographic's cover on which they moved the pyramids, but they include photos that I wouldn't think would make the top 200 let alone top 20, such as "Karl Rove's secret file" and "James Purnell doctored at hospital".

One of these days (hopefully soon) I'm going to get around to producing my own list of the top 20 fake photos of all time.
This one is titled "Caribou Barbie". I wouldn't label it fake based on the content (seems totally believable to me), but if you enlarge it you can see that Palin's head is far more pixellated than the rest of the picture, indicating it was cut-and-pasted in.

This Vogue cover was created by "Ishmael Melville" of the Kodiak Konfidential blog back in Dec 2007. Palin really did appear in Vogue, but wasn't on the cover. However, apparently a couple of news sites believed this photoshop creation was the real thing.
McCain announced his decision yesterday (Friday) that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin will be his running mate, and already the photoshopped pics of Palin are starting to circulate.

Actually, this picture of Palin in a miniskirt seems to predate Friday's announcement, but now that she's on the ticket with McCain it's begun to appear everywhere.

It definitely is photoshopped -- a case of head transplantation. The real picture of Palin, from which her head was lifted, seems to be the one below, posted on Flickr by "marymary81" on Feb. 1, 2007.



Update: I added the image to the Hoax Photo Database.