Ted Kurts is a humble guy. All he asks is that you recognize that he's the Messiah and the second coming of Jesus Christ. You doubt his claim? You want proof? Then check out his photo to the right. Doesn't he look eerily like certain portrayals of Christ? What better proof could you ask for? Oh, and please don't refer to him as Ted Kurts. It's Ted Jesus Christ God, to you. When I come across sites like this it's hard to know if they're supposed to be taken seriously or not. I kinda suspect Ted is serious. Or maybe not. Who knows. But Ted Jesus Christ God says that anyone who links to his site will be blessed, so if he does turn out to be the real thing, then I've got my bases covered.

In December 1989 the U.S. invaded Panama. NBC News managed to obtain a live interview with an American businessman staying in Panama City, Roger Sizemore, who said he was witnessing the invasion as it happened. But ever since then questions have persisted about who Sizemore really was. After the interview 'Roger Sizemore' disappeared without a trace, never to be found again. Then a man named Brian Seifert came forward claiming that he was the man on the phone pretending to be Sizemore, and that he hadn't been in Panama City. He had phoned from a basement in a suburb of Indianapolis. Seifert says NBC put him up to it. NBC says they were the ones who were hoaxed... if there was indeed a hoax at all. Voice analysis shows that the voices of Sizemore and Seifert do match, which lends credence to Seifert's story. But Seifert is a strange character. In 2002 he was indicted by the FBI on suspicion of filing a false terrorist complaint. So he isn't the most upright character. But on the other hand, everything he's said about the 1989 phone hoax has checked out, so far. If true, it's surprising that this hoax hasn't received more coverage.

Anyone who visits here regularly will notice that I've changed the design of the homepage. I do this fairly often, never being very satisfied with my layout skills. I thought the last design was a little too busy, and some of the images were using up too much bandwidth. So my goal this time was to make the page more minimalist and get rid of the bandwidth-hogging images. I also created a new seal for the Museum of Hoaxes (visible at the right of the banner above). It shows a vegetable lamb (a lamb that scholars in medieval times believed grew from a plant out of the ground), and beneath this has the inscription 'Lana Ab Oculis Liberetur.' If my high school latin has served me correctly, this should translate to 'Let the wool from the eyes be lifted.'

The Bush administration is getting some flack for a video it has distributed to news stations showing journalists commenting on the public reaction to the newly passed Medicare law. The problem is that those aren't real journalists. They're actors paid to read from a script. It's a subtle, ambiguous form of deception, since the White House can always say that they really are reporters. After all, they're standing there, in front of a camera, reporting. Doesn't that make them a real reporter? In a sense, yes. But really, no. They're White House press agents. There's still a difference between a press agent and a reporter.

If your cat has been feeling a little down lately, then you may need to hire the services of Confuse a Cat, Ltd., the world leaders in feline bewilderment. One of their highly trained technicians will come to your house and proceed to bewilder your cat, thus restoring it to its former self.

Lex Cusack is in jail for selling love letters supposedly written in 1961 by JFK to Marilyn Monroe. The problem is that the letters contained zip codes, and zip codes only came into use in 1963. Now the FBI wants to destroy all the letters, and Cusack is crying foul. He argues that even if the letters are fake (he continues to claim they're real), they're still his property and the government can't just destroy them.

Bobby Mason, former professional football player for the Wolverhampton Wanderers, was quite a celebrity in Southbourne. Problem is, Bobby Mason wasn't really Bobby Mason. He was an imposter who had been posing as the football player. The real Bobby Mason was quite shocked to learn that someone had been living as him for so long.

I didn't think there was anyone left who hadn't heard this joke already. It's the one about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide, a chemical found in many toxic substances and often used as an industrial solvent. Sounds scary, but dihydrogen monoxide is, of course, simply the scientific name for water, or H2O. Apparently the city council of Aliso Viejo, California hadn't heard the joke before, because they were about to ban the use of styrofoam cups because dihydrogen monoxide was used in their production. Luckily someone clued them in before they embarrassed themselves even more. Their one comfort is that they're not the only ones to fall for this joke. Last year disc jockeys in Olathe, Kansas warned listeners on April 1 not to drink water because it contained dihydrogen monoxide. Over 150 terrified people then phoned up the city's water superintendent to ask about this dangerous substance, prompting the superintendent to describe the radio station's prank as a terrorist act.

In 1953 Bernard Kettlewell performed a set of experiments that proved that predation by birds was responsible for the peppered moth population changing from mostly white to mostly black. The reasoning was that industrial pollution had caused the barks of trees to turn dark. Therefore black moths resting during the day on the darkened trunks of trees had a selective advantage over white moths, because the birds could see the white moths more easily and prey on them. Kettlewell released both white and black moths into the wild and demonstrated that the black moths survived at a higher rate in the polluted areas. Now you can duplicate Kettlewell's experiment with the Evolution of the Peppered Moth Science Kit, available from Boreal Laboratories. There's just one problem. Some are beginning to say that the case of the peppered moth may be one of the biggest cases of scientific fraud of the twentieth century, up there with the Piltdown Man. You see, moths tend not to rest on tree trunks during the day; their main predators are bats, not birds; and anyway, birds see more in the UV range than people do, so what looks camouflaged to us may not look so to a bird. Given this, how did Kettlewell achieve his suspiciously perfect results? Rumors of fraud are in the air. Kettlewell definitely still has his defenders, but if his experiments do end up in the Science Hall of Infamy, then those science kits are going to be collector's items.

Tadeusz, writing from the Netherlands, asked my opinion on whether this product is real or fake: The Breast Pillow (safe for work). It's supposed to prevent women from getting "wrinkling of the cleavage area" as they sleep, especially women who have breast implants. I don't know if it actually works, but I see no reason why it wouldn't be a real product. My wife tells me that some women wear bras to bed for this very reason.

It seems like there have been quite a few articles lately on the growth of hoax photography wrought by photoshop. Now the New York Times has chimed in with an article on the subject.

Because April Fool's Day is fast approaching, I revamped my list of the top 100 April Fool's Day hoaxes of all time. I juggled around the top ten a bit to better reflect the popular favorites. Most significantly, I added Sweden's 1962 classic 'Instant Color TV' hoax into the list, placing it at number three. Plus, by using pMachine I added the capability for readers to add comments to any one of the April Fools.

Kingdom Hospital. It's the 'Hospital that brings out the best in you.' From its website you would think that it's a real hospital, until you start poking around it a bit. Then it gets creepy. It's a tie-in, of course, with ABC's Kingdom Hospital miniseries. But it's pretty well done. (submitted by Brian Flynn).

It's become popular to give party guests little tags to put around their wine glasses so they always know which glass is theirs. Now the same concept has been extended to boyfriends. It's Boyfriend Marker. (via J-Walk)

In a recent survey nearly half of Australian workers admitted to taking fake sick days. I assume this means that the other half were still lying about not taking them.