About the Museum
The Museum of Hoaxes, founded by Alex Boese in 1997, is dedicated to promoting knowledge about the phenomenon of hoaxes. On our blog (to the left) we post about dubious-sounding claims — and whatever else strikes our fancy. But there's more to the museum than the blog. Check out our historical wing, which contains hundreds of articles about famous hoaxes, arranged chronologically from the Middle Ages right up to the present. Our Gallery of the Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes Ever celebrates that one day of the year devoted to pranks and practical jokes. In our forum, you can chat with other MoH members. And there's much, much more.

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The site wonder-who.com claims to reveal that Megan Fox will be starring in a new Wonder Woman movie. The site looks professionally made. Someone obviously put some effort into it. But according to JoBlo.com, Warner Brothers has issued a denial, insisting that no such movie is planned.

So why did someone spend so much time creating the site? I have no idea. A really over-eager Megan Fox fan perhaps? Or maybe a studio was testing the response to the concept?

Links: pfunn.com, io9.com.
Back in January 2008 Variety published a rumor, citing unnamed sources, that Britney Spears had agreed to play a killer lesbian stripper in Quentin Tarantino's next movie, a remake of Russ Meyer's 1965 film Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!.

Seven months later, there's no indication this rumor is true. For instance, there's no listing of such a project on IMDB.

Nevertheless, the rumor is circulating again. It was reported recently in The Telegraph and on popcrunch. It appears that the January rumor is simply being reported again, with no attempt to check the facts.

Taken together with the recent rumor that Spears was to star in a (nonexistent) movie titled The Knoxville Carjacking Party, it seems that there's a deep unmet desire out there to see Spears starring in a slasher movie.
According to internet rumor, Britney Spears is planning to star in a movie titled The Knoxville Carjacking Party, based on the brutal 2007 murder of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom. Spears would play Channon Christian.

The story is a hoax. More specifically, it's a case of satire mistaken as news, having apparently originated as a faux news report from "celebrity snitch, Clarence Star" on the site Ghetto Bragging Rights.

Wayne Bledsoe, a columnist for Knoxnews.com, notes that the spread of the false rumor offers a case study in how misinformation is propagated by the online media. Numerous celebrity gossip sites, such as popcrunch.com, reported the false rumor as fact, without making any effort to verify it. Bledsoe writes:


(Thanks, Bob!)
Kate Beckinsale goes by "Sigourney Beaver." Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, when together, were "Mr and Mrs Ross Vegas." And Johnny Depp uses "Mr. Stench."

These are some of the check-in pseudonyms that Hollywood stars use to remain anonymous when registering at hotels.

The only time I ever use a pseudonym is when asked to fill in info for things like online surveys or grocery store cards. Then I'm always "Eric Blair." But I'm thinking of switching to Hugo N. Frye.
This photo of Ben Affleck is doing the rounds on celebrity gossip blogs. People are wondering if it's real or photoshopped.



It is an odd picture, but I'm almost certain it's real. Affleck just happens to be posed at a strange angle, and the small size of the kids around him make his head appear unnaturally large.

The picture comes from an event Affleck attended in Calgary on June 14 to support the oneXone charity. Wireimage.com has a gallery of photos of Affleck at this event. There are plenty of shots of him posing with these kids (including the shot above).
Marilyn Monroe seems to attract hoaxes, in the same way that Hitler, Bigfoot, and Paris Hilton do. I guess it's because any news about Marilyn is guaranteed to get attention, which is what many hoaxers are looking for.

The latest Marilyn news is that a sex tape starring her was sold for $1.5 million to an anonymous wealthy businessman, who swore he would never make it public. The tape is said to be a copy of a film that has been kept classified by the FBI.

The promise of the businessman to not market the tape sounds very noble, but nobility probably has little to do with it. The tape is probably being kept from the public because it doesn't exist.

Defamer, with the help of Marilyn Monroe expert Mark Bellinghaus, has put all the pieces of this story together. (If I'm a "hoax-pert," does that make Bellinghaus a "Monroe-xpert"?)

The key point, as Defamer argues, is that the sale to the anonymous businessman was brokered by Keya Morgan "whose main objective is to promote himself and the Monroe documentary that he is working on." Defamer argues that "What Keya Morgan is promoting equates to questionable stories generated simply to sell another book or push another cheesy documentary." Some of the questions that Defamer and Bellinghaus raise:


Keeping key pieces of evidence hidden (such as the tape itself!) is the classic modus operandi of hoaxers. So I'm definitely with Defamer on this. It smells like a hoax.
(Thanks Bob and Joe!)

Related Posts:
• Man mistakes Madonna for Monroe
• The JFK-Marilyn Monroe Correspondence

Update: The Smoking Gun has conducted research that also casts doubt on Morgan's claims.
What we can say with certainty is that Robert Irvine is the host of the Food Network's show Dinner: Impossible. I've watched this before and found it entertaining. Though Irvine comes across as pretty arrogant.

However, many other facts about Irvine's career have now been called into question. For instance, in the past Irvine has claimed that he was knighted by the Queen, that he owns a castle in Scotland, that he cooked at the White House, and that he created the wedding cake for Prince Charles and Princess Diana.

None of this, it turns out, is true.

A Food Network spokeswoman says, "It's unfortunate if Robert embellished the extent of his culinary experiences. We are investigating the matter and taking the necessary steps to ensure the accuracy of all representations of Robert on Food Network and foodnetwork.com."

I'm sure that'll be the extent of the Food Network's reprimand of him, since his show is too popular to cancel.

Links: sptimes.com; Daily Mail. (Thanks to Joe Littrell for the heads up about this.)
Everyone dreams of finding a painting by Van Gogh or Picasso in their attic. In Lawrence Nicastro's case, what he found -- so he thought -- was a rare picture of Marilyn Monroe posing as a naked hitchhiker. The BBC reports:


This isn't a hoax, of course, unless you count that guy who called himself a Monroe expert, but couldn't tell the difference between Marilyn Monroe and Madonna. I'm no Monroe expert, but I can see the difference right away.

I found the picture of Madonna posing as a hitchhiker after a bit of googling. I'm just assuming it's the same picture that confused the expert. Click here for a larger version (still with the pink cover-ups, so that it's safe for work).
Does Halle Berry have six toes on her right foot? There are people out there who have spent a lot of time pondering this question. The evidence for the six-toe theory is based on these pictures, which are at least two years old.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that, no matter what these pictures appear to show, Halle Berry is not polydactyl. If she was, she'd admit it.




A few days ago word got out that heiress Paris Hilton was trying to call attention to the problem of drunken elephants going on rampages in northeast India. Soon this story got picked up by the press. For instance, here's part of a report that appeared in India's The Hindu:


Much to everyone's disappointment, it turned out that Paris Hilton never made these comments about drunken elephants. The AP posted a brief retraction:


It's not clear to me what the original source of the Hilton-elephant news was. One theory is that it originated from an article on spoof.com, which would make it a case of satire mistaken as news. But the spoof.com article seems to be dated after the story had already widely circulated.

Whoever dreamed it up should be commended, because I can think of no one better qualified to be the patron saint of drunken elephants than Paris Hilton.

But while on the subject of drunken elephants, I should note that the widely circulated notion that elephants like to get drunk by eating marula fruit rotting on the ground is not true. Recent scientific studies have shown that a) elephants don't actually like to eat the marula fruit when it is on the ground. They prefer the fruit still in the tree. And b) the fruit does not spend enough time in their gut to ferment there and make them drunk. But it is true that elephants will happily drink alcohol if it is offered to them. (There have been studies about that too.)

[Credit goes to Tah for posting this first in the forum.]