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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According to The Telegraph, politicians and industry experts have been shocked (shocked!) to learn that magazines occasionally photoshop pictures of babies:


Honestly, this seems like a non-issue to me. It's not like doctoring baby pictures is a new thing. Remember Baby Adolf?
As posted recently by LaMa in the forum, a video recently began to circulate that appeared to have been created by a Danish girl who was trying to find the father of her child. She said the father had been a tourist in Denmark. They had had a one-night stand a year ago.



Turns out the video was actually created by Denmark's National Tourist Agency as part of a viral marketing campaign. The tourist agency has since issued an apology:


As a publicity stunt, I'd say the campaign was highly effective. But in terms of encouraging people to visit Denmark, I'm not so sure.
Swedish father Ragnar Bengtsson is pumping his breasts at three-hour intervals every day, in the hope that eventually he will start to lactate and be able to breastfeed his future children. If it works, he has no plans to breastfeed his 2-year-old son. The experiment is being filmed by Swedish TV8.

Odds that he may produce some milk if he works at it long enough: pretty good. Odds that he'll produce enough to feed a child: close to zero. He could help his cause by starving himself, since starvation triggers male lactation. That's just one of the odd facts I happen to know. (Thanks, Bob!)
I think the trend toward hyper-realism in dolls started in the 1970s with the introduction of Kenner's "Baby Alive" doll which ate, drank, and wet its diapers.

The latest evolution of the trend is Baby Glutton, the breastfeeding doll. According to thingamababy.com: "Your child wears a colorful bra-like halter-top featuring flowers over the nipple area. When the doll is lifted to the flowers, it makes a suckling motion and sound." A little too realistic, perhaps?

More links: berjuan.com (maker of the doll), nj.com.
(Thanks, Bob!)
Recently a woman who identified herself only as "April's Mom" started blogging about how her unborn child had been diagnosed as terminally ill. And yet she had decided to go through with the pregnancy anyway. Her blog quickly became popular with the anti-abortion crowd. On Sunday "Little April Rose" was born, but died soon after.

But skeptics noticed something strange about the picture of Little April that April's Mom posted on her site. Little April looked exactly like a reborn doll called Avery manufactured by Bountiful Baby.

Soon after, April's Mom was unmasked as Beccah Beushausen of Mokena, Illinois. Her entire blog had been fiction. The Chicago Tribune has more details.
News from the frontiers of medicine: "Baby Brain" is a myth; that syndrome being the supposed decline in intelligence that women suffer while pregnant. A study led by Dr. Helen Christensen of the Australian National University in Canberra tracked 2500 women over ten years and "found no difference between their brainpower before and during their pregnancies."

Baby Brain reminds me of Josh Whicker's 2004 Hoosier Gazette hoax in which he claimed that a five-year Indiana University study had found that "having children significantly lowers parents’ IQs." If I remember, that fooled a lot of the media, including Keith Olbermann.

Anyway, I still believe there's such a thing as Internet Brain.
A Broomfield, Colorado man got his name in the local newspaper for claiming he had named his new son Carter Barack Obama Sealy. He also said that his two other children were named Brooke Trout Sealy and Cooper John Elway Sealy. Supposedly he had a deal with his wife. She got to choose the kids' first names, and he got to choose their middle names.

The children's grandmother spilled the beans on the father, notifying the paper that the names were not real. The guy's wife explained that the fake names were her husband's idea of a joke. She added, "My husband's an idiot."
People magazine reportedly paid $14 million for the rights to publish the first pictures of the twin babies of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. But what the blogosphere is buzzing about is the suspicion that the cover photo of the twins was photoshopped. New York magazine seems to be the originator of this theory:


The picture could very well be photoshopped. Most magazine covers are nowadays. But to me it simply looks like the baby happened to have its mouth open.
There's one final news item I've received a lot of emails about in the past week -- and so deserves a place on the front page (though it's already in the forum). The Gloucester Pregnancy Pact.

Seventeen girls at Gloucester High School are pregnant. According to Time magazine, they all made a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. From Time:


My first thought was that this reminded me of the prom babies rumor I posted about last year. According to this rumor, girls try to get pregnant on prom night so they won't have to go to college. With the Gloucester pregnancy pact, we again have the notion of teenage girls conspiring to get pregnant.

Teenage girls (like teenage boys) are capable of incredibly stupid behavior, but the pregnancy pact has the whiff of urban legend. Sure enough, school officials are now throwing cold water on the idea, claiming they never heard of such a pact until it appeared in Time. Which isn't to say that group psychology didn't play a powerful role in influencing the girls' behavior. It obviously did. But did the girls make a premeditated pact, and then act on it? That seems highly unlikely to me.
If you're tired of your kid, why not swap him or her for another? Childtrader.com makes this possible. From the site:


You can view the profiles of kids available for trade. For instance, Jacob (pictured) is described as, "Not a particularly impressive boy. He hasn’t much been into sports, but he does have a great smile and likes to sit around the house, so he is very quiet."

I'm willing to go out on a limb and declare this a hoax. I'm not even going to do any research into who the site is registered to, etc., because it's obviously a joke. In other words, you're stuck with your kids, even if you don't like them. It's not legal to swap them for another.

Links on the child trader site indicate it was created by the same person responsible for two other spoof sites: medicaladoptions.com (adopt a kid who is a perfect match for an organ transplant you need), and puppyprofits.com (make money from illegal dog fighting).

Childtrader.com does, at least, highlight that children aren't always a constant source of joy to their parents. It reminds me of a study conducted in 1931 by Dr. Mandel Sherman of the Child Research Centre in Georgia. Sherman asked thirty-two parents to keep track in notebooks of all the ways their children annoyed them. He found that there were 2,124 ways in which children annoyed their parents. The most common source of annoyance was disobedience, but other annoyances included being too slow, too quick, and spending too much time primping.