Hoax Museum Blog: Birth/Babies

Woman Performs C-Section, on herself — This story just seems wrong on so many levels... Four years ago a 40-year old Mexican woman, alone in the middle of Nowhere, is giving birth to a baby. Her husband is getting drunk at the local cantina. She's been in labor twelve hours, and the baby isn't coming out. So she reaches over, grabs a butcher knife, slices open her stomach, reaches inside her uterus and pulls out her baby boy. Miraculously both her and the baby survive. When I read this story, it triggered all kinds of hoax alarm bells in my mind. How could anyone possibly do that, I thought. Wouldn't she have passed out from the pain? What about infection? Isn't it a little suspicious that there were no witnesses (though I suppose the very reason she did this was because there was no one around)? But when I did some research, sure enough the case has been described in a scientific journal. So it looks like the story is true. Amazing.

Clueless Childless Couple — Last week the British Daily Mirror printed a story about a particularly clueless German couple. As the article put it:
"Fertility doctors were baffled when a perfectly-healthy couple claimed they couldn't have children - until they confessed they had never made love. The husband, 36, and his 32-year-old wife thought that all they had to do to make a baby was to lie next to each other and let nature take its course."
This story got picked up by wire services, and soon was being linked to all over the internet. But was there actually any truth to the story?
The snopes website, skeptical of the story, pointed out that 'tales of sexually naive adults who don't understand what sex is' are a common subject for urban legends. But other internet sleuths dug a little deeper and discovered that the Daily Mirror's story actually derived from a real case. Comments left at Der Schockwellenreiter website (in German) pointed to this April 2003 medical article describing a couple who sought fertility treatment at the Lubeck clinic, only to later confess that after eight years of marriage they had never actually had sex. The reason: the husband suffered from erectile dysfunction.
Another article from the Medical Tribune describes this same case in more detail (the article is in German, so I used BabelFish to produce a rough translation of it). So the Daily Mirror's story improves on the actual case quite a bit. A whole lot, in fact. But it's not complete fiction. The author of the article was Allan Hall, a reporter based in Germany who regularly sells stories to the British tabloids (back in the 1990s he was the London Sun's New York correspondent). He seems to enjoy taking weird stories and juicing them up to make them even weirder. Headlines from some of his other stories include, "Dog Called Adolf Gave Nazi Salute to Children," "My Twins Had Different Dads," and "Eaten By His Pet Spiders" (this final article was apparently also more fiction than fact). (I got many of these links via Heiko Hebig)

Angel Soft Baby With Gaping Wound — Here's your chance to bid on a rare collectible item: an unopened 24-pack of Angel Soft toilet paper that shows the baby sporting a gaping flesh wound. The seller suggests it's a manufacturer's misprint. Or maybe the toilet paper is cursed (the seller didn't suggest this, but he should have, since everyone knows that demonically possessed items sell like hotcakes on eBay) . It could be like those photographs in The Omen that foretold how people were going to die. Whatever it is, misprint or mark of the devil, the wound seems a little hoaxy to me, though I suppose a printing error could cause something like this.

Petition to Stop the Godsend Institute — I talked about the Godsend Institute (the website of a cloning lab that's really a promo for an upcoming movie of the same name) a few days ago. I said that I really didn't think the site was that convincing. But maybe others have been fooled by it because someone started an online petition to ban the Godsend Institute. Of course, I'm not above suspecting that the petition was started by the movie studio itself as a way to generate faux controversy. This was a favorite ploy of P.T. Barnum. Back in 1835 he was exhibiting Joice Heth, an elderly black woman whom he claimed was the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington. When attendance at the exhibit began to decrease, he sent an anonymous letter to a local paper angrily declaring that Heth was a fake, a "curiously constructed automaton, made up of whalebone, India-rubber, and numberless springs." Sure enough, attendance immediately picked up again as visitors returned to see if Heth really was an old woman or a mechanical automaton.

Godsend Institute, and other movie sites — A few people have written to me about the Godsend Institute, which is supposedly a Massachusetts fertility clinic that offers human cloning as an option for its patients. Its website is quite slick and well produced, but the Godsend Institute is, of course, not real. The site is part of the advertising campaign for the upcoming movie Godsend starring Robert De Niro. Wired published an article about this yesterday. Ever since the Blair Witch Project succeeded in creating such a buzz five years ago with its companion website, movie studios have sought to repeat this trick by creating sites that try to convince websurfers that their fictional characters or companies are real. The site for the upcoming I, Robot, starring Will Smith, is a recent example. As is Lacuna, Inc., which is a fictitious company featured in The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I would say the strategy is wearing a bit thin now because a) the sites usually aren't that believable (for instance, you can kind of recognize Robert De Niro on the Godsend Institute site, which blows the whole cover), and b) they're not that interesting even if you do believe they're real. They give surfers little to do or explore. The Blair Witch site worked not only because it suggested the witch was real, but also because it gave people lots of interesting background material on her to browse through. One recent studio-created site that did understand this was Kingdom Hospital (from the ABC miniseries). It didn't simply try to convince you that Kingdom Hospital was real. Creepy things also started to happen as you navigated around the site, which made it fun to explore.

Fake pregnancy — Maya-Anne Mays was living the good life. She had a couple paying her rent, buying her meals, and giving her money. Why? Because the couple thought she was pregnant, and they were going to adopt her baby. But it turned out Mays wasn't pregnant... just overweight. She had managed to pass a pregnancy test by taking the test soon after having a miscarriage. The couple finally wised up and forced her to take another test, which she failed.

Mobile Phone Birth Control — This one had me going for a while before I figured out it was a joke. The EETimes reports on a small Belgian company called Prophy-Lectric that has developed a cellphone add-on, dubbed the Nippit 3000. This remarkable device "projects a high-intensity ultra-sonic electromagnetic 'sound cone' that is inaudible to the human ear but fatal to any sperm cell within a range of six meters, or about 18 feet." In other words, just place it next to the bed during moments of intimacy, and that's all the birth control you need. As an added benefit, the high-pitched sound also keeps the dog away. I've noticed that quite a few websites have linked to this story without any acknowledgment (or apparent recognition) that it's a joke.

Clone Number Six — Clonaid now claims that it has created its sixth human clone, in the form of a baby boy born in Sydney last week. Once again, no evidence of any kind was provided to back up this claim. You're just supposed to take their word for it. And come on! They seem like an extremely credible bunch, don't they?

Eat Babies — Discover all kinds of recipes for cooking and eating babies at eatbabies.com. For instance, you might want to try baby soup or baby stir fry. The site is plastered with warnings announcing that it's all just a joke (I guess they must have got complaints), but I suppose it'll still attract criticism from people who think it might provide sick and twisted individuals with bad ideas. Personally, I think the site would have been funnier if it had provided recipes for eating the babies of poor people, thus playing off of Jonathan Swift's classic work, A Modest Proposal. (Thanks to Antonia for the link).

Raeling Cloning Hoax, One Year Later — Remember the Raelians and their claims that they've produced a number of human clones? Well, this reporter infiltrated their ranks and writes that the Raelians are now all chuckling about what a brilliant publicity stunt the cloning hoax was.

Male Lactation — Here's an odd website, forwarded to me by Mara. It's titled Milkmen:// Fathers Who Breastfeed. Now, when I first saw this I figured it had to be a joke. It surely can't be possible for men to lactate and produce enough milk to feed an infant. But after reading through the site, and exploring some of the links it provides, I'm beginning to suspect it might not be a joke. One of their links goes to this article about a man from Sri Lanka who breastfed his child after his wife died. I guess men do have all the physical equipment necessary to produce milk. It's just a question of triggering the right hormones so that the equipment starts working.

Black-Market Babies — Black Market Babies: Do you want a kid but don't want to deal with the stress of using an adoption agency? Let Black Market Babies steal a baby for you.

Baby Smashers — Baby Smasher: use baby-changing stations to dispose of unwanted babies

Eggs As Caviar — Chrissy Caviar: A woman sells her eggs as caviar

Black Market Babies — If you feel like adopting a baby, but can't for some reason, just give the folks at Black Market Babies $50,000 and they'll steal someone's baby and give it to you. They also offer black market pandas and black market tigers for sale. Unfortunately their online form for submitting orders is 'temporarily' out of order. (Link via Entensity.net, who linked to me. Warning: their site is not safe for work).

Baby Ink Perpetrators Found — David Emery, of About.com's Urban Legends and Folklore page, found out that the Baby Ink tattoo parlor was an April Fool's day joke created by a couple of San Diego DJs. The DJs boast about the prank on their website (you need to scroll about halfway down to find the reference).

Tattoos for Kids — Here's the latest hoax website making the rounds: Baby Ink, a tattoo parlor for kids. The site claims that any kid over the age of six months is allowed to get a tattoo as long as their parent signs a consent form. But I don't believe that's right. That would be a bit like saying kids are allowed to smoke or drink alcohol as long as their parents consent to it. No, I think you have to be 18 or over to get a tattoo (or is it 16 and over?). The site lists a San Diego location that's quite near to where I live. I think I'll drive by and see what's actually there.

If you hear a baby crying… Don’t Open the Door — Here's a creepy email that's been making the rounds for at least half a year. It was sent to me by a visitor who wants to know if it's a hoax. Yes, it is. There have been no reported instances of serial killers using this particular modus operandi:

Someone just told me that her friend heard a crying baby on her porch the night before last, and she called the police because it was late and she thought it was weird.The police told her "Whatever you do, DO NOT open the door." The lady then said that it sounded like the baby had crawled near a window, and she was worried that it would crawl to the street and get run over. The policeman said, "We already have a unit on the way, whatever you do, DO NOT open the door." He told her that they think a serial killer has a baby's cry recorded and uses it to coax women out of their homes thinking that someone dropped off a baby. He said they have not verified it, but have had several calls by women saying that they hear baby's cries outside their doors when they're home alone at night. Please pass this on! and DO NOT open the door for a crying baby. This e-mail should probably be taken seriously because the Crying Baby theory was mentioned on America's Most Wanted this past Saturday when they profiled the serial killer in Louisiana.

The case of the non-existent child — An Australian woman invented the existence of a child in order to hit up her ex-boyfriend for child support. She even went so far as to provide him with pictures of the (fake) child, and dreamed up a costly medical condition that the kid was suffering from, which she, of course, wanted the boyfriend to pay for.

Clonaid — Recently the controversy surrounding Clonaid's claims that they've created a clone has been the big thing in the world of hoaxes. I got quoted in this Washington Post article about the situation.