Hoax Museum Blog: Future/Time

More About the Mystery Time Traveler — David Emery, at About.com, has dug up some interesting clues about the time-travel spammer. He notes that an authentic mind warper generator was once offered for sale on eBay, as well as a Generation 4 Dimensional Warp Generator. Bidding on these items has closed. He also notes that there's speculation that the mystery spammer is a well-known, Woburn-based spammer named Robert Todino, since the mystery spammer states that he lives in the Woburn area. But someone who wrote to me claims to have talked to the time traveler on the phone and supports the theory that the guy is crazy as a loon.
Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2003.   Comments (0)

Time Traveler Needs Help — There's an email going around claiming to be from a time traveler stuck in the year 2003 who needs a dimensional warp generator to get back home. Lots of people, myself included, are wondering what exactly this email is, and why someone is going to the trouble of bulk-mailing it to millions of people.
Posted: Fri Aug 01, 2003.   Comments (0)

Fake Psychic — A report by the St. Petersburg Times.Psychic fails to predict her own arrest. From Agence France Presse, Sept. 4:
A US woman who claimed to be a psychic medium and conned her clients and the taxman was Wednesday ordered to pay 60,000 dollars restitution to her victims. Sonia Merino, 50 and her husband Steve Merino, 44, each admitted one count of tax fraud in connection with their mail business called "Sonia Psychic Advisor" and agreed to repay 60,000 dollars in ill-gotten gains, including 1,200 dollars to a client to whom she sold fake holy water. In addition to demanding that the couple stump up restitution for their victims, prosecutors have also recommended that the pair serve 18 to 24 months in jail and that they repay 316,427 dollars to the tax man. They were due to be sentenced on November 18. The disgraced Los Angeles-area "psychic" and her daughter daughter-in-law were initially charged with five counts of mail fraud, which carries heavy penalties, but Merino forged a plea bargain with prosecutors in return for those charges against her being dropped. The 23-year-old wife of her son however still faces those charges, while her parents -- who allegedly also tried to hide 850,000 dollars worth of income from the business from the Internal Revenue Service -- made a deal, a Los Angeles court heard. Prosecutors alleged that the women advertised services for certain prices, then told clients they had to pay for additional services to clear away curses or negative spiritual forces.
Posted: Thu Sep 05, 2002.   Comments (0)

Rudolph Fentz and Time Travel — A decades-old time travel hoax has been unravelling in Ohio this past week. It started with an article about Chris Aubeck, a researcher who was investigating the case of Rudolph Fentz. Fentz was a man who had supposedly time-travelled from 1876 to 1950, only to get struck down by a car and killed. The story has gained wide credence in many European circles. But Aubeck tracked the source of the tale down to an Akron-based writer, Ralph M. Holland, who wrote a story about this incident in 1953.But when Rev. George Murphy read about Aubeck's research, he recognized that the tale had an even earlier source. It turned out that Holland had lifted the tale from a short story by Jack Finney that appeared in a science fiction anthology titled Tomorrow, The Stars edited by Robert Heinlein that was published in 1951. So a 1951 science fiction story had somehow become accepted as fact by many, until Aubeck and Rev. Murphy debunked it.
Posted: Tue Aug 20, 2002.   Comments (3)


Should it be called palmistry or buttistry? — I've heard about psychics reading palms. Now here's one that reads buttocks.
Posted: Mon Jul 22, 2002.   Comments (4)

Time Travel Mutual Fund — I once read a science fiction story that theorized that we never die. We just grow more improbable. Whenever we face a life/death moment, there is always a probability, however remote, that we could survive. In one universe we might die, but in an alternative universe somewhere that branches off from our reality the remote probability that we survive is followed. It was a neat theory for a science fiction story. This site has found a way to make money from a very similar idea. Just before you die, they promise, you will be sucked into the future by time travellers. You guarantee this by putting $10 now into their time travel mutual fund. Over 500 years that $10 will turn into millions of dollars, thanks to the miracle of compound interest. This will pay for the expense of sucking you into that future world. Somehow I doubt that they intend to keep any money given to them in a mutual fund for 500 years. But at least they give you a certificate in exchange for your cash.
Posted: Fri Jul 12, 2002.   Comments (4)

Page 2 of 3 pages  < 1 2 3 >