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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Gelf Magazine has an article about Alan Abel, who will be speaking at Gelf's Non-Motivational Speaker Series on Thursday, April 24 in New York City.

The article gives a quick overview of Abel's career: The Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, his obituary in the New York Times, Citizens Against Breastfeeding, etc.

One interesting part at the end, which I've heard people speculate about before, is how Abel funds himself:


I wonder if this "anonymous millionaire from Florida" would care to fund the Museum of Hoaxes?

Jenny Abel, Abel's daughter, recently sent me a copy of her movie, Abel Raises Cain. I plan to watch it sometime in the next two weeks (right after I finish work on the proposal for my next book), and will post about it then.
Someone pasted part of my April Fools list into an email, and this is circulating around Europe. It has the subject line: Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time.

Whoever is responsible for doing this, used my email address in the "From" field. I know this because I'm being swamped by bouncebacks from people who are not in their office, or whose server is rejecting the message.

I'm hoping the email doesn't have a virus attached to it, but my fear is that it does. There's a link at the bottom of the email inviting people to "Read all the other Doaxes," and this link leads to a suspicious-looking document hosted on secure.filesanywhere.com.

I just want to say, to anyone who might have received this message, that I have nothing to do with it. Unfortunately, I'm also powerless to stop it.
April 1st is approaching, which means that the Museum will probably experience its annual surge of traffic that results in pages loading incredibly slowly or not at all. I'm going to do whatever possible to stop the site from crashing on April 1st, though I'm not sure how much I can really do.

I've already moved most of the images to a separate server, to reduce the strain on the main server. I'm also going to temporarily eliminate avatars in the forum. I'm not deleting them. They just won't show up until I reactivate them after April 1st. Unfortunately, because of the way the forum software works, I can't move them to a different server. They're either served up by my web host, or they're not served up at all.

I'm also tweaking settings in the blog software. If it can be easily done, I might turn off commenting on April 1st. Better to have new visitors be able to see something, but not leave comments, than not see anything at all because the page won't load.
When someone wants to rent a midget, I'm apparently the first person they contact. I say this because I receive A LOT of email inquiries from people wanting to rent midgets, such as this one I got yesterday:


or this one from a few weeks ago:


It's my fault. I posted about a rent-a-midget service years ago, and ever since then the emails from people seeking midgets to rent have continued to trickle in, usually at the rate of about one a month.

I also receive many inquiries from people who want to buy tapeworms for the purpose of dieting, who want to know if I sell marzipan babies, who are looking to buy a fake sun roof, or who want to join the Nigerian navy.

I'm really missing out on good business opportunities by not offering these services.

Once upon a time I was receiving emails almost daily from people seeking fake doctor notes, but no longer. Apparently someone has usurped my position as the preferred source of information about this product.
Sorry if I caused anyone vertigo. I decided to move the sidebar over to the left side of screen since, visually, I think it makes more sense to have it lined up beneath the museum banner. Nothing else has changed.

It should only take a few moments to regain your bearings.

Update: Ignore what I said above.
Long-time forum regular LaMa (aka Marco Langbroek) has made it onto the news in the Netherlands! Thankfully, it's not for anything bad. He was interviewed in his capacity as an amateur satellite tracker (in Dutch a "satellietspotter") about that satellite the pentagon is planning to shoot down. Marco writes:


Marco's right. I didn't understand a word. But it looked to me like he knew what he was talking about. And that's what's important.

But now I'm dying to know -- what is the real reason they're shooting that thing down?

Two weekends ago I got a chance to meet John Baker -- better known in the Hoax Forum as the moderator Tah. He was in San Diego with his family on vacation. We had lunch and then took the ferry across San Diego harbor. I had a great time.

John's back home now and emailed me this snapshot of the two of us posing in front of the San Diego skyline. (I'm the short one — and I'm six-feet tall!) Our wives and John's daughter are out of view behind the camera.

The only negative is that it was early February so I, thinking it would be chilly down on the water, had come dressed in black jeans and a sweater. It turned out to be 80 degrees that day, so I had shed the sweater by the time this picture was taken. But I was still pretty hot.

I've now met all the forum moderators in person, except for MadCarlotta, Maegan, and Myst (who hasn't been around in ages). I can confirm that they're all the nicest, most intelligent group of people you could imagine.

John also sent a picture of what he suggests might be Nessie in the bay. He notes, "Anne [his wife] seemed to think it was just two seals looking for fish, but I know better!"



I'm a Mac user, and I recently decided to upgrade to the new operating system, OS X Leopard. I thought it would be relatively simple to upgrade. But it wasn't. I've spent the last two days stuck in front of my computer working out all the kinks. So I thought I'd post a warning to help any other people in a similar situation avoid the mistakes I made.

My big mistake was apparently my choice to simply upgrade the existing system. It took an hour or two to complete the installation process, but then, instead of seeing an improvement, the performance of my computer slowed to a crawl. It was like swimming through molasses. I kept getting an endlessly spinning beach ball whenever I tried to do anything. A few times the finder froze. I have a relatively new computer -- an intel mac mini -- so the hardware should have been able to handle the upgrade. I was thinking, "Wow, this new system sucks!"

After some slow searching on the internet, I discovered that other people had been reporting the same problem. The solution was that instead of simply upgrading the system, you had to do a clean install. This meant wiping out everything and starting new. So that's what I decided to do. The problem was, this meant backing everything up first -- something I should have been doing on a regular basis anyway, but hadn't been.

So I spent an entire day backing stuff up, doing a clean install of the system, and then reinstalling everything.

Long story short, I'm back in business, and the new operating system works really well. But it took me two solid days of messing with this to get it to work.

Obviously the experience of others may vary. But I'd definitely recommend doing a clean install right away, and not even thinking about choosing the "upgrade" option. But now that the system is working correctly, I do like it.
Authors love to read reviews of their books, especially positive ones. So, as an author, it's difficult to resist the temptation to periodically check out the Amazon page for your book, to see if readers have posted any new reviews of it. However, in Hippo Eats Dwarf I pointed out the danger of taking such reviews too seriously because so many of them are posted either by friends of the author -- or by rivals. In fact, I actually invited people to post fake reviews of Hippo Eats Dwarf. (You need to go to the early reviews to find the fake ones -- they're obvious when you see them.)

Inviting people to post fake reviews seemed appropriate for Hippo Eats Dwarf, since that book is all about fakery, but it didn't seem to fit for Elephants on Acid. So I never asked anyone to post a review. But when I last checked Elephants on Acid's Amazon product page, I discovered that a fake review had found its way on there anyway. Or rather, a spam review. But the identity of the person posting the spam surprised me. Here's the latest review of Elephants on Acid, posted by "DISINFO CEO":



The review follows the tried-and-true formula of comment spam. A meaningless platitude, followed by a plug for the product the spammer is trying to promote, which in this case is a book by Mark Pilkington. But if you check out the page for Pilkington's book, you'll discover that DISINFO CEO has posted a review there as well -- and in that review he pretty much reveals that he's the publisher of Pilkington's book!



In other words, someone who appears to be the CEO of the Disinformation Company is leaving comment spam on Amazon -- on the page for my book! I've never had any contact with the Disinformation Company, but I am aware of them and had always thought they published some interesting stuff, which is why it really surprised me that THEY, of all companies, would do something that tacky. The irony here is that DISINFO CEO, on his profile page, claims his nickname is "DeathToSpammers".

The possibility that DISINFO CEO is actually someone with no affiliation to the Disinformation Company crossed my mind, but what would be their motive to do this?

I clicked the link to flag DISINFO CEO's review of my book as inappropriate, since I think it's obviously spam. If Amazon agrees, the review may no longer be there by the time you read this.

Update: Amazon has deleted the spammy review. An irony is that I actually thought Pilkington's book sounded really interesting, so I ordered it -- but I ordered it from a used bookstore, so the Disinformation Company won't get any money from the sale. Ha!
I received a couple of emails this morning along the lines of: Hey, the Guardian just published a list of the top ten weirdest experiments of all time. It sounds a lot like your list of the top 20 most bizarre experiments. They're not ripping you off, are they?

It's nice that people are concerned, but there's no need to worry. I haven't been ripped off. After I posted my top 20 list back in September, New Scientist contacted me asking if I would like to create a shortened version of it for their magazine. I was more than happy to oblige, and the resulting article will appear in the Nov. 3 issue of New Scientist.

Apparently New Scientist circulated a pre-release version of this article to the media, and it's been picked up by a lot of British papers: The Daily Telegraph, The London Times, and the Daily Mail.

I've also found it in the South African Independent Online, the Sydney Morning Herald, and PhysOrg.com.

Here in America, the Hartford Courant had an article about my book, focusing on the creepy experiments to coincide with Halloween.

So there's been some good publicity. Hopefully it'll help sell a few books.

And speaking of publicity, I'll be doing a book signing at Dark Delicacies bookstore at 2 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 18th. It's a bookstore that specializes in horror, so the first chapter of my book (the one with all the Frankenstein-style experiments) should hopefully find a receptive audience there. If you live in the L.A. area, come on by and say hello.

Update: My publisher also tells me that Playgirl magazine plans to review Elephants on Acid (probably because it has a chapter on weird sex experiments). Thankfully, they're not planning a photoshoot of the author to accompany the review. But I will be able to tell people that I've been featured in Playgirl.