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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This looks like it would be a great place to visit.



It's Cinque Terre in Italy. Unfortunately, it's not quite so colorful in real life. (via City Comforts)


In this video a surfer hitches a ride behind a shark, after getting the shark to swallow some chunks of meat attached to a fishing line. It looks like it was shot in southern California, and we do get some big sharks around here occasionally. Just last week a guy was killed off the coast of San Diego by a great white. But this video looks obviously fake. As many of the youtube comments point out, you can see the wake of a boat off camera in front of the shark fin.

I don't have any information about who made the video. At the end, the word "Notorious" appears on the screen, but I don't know who or what that is.


From Secret Thoughts of Stuffed Animals, the following photo and accompanying caption:





I don't know what the real story is with this picture, but I'm pretty sure it's not what the caption says. They look a bit like multi-level shotgun houses.
A few days ago The Sun posted this article:





I can't tell if The Sun printed the picture as a joke, or if they're really so clueless that they didn't realize the mysterious "ghost boy" in the photo is Anakin Skywalker from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. I'm leaning towards clueless.

The latest viral video going around shows Kobe Bryant jumping over a moving Aston Martin. Is it real? I doubt it, though I can't definitively prove it's fake.

Think about it. Why would he risk his career by trying to jump over a car? That's what special effects are for.

A better quality version of the video can be seen at Bryant's website.



Pictures have been circulating showing an expanded observation deck that is supposedly going to be added to the Eiffel Tower, transforming it into something resembling a giant mushroom. An article in the Guardian stated:


But it turns out that the Eiffel Tower is not going to have an expanded observation deck, nor did Serero Archictects win a competition to redesign it. The Eiffel Tower management company has completely disavowed such a project, saying, "This is a hoax. We have no idea where this came from. The whole thing is preposterous." Meanwhile, Serero has posted an explanatory note on its website:


Nick Foister sent me a link to Fred and Sharon's Movies, which have become the latest viral video sensation. Fred and Sharon are a couple who claim to run a movie production business in Kelowna, Canada. But their movies are so bad they're actually funny. It takes talent to be that bad.

They have over 20 videos on youtube. If you haven't seen any of them, at least watch "Who Needs a Movie?" (below), in which they try to promote their movie production business.



Fred and Sharon also have a website. Their site was originally free and open, but the majority of it has recently been locked down so that you need to pay to see it. However, the fee is only $1, so I paid the buck. Turns out that all the "extra content" you get if you pay is simply more videos freely available on youtube. I would have felt cheated if I had paid more than $1, but since it was so little I didn't mind. They deserve it for producing some amusing content.

The question that many people are wondering is whether Fred and Sharon can possibly be for real. Or are they either a) the creations of an advertising agency, or b) comedians.

I haven't had much luck shedding light on this mystery. Though my gut feeling is that they're genuine. It's their effort to make people pay for their site that most makes me think they're genuine. An ad agency would never try to restrict access to content. But a couple like Fred and Sharon who suddenly start receiving hundreds of thousands of visitors to their site, and are faced with a huge bandwidth charge, probably would decide they need to make some money to cover the costs.

Fred and Sharon's site is registered to someone called Rob Korbynn. The only info I can find out about him is that he also seems to be the webmaster of The Ram's Horn, an Ontario-based journal about "food systems analysis." I'm guessing he's must be a guy who provides web services such as site design to clients in the Ontario area.

Even though I do think Fred and Sharon and for real, I also think they're now purposefully hamming it up for the camera. After all, they must realize they've suddenly got a huge audience.
This video of a burqa-wearing woman very awkwardly trying to eat spaghetti is doing the rounds. It's titled "Why Italian Restaurants Failed in Dubai."

All you have to do to find out it's fake is read the comments on youtube, where quite a few people have pointed out that the footage comes from a British comedy show, "3 non-blondes." It's a candid-camera style show, in which the performers pull various bizarre stunts in public to see how the people around them will react. Wikipedia reports: "Ninia Benjamin, Tameka Empson and Jocelyn Jee Esien play a range of comical characters to the unsuspecting public. Varying from a fictional celebrity named Marcia Brown, to a charity worker who only wants a kiss or a hug instead of a cash donation."

I've never seen a woman eat while wearing a burqa, but I assume she would lift the fabric covering her mouth up. She wouldn't try to shove food down from the top.


My sister forwarded me this photo. It comes with the caption:



Well, if the caption says it's not fake, then it must be real!

But seriously, I'm labeling this one undetermined. It could very well be real, but on the other hand, I can't locate its original source. So who knows!

Similar photos:
• Car buried in snow
• Road through the snow

Update: It's real. The tower is the creation of Luc Guertin who lives in the Ottawa suburb of Orleans. The Globe and Mail reports:

Pretending to hold the sun is one of the most popular tricks in amateur photography, because it's so easy to do and the results can look pretty cool. Teen/Nerd has collected together some of the best examples of the "holding the sun" trick from Flickr. A few are reproduced below.