Photographers strive to capture the perfect moment on film, and this comes about as close as any picture I've seen recently. The picture definitely looks real, though I don't know any details about it. When it was taken? Where? etc. (via J-Walk)

Here's a site that has created a flash-based hoax photo test. 10 photos in all. I only got 7 out of 10 correct. But then I'm not sure about some of their answers. For instance, they claim that this picture of a camel spider is fake. I don't think it's fake. Granted, the lens is positioned very close to the spider to make it look huge, but that doesn't mean the photo is a fake. I'm also suspicious of their info regarding the picture of a 'McDonald's Fried Chicken Head.' The picture is real enough, but I had never heard that McDonald's 'fessed up to letting a chicken head slip through the manufacturing process. I mean, if that was a real head, does that imply that McDonald's uses real chicken meat in their nuggets? Unlikely As for the picture of a 'worm removed from eye', I'm willing to accept that's real, if they say so.

I'm late to the party with this image (all the other hoax-related sites have had it up for a couple of weeks), but hey, I was on vacation, and the picture's too good to ignore. Anyway, no one seems to be able to say definitively whether it's real or a fake... or even where it originally came from. It does seem pretty unbelievable that a footprint would be that well defined through the wall of the abdomen. Plus, the foot seems awfully long. And what are those weird bumps in the middle of the foot? But on the other hand, I've heard some women say that this is possible.

Here's a picture that's been doing the email rounds (for some time, I think). The question is, is it a photograph or a painting? Well, if you look closely you can see that the areas on the side are sketched in and not that detailed. So it's a painting. If you tilt your head to the left you can see the shape of a woman standing behind a child. But Mary Alice, who sent me the picture, says that if you tilt your head to the right you can also see a big bird's head pecking on an acorn (though she admits you might have to be a birder to see it right off the bat).

Here's an interesting picture that's going around via email. I can't tell if it's real or photoshopped, but I'm inclined to say that it's real. I can't see any obvious signs of photoshopping, and dolphins do like to surf waves. However, I wouldn't like to be those guys staring down a school of dolphins about to crash down on top of them (though the perspective probably makes the people appear closer to the dolphins than they actually were). It reminds me of this other (real) picture of a dolphin in a wave. Click on the image for a slightly larger version.

Allison, who runs an ultimate frisbee company in Nottingham, just sent in these pictures of frisbee-playing animals. First we have Frisbee Croc.

Yeah, Frisbee Croc is a pretty obvious fake, but it's a cool photoshop nevertheless. The image comes from the Northern Territory Ultimate Frisbee site. Next we have Frisbee Horse.

As far as I can tell, these Frisbee Horse pictures are real. The name of the horse is Namoniet. He's an Egyptian Arabian Stallion trained by Jay Evans. Reportedly Namoniet loves to catch frisbees. The challenge is getting him to give them back. I'd love to show up at a park on a weekend where guys are playing frisbee with their dogs, challenge them to a match, and then bring out my frisbee-playing horse.

You wouldn't want to run into this thing while out for a stroll in the woods. It's a 1000lb wild hog with 9-inch tusks, nicknamed Hogzilla, that hunting Guide Chris Griffin claims to have shot in Georgia last month. To put this in perspective, 500lb wild hogs are considered enormous. No one has ever heard of a 1000lb wild hog before, so it's raising a few eyebrows. Plus, the only evidence for the creature's existence is a picture Griffin snapped of himself posing beside it. He says that he buried the hog soon after killing it. In the picture of Griffin with Hogzilla, the hog sure looks big. Hogzilla could be real. Or the picture could be photoshopped, though I haven't seen a good enough copy of the image to make a judgement on that. Or Griffin could have obtained a large hog from a farm. In the hoax forum, posters have pointed out that tricks of perspective might make the hog look bigger than it really is... though even taking distorted perspective into account, that still seems like a big hog. If I were Griffin, I'd dig the skeleton up to prove that Hogzilla is real, because a picture alone is not indisputable evidence.
Update: A better quality picture of Hogzilla can be seen at Kens-fishfarm.com, and David Emery notes that there have been previous stories about giant hogs caught in the wild.

I found this photo over at J-Walk Blog. J-Walk can't tell if it's real or fake, and the people who have posted comments over there seem split also. I think the image itself has to be real, in the sense of not being digitally manipulated... simply because the image quality is too high. Typically photoshopped images tend to be low-quality, to hide any mistakes. One person claimed that the guy falling off his bike is actually a statue, which could be, though I haven't been able to find any verification of this. If it is a photo of a statue, that would put it in the same genre as the Splat photo (i.e. photos of life-like, bizarre statues). I'm not sure where the image is taken. Is that the Vienna Opera House?

Jim sent in this picture of his grandfather posing with an ear of corn, along with this explanation: "My grandfather, Frank Weed, who died in 1949, worked on the railroad for years. He bragged to the other men about how big the Iowa corn was but they wouldn’t believe it. So my father took a picture of him, and of an ear of corn, then cut the negative, pasted the other into the hole and printed it. After that, the criticism of my grandfather’s exaggerations were silenced!" Thanks, Jim!

About a week ago I posted a picture of a 'Big Hairy Fanny' bus that supposedly operates in Finland. I suspected the picture was a fake, and it turns out that my suspicion was correct. Quite a few people commented that they had seen other pictures of the same bus with the name 'Fücker' painted on the side, and today Iain Cartmill sent me a picture of this bus. A quick google search turned up lots of other images of it, as well as the website of the Fücker travel company, based in Germany (click on the 'Die Busflotte' button to see pictures of the bus in question). So the Fücker Bus is real, but the Big Hairy Fanny Bus is fake. The mystery is why anyone photoshopped the picture to read 'Big Hairy Fanny,' since the actual name is funnier than the hoax name.

This image may have been circulating around for a while, but I just got it in my email for the first time today. It purports to show the 'worst named bus company in Finland.' That would be the 'Big Hairy Fanny' Bus Line. I've come across oddly named bus lines before (specifically the Lamers bus company that operates in Wisconsin), but I refuse to believe that there's really a bus company in Finland calling itself Big Hairy Fanny. My suspicion is that the picture was photoshopped (it's pretty easy to insert text into pictures). Or perhaps there really is a bus touring around somewhere with 'Big Hairy Fanny' plastered on its side... though it would probably be some kind of joke, or something created for a movie. The final option (which, as I said, I seriously doubt) would be that a clueless Finnish bus company really did name itself 'Big Hairy Fanny'. But if that's the case, then why the umlauts over the two a's? Until I found out what the reality is behind this mystery photo, here's a poll:
Update: The picture is fake, but the real name of the bus is even better than the fake name. It's Fücker Bus Lines, based in Germany. More details here. Of the 366 people who responded to the poll (which I've now deactivated since the mystery is solved), 46% guessed the right answer, but 54% of you guessed wrong and thought the picture was real.

Nick and Emily discovered a ghoulish secret while perusing the latest edition of the Victoria's Secret catalog: a disembodied hand resting on the shoulder of one of the models. Very creepy. Either the model has a hand growing out of her shoulder, or there was originally someone standing next to her in the picture. The question is, was the hand left in there by mistake, or was it left in there on purpose... the mischievous signature of some disgruntled photo retoucher?