Hoax Museum Blog: Photos

Hanoi John — image A doctored photo of John Kerry speaking with Jane Fonda (aka 'Hanoi Jane') at a 1971 anti-war rally has been making the rounds lately and getting a lot of attention. It was almost immediately debunked as a phony. As this Newsday article describes, the original photo was taken by Ken Light. image The doctored version of it began popping up in conservative chat rooms a few weeks ago. As the political campaign heats up, I expect that many more photoshopped pictures of political candidates will surface. What I found surprising was not the picture itself, but the speed at which it was debunked.
Posted: Mon Feb 16, 2004.   Comments (1)

Mountain Lion Email Hoax — image Quite a few people have received this picture in their email showing a man holding up a giant (dead) mountain lion. According to the accompanying text, the lion was shot by the man near Leon, Kansas while he was out deer hunting, though different versions of the email list different locations. Is the picture real? It is. But the accompanying text is incorrect. According to this article on Buckmasters.com, the lion was actually shot near Seattle, Washington. The picture first appeared in Fair Chase magazine, published by the Boone and Crockett Club, before it spread to email.
Posted: Fri Feb 06, 2004.   Comments (1)

Tall-Tale Aviation Photo — image Richard has written in with a question about the photograph (to the right) that's being sold as a print by The New York Times. It shows the sky above Portland, Oregon filled with biplanes. It was taken in 1920 by the photographer C.S. Woodruff. Richard questions whether the picture can possibly be real, and I think he's right to do so. First of all, the biplanes seem dangerously close to each other, all clustered together in a swarm. Second, by 1920 there were hundreds of biplanes and trained pilots in the U.S. But what would they have been doing all gathered together in Portland? Could one city have produced that many pilots and planes in 1920? Probably not. Finally, if you look at a larger version of the picture, it's pretty obvious that it's the same biplane pasted into the photo numerous times. In other words, this is a tall-tale photo. Such photos were all the rage in the early twentieth century. A sky filled with planes must have seemed like a fairly farfetched concept to people in 1920.
Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2004.   Comments (3)

Mexican Ghost — sweet dreamsI just received this spooky photo from Katherine DeLong who explains that it's been making the rounds via email. The photo is accompanied by the following text:

This picture was taken in one of the rooms of "Our Lady of Charity" hospital in Toluca, Mexico while one of the patients was asleep, the patient had been involved in a multiple car accident and the lady under the bed was the only one person who died in the same accident and taken to the morgue, the brother's patient captured this image with his own camera and the picture has been seen around the world and has been authenticated by the research center in Chicago,Illinois

While I haven't seen the photo before, my first guess would be that it's a scene from a movie, though I have no idea which movie. The picture looks too well composed to be a casual snapshot. And whenever an email claims that something has been authenticated by a 'research center in Chicago,' while neglecting to mention which research center, you know that it's got to be a hoax.
Posted: Tue Jan 20, 2004.   Comments (11)


Posted: Mon Jan 12, 2004.   Comments (0)

Tall-Tale Postcards — martinThe American Museum of Photography has a nice collection of William H. "Dad"�Martin's tall-tale photographs online. Martin made a fortune selling tall-tale postcards during the early twentieth century. He had a company called the Martin Post Card Company based in Ottawa, Kansas.
Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2003.   Comments (0)

New Stealth Bomber — stealthHere it is. The first unclassified photo of the new F-22 Stealth Fighter Bomber. Invisible not only to radar but also to the human eye. (Thanks to Darren McEwen for the picture).
Posted: Tue Dec 09, 2003.   Comments (2)

He casts a long shadow — gephardtThis photo of Dick Gephardt's shadow cast across an American flag was snapped today (Dec. 1) at a campaign rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It appeared on Yahoo News and is quickly spreading across the internet. Despite the suggestive nature of part of the shadow, one has to assume that it hasn't been photoshopped. It's one of those things that seems like a hoax, but actually isn't, much like the picture of the Jamie Oliver calendar that was circulating around recently. Thanks to Kentaro Mori for giving me a heads up about this.
Posted: Mon Dec 01, 2003.   Comments (0)

The Naked Chef — jamie oliverHere's a picture of the 2004 calendar of Jamie Oliver (aka The Naked Chef). Note the suggestively placed piece of bread. This image originally appeared on the website of Boots, which is a British pharmacy. And it quickly attracted attention, at which point Boots cropped the image in order to remove the offending piece of bread. I can't find another picture of the calendar anywhere online to compare this picture to, but I'm assuming that the piece of bread must have been photoshopped in. Probably by a mischievous Boots employee.

Update 2 (11/17/03): David Emery reports that he was able to find the real version of the Jamie Oliver 2004 calendar, and it looks nothing like the fake version that appeared on the Boots website. Oh, and what I thought was a piece of bread was actually a brown paper bag that had been photoshopped.
Update 3 (11/18/03): jamie oliverDavid Emery has done some great sleuthing and discovered that the Jamie Oliver calendar being sold by Boots is absolutely real and unaltered. Boots sent him a full-size image of the calendar cover (which he was kind enough to forward along to me). It shows Jamie taking oranges out of a paper bag and peeling them. Full-size the image looks quite innocent, but shrunk down to thumbnail size, the position and shape of the paper bag becomes rather suggestive. Personally I think that whoever created that calendar must have been aware of the two ways of viewing that paper bag when they chose that image. It's an old advertising strategy: put a bit of subliminal (or not so subliminal) sexual imagery in an ad and watch the product fly off the shelf.
Posted: Fri Nov 14, 2003.   Comments (0)

Ray Charles — Here's a hoax photo of Ray Charles that's going around. It's pretty stupid, actually, but then the words 'stupid' and 'hoax photo' seem to go together often. It may not even be photoshopped. It could just be a picture taken at the instant that he was pointing the mike away from himself for some reason. (Found on the German language Wohin Heute).
Posted: Thu Nov 06, 2003.   Comments (1)

Lucky — luckyHere's another image from the San Diego fires that seems to be too amazing to be real, but is actually totally genuine. It's circulating around with the caption 'lucky bastard' (enlarge it to see why this makes perfect sense). It was sent to me by Kentaro Mori of Liquito. I think that the photo was taken in the Scripps Ranch neighborhood of San Diego, though I could be wrong about that. According to the navy website which the picture comes from, the photo was taken from a Sea King helicopter by Photographer's Mate 2nd Class Michael J. Pusnik, Jr.
Posted: Mon Nov 03, 2003.   Comments (1)

Is The Blood Red Water Real? — blood red waterAn environmental activism group named Sea Shepherd photographed and videotaped Japanese fishermen slaughtering sixty dolphins in a cove near Taiji, Japan. They posted the pictures of the slaughter on their website, thereby causing widespread outcry. But one of the pictures is also provoking debate of a different kind. It shows the water of the cove turned an almost neon red color because of the blood of the dolphins. People looking at this are wondering, can that possibly be real? Can the water really be that red? Or did Sea Shepherd, perhaps, tweak the colors in the picture via photoshop? I don't have the answer. In an accompanying videotape the water is definitely red, though not quite as red as in the picture. The debate has been raging on Metafilter, as well as a site named egullet.
Posted: Sun Nov 02, 2003.   Comments (1)

Fire Scene — san diego fire Here's a very cool picture of one of the San Diego fires. For a second I actually thought it was fake because it seemed weird that traffic was heading right into the fire. Plus the time stamp looked odd (it's stamped October 28, even though the picture was posted on the 27th, and the woman who posted it says it was taken on the 26th... maybe their camera has the wrong date). I thought maybe someone had pasted the bottom scene of the traffic together with the top scene of the smoke. But on second thought, I'm sure it's real. I can't see any sign of photoshopping. It was just the skeptic in me being too doubtful. (via J-Walk)
Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2003.   Comments (1)

Plane Meets Truck — plane crash I received this image from 'Detective Kid' who wants to know if it's real or fake. I've been checking it out and can't see anything obviously fake about it. The picture has a watermark on it, that I can't read. It's something like 'erzool.com.' If anyone knows anything about the picture, let me know.
UPDATE: A solution to this photo comes from Jeffrey Schuh: "This photo is a national geographic photograph. The photo has been republished in 'The Photographs' coffee table book. (The one with the Afghan woman on the cover.) The plane photo is on page 50-51 and is captioned:
Sanarate, Guatemale 1976.
'On a rescue mission after an earthquake, a plane caught by a crosswind crashes. Moments earlier, Madden had landed on this same road; he took the photo through the window of his plane.'
I presume since it's a National Geo photograph/photographer, it is authentic...."

Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2003.   Comments (3)

Pool Shark — pool shark Mark Allsop was kind enough to send along this photo of him and his kids on holiday in Australia. Thanks, Mark.
Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2003.   Comments (6)

Indian Ghost, Part II — Kentaro Mori managed to unearth the source for that ghost photo that scared so many people in India (see below). Click images for larger versions.

  ghost
Posted: Sun Sep 21, 2003.   Comments (3)

Hurricane Isabel? — hurricane isabelA photo described as a tanker approaching Hurricane Isabel at sea has been spreading around though email. And I have to admit, I've contributed to its spread, forwarding it on to friends and family. But David Emery informs us that it's a hoax. Well, the picture itself is real. But it doesn't show Hurricane Isabel. Instead, it shows a tanker approaching Tropical Cyclone Graham. But whether it's Isabel or Graham, it's still a really cool photo.
Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2003.   Comments (1)

Indian Ghost Hoax — indian ghost A newspaper in the Indian city of Tiruchirappalli published a picture of a boy with an eerie ghost hovering behind him. They claimed the boy had encountered the ghost while on a school picnic, and went into a coma. Now the ghost was stalking other boys. As a result, families throughout the region started keeping their kids home, out of school. The photo, of course, was a photoshopped fake. More details here.
Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2003.   Comments (0)

More about that guy and the bus — bus Got an email from Kentaro Mori who runs a Brazilian weblog about hoaxes (he also translated my hoax photo test into Portuguese at one point). He took a look at the video of that guy ducking under the bus. Whereas I thought the guy must be on the opposite side of the bus, employing a trick of perspective to make it look like the bus was going over him, Kentaro analyzed some of the frames of the video a little more closely and suggests that the bus is actually going over him. Could be. If so, hopefully it was a staged stunt, otherwise I can imagine the heart attack the guy must have given the bus driver (who doesn't appear to even slow down).
Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2003.   Comments (3)

Playing Chicken with a Bus — Here's a suspicious bit of video forwarded by Mara (who should get a prize for finding this kind of stuff). It shows a young man ducking to the ground as a bus rushes over him. Personally I think he's not actually under the bus. He's on the opposite side of the bus.
Posted: Mon Sep 15, 2003.   Comments (0)

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