A video of a news segment about marshmallow farming in North Carolina recently appeared on youtube:


It looks like it was inspired by the BBC's famous Swiss Spaghetti Harvest April fool's day segment.

The reporter identifies himself as being from Channel 9 news in Iredell County. But there's no info about what year this first aired. So I sent the station an email to find out what they might know.

Back in September 2012, a video was uploaded to youtube showing a pig rescuing a baby goat that was supposedly stuck in a pond at a petting zoo.


The video got millions of views on youtube and was widely aired in the media (including being shown on Good Morning America, the NBC Nightly News, and Fox News). Yesterday, it was revealed to be entirely staged.

It was created for a Comedy Central series, "Nathan For You," which is debuting this week (thus the timing of the reveal). The pig was directed toward the goat by means of an underwater plexiglass ramp.

The New York Times has a fairly long article about the video hoax, including comments from some media critics who take the news organizations to task for not questioning the video. Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute says, "It really is embarrassing for the journalists who stumbled upon this and decided to promote it or share it with their audience. It's almost a form of malpractice."

Comedy Central has posted a follow-up video showing exactly how the original video was made.

Although this may appear to be footage from a newscast, it's actually a video purposefully designed to go viral, created by a Danish pr firm calling itself PublicAttack. On its youtube page you can find the same actor appearing in its other videos.

The car going through the ice is apparently a CG effect.

What part of this UFO sighting has been faked?


The answer is that the UFOs are, of course, fake, but so is everything else. Every part of this video — the car, the scenery, the clouds — is CGI. Wired explains:

Recently a video began circulating that appeared (despite suspiciously poor production values) to be an advertisement by Coca-Cola announcing a new "Coca-Cola-Bag." The idea was to do away with selling Coke in bottles and switch to biodegradable plastic bags made "in the unique Coca-Cola bottle shape."



The video claimed the idea came from Central America where many consumers supposedly already buy Coke in plastic bags in order to avoid paying the bottle deposit.

Gizmodo, Digital Journal, and WKMG Orlando were among those who posted about the video.

But Just-Drinks.com now says it has received confirmation from the Coca-Cola Co. that the Coke Bag is a hoax — though not one Coca-Cola was responsible for. The company says it has no idea who created the video.

Given the references to Central America, and the idea of Coke bags, I'm guessing the video may be an elaborate drug-themed joke.

On June 7, an Occupy Seattle activist, Logan Price, posted a video online that appeared to show an embarrassing scene from a private party of Shell Oil executives. Price explained, on his twitter page, that he had managed to infiltrate the party, which was intended to celebrate the launch of Shell's Arctic drilling program, and which was hosted at the top of the Seattle Space Needle.


The centerpiece of the party was a sculpture shaped like an iceberg, topped by a miniature oil rig that dispensed drinks for the guests. In the video, an elderly lady could be seen approaching the model rig, cup in hand, ready to be served the first drink. However, the drink dispenser malfunctioned and began squirting a brown liquid all over her as she screamed in shock.

"Turn it off!" an executive demanded. "I can't turn it off," another replied.



Soon after Price posted it, the video went viral online, spread by bloggers and news sites including Tree hugger, Seattle Post Intelligencer, Gothamist, Gizmodo, and Gawker. The symbolism seemed too perfect — an oil rig drink dispenser springs a leak at the launch party for an oil drilling program!

Of course, it was all just a little too perfect. Soon after being released, the video (as well as the entire event) was exposed as a hoax. Bloggers realized that the pr firm that had supposedly organized the event, Wainwright & Shore, wasn't a real pr firm. Its website had only recently been created. The hoax was traced to the activist group the Yes Men, working in collaboration with Occupy Seattle and Greenpeace. These groups took full credit for the hoax, and even posted another video showing a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the stunt. The elderly spray victim in the video turned out to be Dorli Rainey, an 84-year-old woman who had recently gained fame as a pepper-spray victim during a protest rally.


In a follow-up to the hoax, news outlets and some blogs received a statement appearing to come from Shell Oil denouncing the hoax. This statement also turned out to be a hoax.

Following the video hoax, the Yes Men also unveiled a hoax website, ArcticReady.com. The site purported to be an official Shell site touting how the melting of the polar ice caps, while unfortunate for the planet's climate, also offered exciting opportunities for new oil drilling. Shell Oil is, in fact, taking advantage of polar melting to start new drilling.


Links: gawker.com, Salon.com.

Over at livescience.com, Ben Radford analyzes a video that supposedly shows an angel falling to the floor of an Indonesian shopping mall. The video is said to have been taken on Sep 11, 2011.



Radford concludes that whoever created the video (and he's sure it's a fake) got the lighting all wrong when they inserted the animated angel.


He also quotes Derek Serra, a Hollywood visual effects artist, who notes: "look at the light hitting the building behind it: given its movement, we would see high contrast shadows from the window frame and tree move across the inside of the building as the light moves around, but those shadows are conspicuously absent."

Of course, true believers might respond that angelic light doesn't behave the same way that normal light does.

Regardless, the only real mystery remaining here is who created the video, and why.

Either it's a hoax, or a muggle wandered across a wizarding lesson. (via HuffPost)

I posted a brief description of the Australian legend of the Nullarbor Nymph back in 2004. This is what I wrote:


Now filmmaker Matthew Wilkinson has brought the legend to the screen. ABC News quotes him as saying:


The film just premiered. Based on the trailer, it looks like an instant classic.

Video created by filmmaker Jesse Rosten:

A video of a race between miniature cars floating above a track by means of "quantum levitation" was recently debunked. The intro screen to the video credited it to the (fictitious) "Japan Institute of Science and Technology," but the true creator was Sony and SCE Studio Liverpool. The Business Insider says: "the video was a ploy by Sony and developer SCE Studio Liverpool to promote the Wipeout 2048 game that's coming out on the PS Vita."



I'm assuming the video was inspired by a demonstration of "quantum levitation" conducted by the superconductivity group at Tel-Aviv University and posted on youtube a few months ago.

As posted recently by LaMa in the forum, a video recently began to circulate that appeared to have been created by a Danish girl who was trying to find the father of her child. She said the father had been a tourist in Denmark. They had had a one-night stand a year ago.



Turns out the video was actually created by Denmark's National Tourist Agency as part of a viral marketing campaign. The tourist agency has since issued an apology:


As a publicity stunt, I'd say the campaign was highly effective. But in terms of encouraging people to visit Denmark, I'm not so sure.