About the Museum
The Museum of Hoaxes is dedicated to promoting knowledge about hoaxes. (Click here for opening hours, etc.) On our blog we post about dubious- sounding claims, and whatever else strikes our fancy. The site is also home to the Hoax Photo Database, the Hoax Forum, and the Hoaxipedia.

Web Hoax Museum

RUDE ROVER
The Christmas dog with no class! He sings and toots Jingle Bells.
INFLATABLE TREE
Who needs the hassle of a real Christmas tree?
FARTING SANTA
Go ahead and pull his finger!

Do they have little gold discs on them, with a message to the Universe from Richard Nixon, like on the Voyager Spacecratft? Dick to the Stars, as it where. Cosmic Dick. Stop me before I Dick again

I'm sorry I put an extra "t" in "Spacecraft", but Dick was kinda "craft-T"... I told you to stop me, and now it's too late. Do they have these for Sun-Dogs, too? MoonDogs?

BangBang Raoul's silver hammer came down on his head, BangBang Raoul's silver hammer made sure Hairy's Dead. Talk about a cosmic dick.

I want one. Not because I believe in it, but because I think it would be fun seeing the looks I would get when someone asks me to explain what it is.

There is an error in the picture of the solar system on the tags. They only show rings on the sixth planet, Saturn. But we now know that Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune have rings too. This might confuse the aliens and result in your being returned to the wrong solar system. Not good.

Take this seriously
I took something like this as no more than a hoax once
and look where the aliens dumped me :(

Don't forget to buy matching tags for your luggage to make sure it gets on the same flight.

Captain Al: Yeah but because they're not as readily visible as Saturn's (nowhere near that infact) they don't make a really good reference...

Africa and Europe are the same continent, according to the picture.

Soldant, they are not as readily visible when viewed from earth-based telescopes. During a fly-by mission they become more obvious. That is how they were discovered. An alien civilization capable of interstellar flight would surely be able to detect their existance. Also, if our solar system is any example, it may be that all gas giant planets have rings and therefore the aliens would expect them to be there.

I have a tattoo of the Earth on my ankle. Maybe I should add the rest of the solar system, just in case--what if the aliens lost the dog tag?

And wouldn't an alien race with the technology to get here (and the courtesy to bring you back after the abduction) be organized enough to remember where they got you from?

Maybe I should get these tags for my dogs. Who knows if the aliens could read their microchips?! AAAGH!

Captain Al, I think you'll find that they wouldn't be as good a reference point as the rings of saturn. Remember that the flybys had optical aid as they were probes, not humans, and we would (probably) be dealing with an actual life form. Now if they did have the natural optical ability to discern the rings, it might have been worthwhile marking them. Or they could use a technological way (like the probes) to detect them. However I'm willing to bet the tags were designed with easily discernable and obvious information in mind so that even the lowest of alien intelligence could figure out where the person came from, hence marking the rings of Saturn, the most obvious, instead of the sparse and faint rings of Juipter, Uranus and Neptune.

What I also find interesting is that they define Pluto as a planet on this dog tag. That's pushing it a bit far, since I'm on the side of Pluto being a large KB object instead of a planet. In saying that if they were going to include something as insignificant as that they may as well have thrown in all rings, the astroid belt, Oort cloud, and every other piese of misc crap too.

I still think it is a mistake to leave the rings off Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune just because they are not normally visible from inside Earth's atmosphere. That would be a sure sign the creatures who drew the picture were not very advanced. (And parts of Neptune's rings have been photographed from Earth.)
Also, the fact that Uranus' rings, like its axis, are tilted almost 90 deg gives another clue about which solar system you originated from. So the 7th planet should be a circle with a vertical line through it. It's part of our cosmic fingerprint.

You may have a valid point about Pluto. However, parts of the dog tag were taken from the plaque on the two Pioneer spacecraft:

http://spaceprojects.arc.nasa.gov/Space_Projects/pioneer/PN10&11.html#plaque

The plaque was designed by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake. They chose to include Pluto and leave out the asteroid belt, comets, etc. I guess if that's good enough for them, it's good enough for me.

I'd be more concerned with the pulsars.

If they can reverse-engineer the pulsar map, firstly by removing the estimated speed of light delays to the point of origin that they are guessing we forgot to remove (as a pulsar's rate decreases over time), and secondly by adding their own delays (from wherever they are), and thirdly by judging the overall delays (by the decay of the ultrapure U-238 sample included on the cover), and fourthly by reversing the motion of all pulsars and the POI, and fifthly actually figure out which pulsars are referenced (assuming they figure out the timescale too, and the fact that the U-238 was included as a timestamp), then they have to figure out that the numbers are rates of pulsing and *not* distances (the distance measurement is pretty useless, since we don't know it very well anyway).... if they can do all that, how hard do you think it will be for them to decide we were primitive enough to only see rings around one of the four gas giants? (That may all sound complex, but really it is much harder than that even)

You might find this interesting: Reading the Pulsar Map

Also, the main problem with video signals (other than monochrome) is that any life not from earth (and much on it too) most likely can't see colors the same as us, either in number of colors or peak Hz. A tri-color signal would be bad enough, one of our monitors/tvscreens could end up as visually useful to them as a heater or tanning lamp is to us.

No, that didn't have much to do with the topic, just random conjecture. There is a video signal on the record though.

I think it is in monochrome.

Captain Al I'm trying to track down an out-of-print book that had a CD duplication of the Voyager golden record. Also I think that the people who made the tags don't understand much of the information anyway and, like most things, shoved it on there for a quick sale.

Splarka: Isn't it in colour? At least, that's what the info on this site seems to suggest: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html

Soldant, I still have not figured out how to locate Earth using the pulsar map even after reading the link posted by Splarka. I'll just have to trust that our crack team of scientists did a good job.
Maybe the dog tag company can sell copies of that Voyager CD. Then if someone is abducted while listening to their Walkman, they can just hand it over to the aliens.

'Due to circumstances beyond his knowledge or control, Victor Quanducci was suddenly ejected from the Universe like a watermelon seed, and never heard from again.' -B.Kliban. (He only left his shoes behind, on the sidewalk). Doesn't anyone remember that "Dog tags" come in PAIRS? One goes around your neck, and the other one gets secured to or inside your right boot, if you're going into combat. The theory being that if you're hit with an arty shell, or step on a large mine, your foot will probably be left, and may be the only thing left to identify your remains. Oh, and right-handed people who step on a mine, are 3 times more likely to do so with their left foot. Pretty thought.

Besides, even if you believe in alien abduction -If they're smart enough to find and abduct you, and supposing they even WANT to return you, wouldn't they already know where?

Hmm, there are 20 (of the ~115) in color, apparently. Suddenly my previous rant is topical.

The Voyager record contains about 20 color pictures, and at first it might seem a mystery how these could be extracted from 16 levels of gray. This picture of the solar spectrum is the first color image on the record, and someone recovering the image would note that it is actually recorded on the record three times in succession, with only the gray levels being different between the three recordings. The black absorption lines extending through the rainbow pattern are distinct for any G2 star like our own sun. A civilization familiar with solar spectroscopy should be able to recognize this as the red, green, and blue portion of a solar spectrum. They should then realize that the color image can be reconstructed by making a composite of the three images, one on top of the other, with the 16 shades of gray being interpreted as 16 shades of red, green, or blue in each layer of the image.

How *would* an alien civilization be expected to see such a picture. Imagine an alien race giving us a picture recorded in 4 EM spectrum colors, two in microwave, one in ultraviolet, and one in gamma (and maybe a few extra sonic wavelengths, they could have sonar in their foreheads).

...

Actually, don't.

Makes my head hurt.

As for the sounds, similar problem. Though it is hard to imagine a species that can't detect sonic vibrations at some level or other.

As for the map. Any civilization that could reach us could probably find us via the map, and probably not forget where we came from. However, if the kidnapped aliens/specimins in "Flight of the Navigator" had such tags, the ship wouldn't have needed to get the backup copies of its star charts from the kid.

Most of the images used on the record (reproduced in black and white), together with information about its compilation, can be found in the book Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record by Carl Sagan, F.D. Drake, Ann Druyan, Timothy Ferris, Jon Lomberg and Linda Salzman (1978), ISBN 0394410475 (hardcover); ISBN 0345283961 (paperback). A CD-ROM version was issued by Warner New Media in
1992.

Is that the CD you mean? if it is a CD version of a book it might not have the audio samples, however.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0394410475/

I think something fun would be to duplicate the record as close as possible, mail it to Nasa, with a slightly degraded sample of U238 (some U234 Th230, Ra226, and Pb206), and a note: "Sorry if am giving late you this back. Translation delays and if time travel nonaccuracies. Thanks you great full for music, became tops hit chart million future in years your. Dick Clark says hi."

Captain Al I wouldn't worry about it, I didn't even bother trying to figure it out.

Splarka that's the one I was on about. As for the life thing yeah, it's a difficult situation, especially when you look at the larger idea of searching for life. We can only comment on what we can see here on Earth, but out there life could exist in places humans could never tread.

Oh well. In any case if someone gets abducted I'm willing to bet they're screwed anyway. I mean what's the point of picking someone up and putting them back down, if not for some sort of moral reason? And if the aliens don't have any sense of that, then we're really messed.