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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.

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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!

The storm photos are a hoax--they are from the collection of 2004 storm photos on the Extreme Instability site. They were in Iowa, USA, not Bunbury, and can be seen in their original state here:

http://extremeinstability.com/2004photos.htm

you guys have certainly deminished the credibility though meteorological analysis...
I debated these photos last night, through knowing the south west region very well, this is definately not the landscape or cloud formations seen in even the worst storms. The road aggregate colour, lack of fencing, yellow road line, road sign, housing style, driving side, and most of all crops (what appear to be fence-less corn and pineapples crops!!!) All pointing to bullshit

Kimmy come home i miss you Honey Buns!

the one clear conclusion: there are a bunch of idiots out there who chase storms like the ones in the pictures, just to take more pictures.

Sometimes, PiercedFreak, the Storms chase the Idiots

Okay, I didn't mean to suggest that people chased by storms are idiots, so don't go there. What are you supposed to do if a big storm goes by? Not take a picture cuz somebody will think you are an idiot who chased it? No, you'd take that pic. I would. Urrrrrrrrrf

I mean, what if it wasn't a big storm, but The Full Moon, that came up, and you could take a picture of it? With its silver light bathing the valley, calling to you, telling you to run and get up on the hill to get closer to her, so you can HOWWWL and HOWWWWLL until your chest explodes? That would make a good picture... ggrr

Darn. Too late to really make much of a difference to the discussion. My sister told me about these pics this arvo, and we've established that they are not pics of tornadoes over Bunbury. Biggest problem being that the main tornado over Bunbury happened at 6am, a good 45 minutes before dawn!!

I'm in Perth, Western Australia. Strange I just saw this entry. I just watched a report on the local news about a waterspout just off the coast of Perth last evening. Of course, it didn't look anywhere as spectacular as these pics, but there's been some unusual weather around here over the last few days.

Tornadoes spin both clockwise and anti-clockwise, there is just more of one than the other in each hemisphere.

What I find most amazing, is that almost three quarters of the pictures are not of tornados at all, but of mesocyclones.

There certainly is a place called Bunbury, in Western Australia - a small coastal town approx, 30,000 people and I live here ..........
We certainly did have a huge tornado here on Monday 16th May - and it did cause a lot of damage - including moving a cathedral off its foundations. The pictures you can see of house, business damage are definately real - I can give street addresses for these.
The pictures of the "actual" tornado ?? I don't believe these are local - for a start it was pitch dark (6.10 am) when it hit - and is only recorded as being 100m across but it did 'hit' a swath of damage along a 10Km 'stretch'. The "landscape" in those photo's is totally strange to me !!.

Damn strange weather we've been having lately. First it's water restrictions, now massive storms and tornados.

And despite the storms, we'll still be on water restrictions for the foreseeable future. The weather bureau is still saying that it's going to be a drier than average winter here in Perth.

And looking at this week's forecast, I'll believe it - no rain predicted until this time next week!

I work for the Western Australian Agriculture Department. One of the photos has an unfenced suger crop in it. bunbury has no sugar crops, and no unfenced crops. These ARE very fake.

I did a round up a while ago of storm photos that had been floating around that day

I put them together on a site so you can see the real storm...

http://www.t00l.net/storm/

Okay, let me straighten some of you out, Otay? The Coriolis Effect refers to the effect of moving bodies in relation to the rotation of the Earth... that's all fine and dandy when we talk about the atmosphere, but we are talking about a downward, gravity-driven movement, turned into rotation not by the movement of the atmoshere in relation to the Earth's rotation, but by its relative latitudinal postion to the Earth's poles. It's a gravity-driven process, not a deflective process of the atmosphere. Damn. Read a book

Okay, final clarification: The storm rotation? Coriolis Effect. Yes. Definately. The sink/drain rotation? Relative Latitude. Okay? Okay. Quiz on this tomorrow, so cram big-time. That's my motto: Cram It.

harry are you sure? I just tried to look it up on the internet, here's some webpages I found:
http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/(Gh)/guides/mtr/fw/crls.rxml
and here's another one:
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/resources/basics/coriolis-understanding.htm
there's a whole bunch by just googling "coriolis effect"
It's caused by a deflection process by the earth's rotation. Are you maybe thinking of tides?

Or do I just not understand it at all. As I wrote in my first post on it, I can't pretend to be an expert, that's just the way I've always understood it. I could just be misinterpreting it.