About the Museum of Hoaxes
The Museum of Hoaxes is dedicated to promoting knowledge about hoaxes. (Click here for opening hours, etc.) On our blog we post about whatever dubious-sounding claims come across our path on a day-by-day basis. In our archives we have hundreds of articles about the most fascinating and notorious deceptions throughout history, from the middle ages to the present.
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Abel Raises Caine
Back when I was writing The Museum of Hoaxes (the book) I exchanged a few emails with Jenny Abel, daughter of professional hoaxer Alan Abel. During the course of our correspondence she mentioned that she was making a movie about her father. Now I see that she's completed the movie, titled Abel Raises Caine. It can be seen at the Slamdance Film Festival in LA next week. Phil Reisman describes it in this way (his article also tells about some of Abel's more famous hoaxes): It's an entertaining and at moments a laugh-out-loud film about growing up in a creative, dysfunctional family in the vein of "Capturing the Friedmans" and "Crumb," but minus the sinister elements that made those documentaries especially creepy. Using archival footage of now defunct talk shows, press conferences and long-forgotten news broadcasts, Jenny Abel attempts to explain her antic father, who has never held a 9-to-5 job and it would appear has never had much of an attachment to the truth. About anything.
The only Abel hoax I describe on this website is his most famous one, the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals. But I included many more of his hoaxes in my book. I've been meaning to describe more of his hoaxes on this site for ages. Just never got around to it.