Fact or Fraud? A Look at Notable Hoaxes
August 13th, 2010
Yesterday, Jenny might have found one of the most snide and clever ways to quit a job. Using a dry erase board, she posed for a series of photographs explaining her reasoning for quitting, making sure to mention plenty of juicy office details.
The dry-erase messages reveal how Jenny overheard her boss call her a “HOPA” (Hot Piece of Ass) on the phone. Given her facial expressions in the photographs, she seems to have no reservations dishing out these details — along with info on the excessive amount of time her ex-boss spends playing Farmville each week.
After the article was re-tweeted and Facebook’d beyond belief, we found out the whole thing was a hoax. (Either way, this little slideshow series serves as a fresh comical break from work.)
Take a look for yourself over at Mashable.
While it turned out to be a prank, the whole occurrence caused us to wonder…what other media or Internet hoaxes have succeeded in fooling the public?
Bill Cosby’s Death
Poor Bill Cosby. August 2, 2010, marked the fourth time the comedian had been wrongly reported dead. “Bill Cosby Died” was the top hit on Twitter for the majority of the day, and “is Bill Cosby dead” was the second-most searched-for query on Google for an afternoon. The next day he appeared on CNN* in an attempt to call an end to the repeated fabrications.
*Embedding not allowed. Click here to watch.
Air Force One Graffiti
In April 2006, Marc Ecko of Marc Ecko Enterprises created an elaborate hoax to promote all forms of freedom of expression, including graffiti. A video appeared to show vandals on a nighttime run, breaching security at Andrew Air Force Base in order to spray-paint graffiti on the President’s plane. After the video began circulating on the web, the Air Force actually checked to see whether the plane had been vandalized.
Falcon and the Balloon
Falcon Heene, a 6-year-old boy from Colorado, was thought to have floated off in a homemade balloon in October 2009. During a live interview on CNN, the truth slipped out when he told his father, “You had said we did this for a show.” The boy’s parents had appeared twice in the ABC reality show “Wife Swap.” The
show promoted the Heene family as storm chasers who also “devote their time to scientific experiments that include looking for extraterrestrials and building a research-gathering flying saucer to send into the eye of the storm.”
Jennifer Wilbanks, Runaway Bride?
In spring 2005, Jennifer Wilbanks disappeared from her home town days before her wedding ceremony. After a nationwide hunt that captivated news stations all throughout the country, Wilbanks called her fiancé from New Mexico, explaining she’d been kidnapped and sexually assaulted by a Hispanic man and a white woman. In actuality, she caught a case of cold feet and fled the town on a bus.
Bigfoot Discovery
In August 2008, a pair of hunters claimed to possess the most definitive proof yet of Bigfoot, an animal that scientists say does not exist: DNA evidence and photographs of a dead Bigfoot specimen found in the woods of northern Georgia. One photograph provided to the news media showed what resembled a gorilla — or maybe an old sheepskin rug — lying twisted in a freezer, with a dollop of intestines protruding from its belly. To the dismay of cryptozoologists everywhere, it turned out to be nothing more than a gorilla suit.