Say it ain’t so…Hoaxes have a long and storied history

Kirk Baird

Monday, Nov. 11, 2002 | 8:21 a.m.

In Texas, Colorado, Nebraska and Wyoming, the jackalope is a near legend. Postcards of the famed beast a large jack rabbit with antlers can be purchased at most any novelty store.

And some roadside diners even have mounted jackalope heads on the wall, next to deer, fish and other animal trophies.

The town of Douglas, Wyo., went so far as to declare itself the Jackalope Capital of America because, according to legend, the first creature was spotted there in 1829.

The funny thing is, no one's ever seen a living jackalope. Certainly there are no jackalopes in zoos or mounted in museums. And there's never been any footage of the fabled hare with horns shown on wildlife shows or on reruns of "In Search Of."

That's because the jackalope doesn't exist. It's simply a hoax, a tall tale made up by cowboys in the 1800s to explain noises they heard at night while sitting around the campfire.

But since when has the truth ever stood in the way of a good story?

"Tall tales are a big part of our culture, like jackalopes and Paul Bunyan," said Alex Boese, author of the just-released "The Museum of Hoaxes" (Dutton, $19.95). "You just tell these stories and kind of wink."

And Boese has heard and researched most of these stories for his book:

The infamous Cottingley Faries photograph fraud of 1917. The Swiss spaghetti tree harvest news story on April 1, 1957. And the April 1, 1996, full-page Taco Bell ad in the New York times stating the fast-food chain was purchasing the Liberty Bell and renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell.

These classics hoaxes aren't to be confused by such popular urban legends as: Walt Disney's body is in a cryogenic freeze, Mikey from the LIFE cereal commercials died from eating Pop Rocks and soda, or that a drawing of Humphrey Bogart was the model for the Gerber baby.

Boese finds a clear distinction between the two.

"Hoaxes have identifiable authors where urban legends belong to common culture and it's not clear that anybody originally wrote them trying to deceive anybody else," he said. "People tell (urban legends) with the intent of not trying to fool other people. They're just passing along information."

"Touristguy," for example.

Touristguy is a popular e-mail photo of an anonymous man in a dark jacket and ski cap standing atop the World Trade Center with one of the hijacked planes clearly in the background, moments away from crashing into the building.

An accompanying story said a digital camera was recovered amid the rubble and when the photos were retrieved, this haunting image was found.

The photo began popping up in e-mail queues all over the world shortly after Sept. 11.

A subsequent follow-up pic, with the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from "Ghostbusters" in place of the plane, showed just how easy it was to create the original fake photo.

"What happened with the Internet was, previously to hoax or get a wild story out to the public, you had to be connected to the media," Boese said. "There were a lot of gatekeepers you had to get through to get your voice to the public. But with the Internet, all those gatekeepers came crashing down."

Boese, 34, first became interested in hoaxes in the mid-'90s while working on his doctoral dissertation, "The Mermaid, The Moon, and The Hollow Earth," which dealt with the relationship between science and popular culture in antebellum America.

During his research, Boese noticed startling similarities between the number of hoaxes at the turn of both the 19th and 20th centuries.

He began posting some of the stories on a website he created, museumofhoaxes.com

The research soon turned into more of a hobby and later into a book, which, Boese joked, justifies all the hours spent on the website.

Boese said he remains fascinated by how our culture not only tolerates but celebrates hoaxes.

P.T. Barnum, the 19th century huckster, was celebrated for his shownmanship and tall tales.

Boese even credits him for helping to create a forgive-and-forget policy among the public when it came to being duped by media figures.

"It was really P.T. Barnum who started this: 'You can lie outrageously to the public, as long as as the public thinks that they're getting (entertainment), they'll tolerate it,' " he said. "He became one of the most revered men in America by doing that."

Of course, hoaxes can go awry.

Pope John VIII, who ruled from 853 to 855 A.D., was revealed to be a woman after she gave birth on the side of a road, as legend states. The story goes that Romans were so angered over the deceit, they tied the pope's feet together and dragged her behind a horse while stoning her until she died.

Historians still debate the veracity of the tale, but it shows the extremes the public will go to when deceived.

These days, however, perpetrate a hoax and at best you become a media darling -- Barnum -- and at worst you're censored.

Such as the Sony executive who created a fictitious movie critic, David Manning, from the Ridgefield Press to provide quotes for Sony and Columbia films: "Hollow Man" ("one helluva scary ride!"), "The Animal" ("another winner"), and actor Heath Ledger of "A Knight's Tale" ("this year's hottest new star").

When a Newsweek reporter uncovered the hoax, the executive, whose name was never revealed, was disciplined but allowed to keep his job.

"A lot of less-sophisticated cultures, if you tell a lie, your arm will be chopped off or worse," Boese said. "Our culture celebrates when people lie very well. As long as it's entertainment, we tend to forgive people who do that."

And that's the truth.