Mars is invading. Or so claims a resurrected hoax that claims that the Red Planet will soon appear as large as the Moon in the night sky. It’s a tweaked version of an earlier hoax from 2003, when Mars really was at its closest approach to Earth in thousands of years … but remained a … Read more
It was a big summer for Harry Potter. The seventh and final book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released, as was the fifth movie, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. After reading the first and seeing the second, I was reminded of a hoax I’ve had sitting on … Read more
Can a prescooler get drunk and even die from drinking hand sanitizer? The short answer is … yes, they can. The following e-mail describes swallowing a squirt of hand sanitizer was enough to make a four-year-old loopy and while it gets some of the specifics wrong — namely that the child couldn’t have had an … Read more
An e-mail claims that Mars will soon be looming so large in our skies that it will rival the moon. The truth is that while Mars did get very close to Earth a few years ago, that merely turned it into a slightly brighter red star in the sky. If it actually did get as … Read more
An old virus hoax stumbles back to virtual life with a debunking bait-and-switch that points to a real threat, then repeats the same tired warning. Date Captured: 8/6/07 Subject: Serious Virus Threat per CNN Report Be cautious of this. Here is a link to the snopes page: http://www.snopes.com/computer/virus/postcard.asp PLEASE SEND THIS TO EVERYONE ON YOUR … Read more
Ah, Bill Clinton. I’d almost forgotten about all the great hoaxes, urban legends and miscellaneous crap that was circulating the Internet back in the heady days of the Dot Boom. Now that his wife is looking to make a presidential run, it’s all floating back to the surface, as is illustrated by the email alleging … Read more
Snopes.com debunks the rumor that Willie Nelson quipped “It’s a good thing I had a bag of marijuana instead of a bag of spinach. I’d be dead by now” after his tour bus was raided for drugs, and in the wake of hundreds being sickened by E. coli-contaminated spinich.
Neil Armstrong long maintained that when he uttered his famous phrase “One Small Step for Man, One Giant Leap for Mankind”, there was an ‘a’ in there between ‘for’ and ‘Man’. Austrialian programmer Peter Shann Ford analyzed NASA’s recording of the phrase, and says Armstrong was right. It’d be nice to if other researchers confirmed the existance of the missing “a”, which has dogged Armstrong for years (as this account on Snopes.com shows).
In related Neil Armstrong news, despite myriad rumors to the contrary, he has not converted to Islam. And no, Mr. Gorsky didn’t get lucky when Armstrong touched down at Tranquility Base.
The “Virtual Card for You” e-mail hoax has mutated yet again, promising hard drive devastation in a slightly different form: that of an Olypmic torch that “burns” your hard drive. While it earns bonus points for imagry, “Invitation” remains just as false as its predecessors. Here’s the text of the email: Date Captured: 8/17/2006 Be … Read more
For the last few weeks I’ve seen people searching for “toxic chopsticks” on Nuketown, which I assumed was in regards to some sort of hoax, but since no one ever sent me the text, I couldn’t debunk it. This morning I tried searching Snopes.com and came up with the story “Chopsticks”. According to Snopes, the … Read more