It's the invasion of the hoaxes!

www.kansascity.com Posted on Wed, Jan. 15, 2003 By EDWARD M. EVELD and LISA GUTIERREZ The Kansas City Star

Has somebody really cloned a human being? Or are the folks at Clonaid putting us on?

It's the hoax question. Again.

Bombarded with information, we constantly confront the puzzle of what to believe and what not to believe, from crop circles to John Edwards' "Crossing Over."

As hoaxes and big lies fall all around us -- there's no Bigfoot, no tainted Coca-Cola -- it's amazing we believe anyone about anything. But we do.

Even post-Watergate. Even post-Enron. Even though government officials, corporate executives, doctors and scientists have lost some of their aura of authority.

We like to think of ourselves as more sophisticated and more skeptical than ever. Certainly more so than those '60s rubes who fell for the cons of Frank Abagnale Jr., glorified now in the movie "Catch Me If You Can."

Yet even hoax "experts" admit to looking twice at that photo of the 80-pound monster cat on the Internet. And the president of Venezuela believed it was Fidel Castro on the phone last week, falling prey to a prank by two Miami disc jockeys.

And the women competing on TV's "Joe Millionaire" believe the good-looking bachelor is worth millions. But he's not. (Or is he?)

Thanks largely to the Internet -- that World Wide Web of deceit that warns of tainted perfume strips and offers free Gap clothes -- hoaxing is in its heyday.

"I think we're living through another golden age of hoaxes," said Alex Boese of San Diego, curator of the Museum of Hoaxes, an Internet site that chronicles history's more famous hoaxes (www.museumofhoaxes.com).

"In our culture we have very open minds about new things. So when you're very open to new possibility, you can easily get hoaxed."

Boese, 34, became fascinated with hoaxes while working on a history of science degree at the University of California-San Diego. He began collecting stories of the weird and wacky and posted them on his Web site in 1997. Museum of Hoaxes -- the book -- came out in November.

Boese's research took him back to 1726, where he found the tale of Mary Toft, a peasant woman in a small English town who gave birth to rabbits.

Made you stop, didn't it? People are especially fascinated with hoaxes concerning bodily atrocities, Boese said.

"Birth and extreme births have always been kind of a fascination with people," Boese said. In honor of Clonaid, he added birth hoaxes to his Web site.

The media have exposed hoaxes but have, in their history, done better perpetuating them. Media hijinks began in the early 1800s, Boese said, when America's penny press was hunting bigger circulations. Editors figured there wasn't enough real news to grab readers' attention. So why not make some up?

The first big scam was the Great Moon hoax. In 1835 the New York Sun ran stories claiming that British scientists had discovered life on the moon. Lunar unicorns. And beavers that stood on two feet and lived in huts.

But wait, there was more! A race of winged humans living on the moon!

Now the Internet is an engine of hoaxes, urban legends and rumors, but it also can be useful in stopping them in their tracks. Or at least trying to.

A Web site at hoaxbusters.ciac.org -- its logo is a court jester with the international slash through his tasseled headpiece -- tries to give visitors a heads-up about current e-mail hoaxes.

Rose Konopka, a cyber-security analyst for the U.S. Department of Energy in Livermore, Calif., said she and colleagues launched the site because they were bombarded by inquiries about hoaxes, to the point they couldn't focus on real computer security problems.

The Web site quickly grew popular within the Energy Department and then with the general public, she said.

When Konopka gives computer security talks, her best advice about hoaxes is simple: "Don't be afraid to hit `delete.' "

But how do you know real from scam, serious from hoax? Repetition, for one thing. By now, she said, everyone should know there's no Nigerian fellow who needs to give you his bank account number.

There are other recognizable attributes. Any message that says "send this to everyone you know" is unlikely to be legitimate. Beware of messages that drop names of famous people or corporations -- or appear to originate from such lofty offices -- and of those that use technical language.

One widely distributed hoax told e-mail recipients that "if the program is not stopped, the computer's processor will be placed in an nth-complexity binary loop which can severely damage the processor." All made up.

Most hoax messages sound like chain letters. There's the hook, which seems plausible and plays on fear or sympathy, such as "virus alert" or "little girl is dying." Then comes the threat, the dire consequences if you delete the message. Often there's a request, either for money or for help in distributing the message.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, confronted with one health hoax after another, has devoted part of its Web site, www.cdc.gov/hoax(UNDERSCORE)rumors, to debunking bad information.

Under the heading "False Report: Poisonous Perfume Samples in the Mail," for example, the CDC states unequivocally that women are not dropping dead after inhaling free perfume samples that come in the mail.

With the anthrax scare, apparently, poisoned scents didn't seem out of the question.

Ditto for the bogus "Klingerman virus," which victims supposedly contracted by handling a sponge that arrived in a package labeled "A gift for you from the Klingerman Foundation."

Why do people try to pull off such hoaxes? They get a charge out of it. They like to see how far a published hoax can spread, Konopka said. "It's like writing viruses -- because you can," she said. "Just for kicks."

More often, hoaxsters want the attention. "Everybody wants to be a celebrity," said Boese of the hoax museum. "But not everybody has a good, compelling, truthful reason why other people would be interested in them.

"In that case, if you don't get what you want by telling the truth, you get what you want by telling a lie. And the more creative a lie you can come up with, the more attention you'll get."

Case in point: The infamous Taco Bell April Fool's joke in 1996, when the fast-food chain made a bogus announcement that it bought the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia and would rename it the Taco Liberty Bell.

People got so mad that Taco Bell quickly owned up to the joke.

Maybe the company would have gotten more attention if it had cloned a baby.

Technological advances, especially in the biomedical field recently, make almost anything seem possible now. Scientists have cloned a sheep, so what's so far-fetched about a cloned human?

Falling for the far-fetched doesn't necessarily make us suckers. Not in Boese's book anyway. "I think you have to keep a sense of humor about it."

To reach Edward M. Eveld, features writer, call (816) 234-4442 or send e-mail to eeveld@kcstar.com.

To reach Lisa Gutierrez, features reporter, call (816) 234-4987 or send e-mail to lgutierrez@kcstar.com.

Laughing matters?

See more hoaxes:

• www.museum of hoaxes: A look at famous hoaxes throughout history. Test your skills at spotting hoax photos.

• www.stiller.com/hoaxa.htm: An alphabetical list of common hoaxes -- computer viruses and others.

Avoid hoaxes:

...hoaxbusters.ciac.org: Warns about current e-mail hoaxes. Run by employees of the U.S. Department of Energy in Livermore, Calif.

...www.cdc.gov: Debunks health hoaxes. Run by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention.