By Sharon Hill via The Huffington Post
It’s been a hot time for hoaxing thanks to the Internet. With Photoshop, citizen journalism sites, YouTube, and postboards for the latest photo leaks, it is way too easy to send a lie half way around the world before the truth can pull its shoes on.
This iconic image of the Lock Ness monster was hoaxed by Hugh Gray in 1933. (source)
In this post, I wrote about a busy week in paranormal-themed news. In chatting with a correspondent — Jeb Card, Visiting Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department of Miami University — over a shared interest in the state of the paranormal today or “occulture,” we got to talking about the state of hoaxing.
Make no mistake, hoaxing has always been around. Hoaxers have been trying to fool people by displaying their special skills (scams) or stupendous stories since the beginning of civilization, I think. But there is a particular history of hoaxing in occulture. Lately, it has gotten more frequent (or we sure notice it more), more absurd (to outdo the last one) and more involved (because the payout can be big while the scrutiny greater).
There are many famous hoaxes from this scene. It’s hard to say if it’s more common now than in the past. Some of the hoaxes, notes Jeb, have been very influential in the creation of popular folklore. Big ones have defined UFOlogy: Roswell and the Men in Black. Not everyone would conclude these are deliberate hoaxes — there is a grain of truth to them — but they went way out of control and now there are hoaxed videos, documents and tales based on these events that never happened the way the lore says it did. Stories like that, which have taken on a life of their own as if they were true, are called “fakelore.”
The Bigfoot field is trampled over with fake footprints, stories, casts, photos and videos. It can’t be denied that the majority of Bigfoot stories are unbelievable, without supporting evidence, or obvious hoaxes. Every new bit of Bigfoot “evidence” these days makes us roll our eyes and say “SERIOUSLY!?” This reputation is damaging to those who truly believe something is out there to be found. The credibility of Bigfoot researchers scrapes the bottom of the barrel. The history of hoaxes colors this topic deeply when we realize that the seminal story of “Bigfoot,” Ray Wallace’s trackway, was revealed to be a hoax.
Actually, the same can be said for the Loch Ness Monster. The iconic Nessie photo — the long-neck arching out of the rippling water — was hoaxed.
A longtime follower of the occulture fields, Jeb says he can’t think of a time when these communities weren’t awash with . . .
Related articles
- Inside Source Claims “Shooting Bigfoot” Documentary Climax is Just a Big Hoax (illuminutti.com)
- Foiled Again: Lake Monster, Bigfoot Body and Alien Humanoid All in One Week (illuminutti.com)
- Where’s the Beef? Thoughts on the Lack of Paranormal Evidence (illuminutti.com)
- List of UFO-related hoaxes (Wikipedia)
- Join Us for Sharon Hill’s Workshop: “I Doubt That: The Media Guide to Skepticism” (randi.org)
- Yet Another Sylvia Browne Fiasco (randi.org)
- The Internet: A Superhighway of Paranormal Hoaxes and Fakelore. (zedie.wordpress.com)
- Score: Aliens-1 Bigfoot-0 (yankeeskeptic.com)
- The Loch Ness Monster Search & Bigfoot Mystery (disclose.tv)
- Rumors, hoaxes and myths of the week, then I tell you how to sort through it (idoubtit.wordpress.com)
- Friends spreading Internet hoaxes? How to make them stop (today.com)
Hello initiates and welcome to module one of the Illumicorp video training course. I would like to officially welcome you as a member of the team.
This week was the 
Dobbs’ offscreen partner tells Jeff that internet commentators were picking apart the film’s final scene, saying, “at the end you see some sort of scuffle and Rick with his gun, and then Morgan Matthews, the director, gets knocked over by something.. can’t really tell what’s going on, and then at the end he’s in a hospital. Doesn’t really explain what happened to him.”
I am that annoying Facebook friend who can smell an Internet hoax a mile away. It’s a skill I had to develop as an entertainment reporter because I often ran across stories or received tips that were about as reliable as the R train on a weekend. My protocol is made up of a few simple questions:
By 
Today we’re going to delve into a modern Internet-borne legend: the story of time traveler John Titor, said to have come from the future, and briefly stopped by the year 2000 to make some Internet forum posts. That, my friends, is essentially the beginning and the end of the story. However, this is Skeptoid, and we can’t stop there. There’s something to learn from every urban legend. Even in cases where the legend itself has no connection to any actual events or history, the fact that it has nevertheless managed become a legend offers a lesson. Moreover, the thinner a story is, the stronger is the urge to dismiss it out of hand, which is never a responsible type of analysis. So let’s take a look at our apocryphal friend from another time, John Titor.
Titor was here on a military mission, he said. He’d been sent back from 2036 to 1975 to retrieve an 
So the skeptical mind might well slap a palm to the forehead and wonder why the John Titor story has become well known. Anyone can go onto virtually any Internet forum and say anything they like. There is no editorial review. You can say you’re Mickey Mouse, you can say you’re the reincarnation of Napoleon, you can say you’re from the future. People also impersonate one another all the time; it’s likely that more than one person who read John Titor posts decided to make their own. Any given random Internet post, that is not connected to an established body of posts from the secured account of a known individual, has no meaningful provenance. Similarly, there’s no serious reason to suspect that anonymous faxes or phone calls into radio shows are not crank calls; it happens many times every day.
Poring over every single detail for inconsistencies and potential government tampering, people who buy the moon landing 
In spiritualism
James Van Praagh is a self-proclaimed medium who claims he has a gift that allows him to hear messages from just about anyone who is dead. According to Van Praagh, all the billions and billions and billions of dead people are just waiting for someone to give him their names. That’s all it takes. Give Van Praagh a name, any name, and he will claim that some dead person going by that name is contacting him in words, fragments of sentences, or that he can feel their presence in a specific location. He has appeared on “Larry King Live,” where he claimed he could feel the presence of Larry’s dead parents. He even indicated where in the room this “presence” was coming from. He took phone calls on the air and, once given a name, started telling the audience what he was “hearing” or “feeling”. Van Praagh plays a kind of twenty-questions game with his audience. He goes fishing, rapidly casting his baited questions one after the other until he gets a bite. Then he reels the fish in. Sometimes he falters, but most of the fish don’t get away. He just rebaits and goes after the fish again until he rehooks. The fish love it. They reward Van Praagh’s hard work by giving him positive feedback. This makes it appear to some that he is being contacted by spirits who are telling him that being dead is good, that they love those they left behind, and that they are sorry and forgive them everything.
DENVER (CBS4) – One Denver psychic has been convicted of theft, a second was arrested this month in California and Denver prosecutors are still seeking to arrest a third psychic accused of convincing clients she was a “witch doctor.”
How is it possible to get relief from swelling, pain, nausea, headaches, anxiety, and an assortment of other ailments without the use of medicine or surgery? It happens all the time and has been going on for centuries. It’s called by many names but these days it’s mostly called “
They just wave their hands over the patient and “feel” the energy moving. The patient feels it, too. Great stuff but what’s really going on? How did so many different people independently discover energy healing? It must be because there really is energy that can be manipulated to bring about healing, right? Not necessarily.
The zombie drama “
James Randi has an international reputation as a magician and escape artist, but today he is best known as the world’s most tireless investigator and demystifier of paranormal and pseudoscientific claims.
Reiki (pronounced ray-key) is a form of 
Reiki healers differ from acupuncturists in that they do not try tounblock a person’s ki, but to channel the ki of the universe so that the client or patient heals. The channeling is done with the hands, and like TT no physical massaging is necessary since ki flows through the body of the healer into the patient. The reiki master claims to be able to draw upon the energy of the universe and increase his or her own energy while performing a healing. Reiki healers claim to channel ki into ill or injured individuals for “rebalancing.” Depending on the training and beliefs of the healer, reiki is used to treat a wide array of ailments. Larry Arnold and Sandra Nevins claim in The Reiki Handbook (1992) that reiki is useful for treating brain damage, cancer, diabetes, and venereal diseases. Many reiki healers are more modest and treat lesser problems such as fatigue or muscle soreness. I was once treated by a reiki practitioner for a wrist injury. The treatment didn’t work because I was a non-believer, or so I was told. If the healing fails—and it will inevitably fail for such things as cancer—it is because the patient is resisting the healing energy. Non-belief is one of the great blocks to healing energy. There is a reason for that, which we will explore below.
This scam involves making a series of opposite predictions (on winners in the stock market, football games, or the like) and sending them to different groups of people until one group has seen your perfect track record sufficiently to be duped into paying you for the next “prediction.”
Speaking of Theresa Caputo, that’s 
There is the pure quackery that he features and promotes, such as psychic scammers like 
The 
Scientific studies of these pseudosciences demonstrate that they are not valid personality assessment tools, yet each has many satisfied customers who are convinced they are accurate.
As true believers are wont to say: the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. That is, just because there is no compelling scientific evidence that subtle energy exists doesn’t mean that such energy doesn’t exist. True, but belief in subtle energy is based on 
“Resonate with natural frequencies” – they can’t even be bothered to make up their own ridiculous pseudoscientific technobabble. Improving blood flow by separating blood cells is also an old scam. We have evolved very robust mechanisms to ensure optimal delivery of oxygen to our tissues. There is no simple way to “improve” this in a healthy person. These mechanisms may not be adequate in someone with advanced disease affecting the pulmonary or cardiovascular systems, neither is a little wrist band going to have any effect in such serious conditions.
They quote Einstein and E=mc2 – it’s so sciencey. Yes, all atoms vibrate and have energy (unless they are at absolute zero). That’s called heat. None of this explains how their chip, or anything, can emit “subatomic energies” (what energy, exactly, is that?), and how this energy is transferred to the blood of the wearer. How is a computer chip “programmed” to do this? Are they saying that the energy of atoms responds to the programming inside a computer chip?
Harsha Maddula, a Northwestern University pre-medical student from Long Island, N.Y., went missing Sept. 22, last seen leaving an off-campus party in Illinois. Police and volunteer searchers were unable to find him, but Maddula’s family said reassuring words from psychics had raised their spirits.
Indeed, as a news article on Michigan Live.com noted, the mother of a missing woman will be seeking advice from a nationally-known psychic next week: “The mother of 
Well, well, well. 
AUBURN.—Unsatisfied customer Abraham Char filed suit against an Auburn psychic, according to the 
A man dressed in a military-style “
More than two centuries have passed since humans first started using 
Bad news for 
Psychic mediums perform one-on-one sessions for sitters. Stage mediums typically offer personal readings, but they also perform short 
Ever since 1969 when 
The Martian dust has barely had time to settle after the landing of 
If the two suns look oddly familiar, you might be a “Star Wars” fan. Turns out, the image is a photo of an actual Martian sunset taken by NASA’s Spirit rover in 2005 overlain with the double sunset that appears on the planet 
Today (August 7, 2012) marks the 84th birthday of the one and only James Randi, the man loved (some might say worshipped) by skeptics the world round and squarely hated by just about everyone who claims to have a paranormal power of some kind.
This alleged trick, reportedly witnessed by thousands of people, involves an Indian 
