Cry me a river

Urban legends often have nebulous origins.  As author Jan Harold Brunvand describes in his wonderful book The Choking Doberman and Other Urban Legends, "Urban legends are kissing cousins of myths, fairy tales and rumors.  Legends differ from rumors because the legends are stories, with a plot.  And unlike myths and fairy tales, they are supposed to be current and true, events rooted in everyday reality that at least could happen...  Urban legends reflect modern-day societal concerns, hopes and fears...  They are weird whoppers we tell one another, believing them to be factual.  They maintain a persistent hold on the imagination because they have an element of suspense or humor, they are plausible, and they have a moral."

It's not that there's anything wrong with urban legends per se.  A lot of the time, we're well aware that they're just "campfire stories" that are meant to scare, amuse, or otherwise entertain, and (absent of any further evidence) are just as likely to be false as true.  After all, humans have been storytellers for a very long time, and -- as a fiction writer -- I'd be out of a job if we didn't have an appetite for tall tales.

When it becomes problematic is when someone has a financial interest in getting folks to believe that some odd claim or another is true.  Then you have unethical people making money off others' credulity -- and often along the way obscuring or covering up outright any evidence to the contrary.  And it's worse still when the guilty party is part of the news media.

Which brings us to The Sun and the legend of the "Crying Boy."

Back in 1985 the British tabloid newspaper The Sun reported that a firefighter in Essex had more than once found undamaged copies of a painting of a crying child in houses that had otherwise been reduced to rubble by fires.  Upon investigation, they said, they found that the painting was by Italian painter Giovanni Bragolin.

If that wasn't weird enough, The Sun claimed they'd found out that Bragolin was an assumed name, and that the painter was a mysterious recluse named Franchot Seville.  Seville, they said, had found the little boy -- whose name was Don Bonillo -- after an unexplained fire had killed both of his parents.  The boy was adopted by a priest, but fires seemed to follow in his wake wherever he went, to the extent that he was nicknamed "El Diablo."  In 1970, the engine of a car the boy was riding in exploded, killing him along with the painter and the priest.

But, The Sun asked, did the curse follow even the paintings of the boy's tragic, weeping face?

It's not a headline, but we can invoke Betteridge's Law, wherein we learn that anything like that phrased as a question can be answered "No."  Further inquiries by less biased investigators found that the story had enough holes to put a Swiss cheese to shame.  There was no Don Bonillo; the model for the little boy was just some random kid.  Yes, Bragolin went by the pseudonym Franchot Seville, but Bragolin was itself an assumed name; the painter's real name was Bruno Amadio, and he was still alive and well and painting children with big sad eyes until his death from natural causes in 1981 at age seventy.

As far as the survival of the painting, that turned out not to be much of a mystery, either.  Bragolin/Seville/Amadio cranked out at least sixty different crying child paintings, from which literally tens of thousands of prints were made and then shipped out to department stores all across southern England.  They sold like hotcakes for some reason.  (I can't imagine why anyone would want a painting of a weepy toddler on their wall, but hey, you do you.)  The prints were made on a heavy compressed cardboard, and then coated with fire-retardant varnish.  Investigators Steven Punt and Martin Shipp actually purchased one of the prints and tried to set it alight deliberately, but the thing wouldn't burn.  The surmise was that when the rest of the house went up in flames, the string holding the frame to the wall burned through and the print fell face-down on the floor, protecting it from being damaged.

Of course, a prosaic explanation like that was not in the interest of The Sun, which survives by keeping sensationalized stories alive for as long as possible.  So no mention was made of Punt and Shipp and the probable explanation for the paintings' survival.  Instead, they repeated the claims of a "curse," and told readers that if they owned a copy of The Crying Boy and wanted to get rid of it, The Sun would organize a public bonfire to destroy the prints forever.

How they were going to accomplish this, given that the whole shtick had to do with the fact that the painting couldn't be burned, I have no idea.  But this evidently didn't occur to the readers, because within weeks The Sun had received hundreds of copies.  A fire was held along the banks of the Thames in which the mailed-in prints were supposedly destroyed, an event about which a firefighter who had supervised the burning said, "I think there will be many people who can breathe a little easier now."

This in spite of the fact that the whole thing had been manufactured by The Sun.  There would have been no widespread fear, no need for people to "breathe uneasily," if The Sun hadn't hyped the claim to begin with -- and, more importantly, ignored completely the entirely rational explanation for the few cases where the painting had survived a house fire.

It's probably unnecessary for me to say that this kind of thing really pisses me off.  Humans are credulous enough; natural conditions like confirmation bias, dart-thrower's bias, and the argument from ignorance already make it hard enough for us to sort fact from fiction.  Okay, The Sun is a pretty unreliable source to start with, but the fact remains that thousands of people read it -- and, presumably, a decent fraction of those take its reporting seriously.

The fact that it would deliberately mislead is infuriating.

The result is that the legend still persists today.  There are online sites for discussing curses, and The Crying Boy comes up all too frequently, often with comments like "I would never have that in my house!"  (Well, to be fair, neither would I, but for entirely different reasons.)  As Brunvand points out in The Choking Doberman, one characteristic of urban legends is that they take on a life of their own.  Word of mouth is a potent force for spreading rumor, and once these sorts of tales get launched, they are as impossible to eradicate as crabgrass.

But what's certain is that we do not need irresponsible tabloids like The Sun making matters worse.

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One hoax, well-toasted

One thing that really torques me is when people say "I did my research," when in fact what they did was a five-minute Google search until they found a couple of websites that agreed with what they already believed.

This is all too easy to do these days, now that any loudmouth with a computer can create a website, irrespective of whether what they have to say is well-thought-out, logical, or even true.  (And I say that with full awareness that I myself am a loudmouth with a computer who created a website.  To be fair, I've always been up front about the fact that I'm as fallible as the next guy and you shouldn't believe me out of hand any more than you do anyone else.  I maintain that the best principle to rely on comes from Christopher Hitchens: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."  This applies to me as well, and I do try my best not to break that rule.)

The problem is, it leaves us laypeople at sea with regards to trying to figure out what (and whom) to believe.  The solution -- or at least, a partial one -- comes with always cross-checking your sources.  Find out where a claim came from originally -- there are all too many examples of crazy ideas working their way up the ladder of credibility, starting out in some goofy publication like The Weekly World News, but being handed off like the baton in some lunatic relay race until they end up in places like Pravda, The Korea Times, and Xinhua.  (Yes, this has actually happened.)

The water gets considerably muddier when you throw Wikipedia into the mix.  Wikipedia is a great example of the general rule of thumb that a source is only as accurate as the least accurate person who contributed to it.  Despite that, I think it's a good resource for quick lookups, and use it myself for that sort of thing all the time.  A study by Thomas Chesney found that experts generally consider Wikipedia to be pretty accurate, although the same study admits that others have concluded that thirteen percent of Wikipedia entries have errors (how serious those errors are is unclear; an error in a single date is certainly more forgivable than one that gives erroneous information about a major world event).  Another study concluded that between one-half and one-third of deliberately inserted errors are corrected within forty-eight hours.

But still.  That means that between one-half and two-thirds of deliberately inserted errors weren't corrected within forty-eight hours, which is troubling.  Given the ongoing screeching about what is and is not "fake news," having a source that could get contaminated by bias or outright falsehood, and remain uncorrected, is a serious issue.

Plus, there's the problem with error sneaking in, as it were, through the back door.  There have been claims that began as hoaxes, but then were posted on Wikipedia (and elsewhere) by people who honestly thought what they were stating was correct.  Once this happens, there tends to be a snake-swallowing-its-own-tail pattern of circular citations, and before you know it, what was a false claim suddenly becomes enshrined as "fact."

Sometimes for years.

As an example, have you heard about the famous Scottish polymath Alan MacMasters, inventor of the electric toaster?

The only known photograph of MacMasters, ca. 1910

It was such a popular innovation that his name became a household word, especially in his native land.  More than a dozen books (in various languages) list him as the popular kitchen appliance's inventor.  The Scottish government's Brand Scotland website lauded MacMasters as an example of the nation's "innovative and inventive spirit."  The BBC cooking show The Great British Menu featured an Edinburgh-based chef creating an elaborate dessert in MacMasters's honor.  In 2018, the Bank of England polled the British public about who should appear on the newly-redesigned £50 note, and MacMasters was nominated -- and received a lot of votes.  A Scottish primary school even had an "Alan MacMasters Day," on which the students participated in such activities as painting slices of toast and building pretend toasters out of blocks.

But before you proud Scots start raising your fists in the air and chanting "Scotland!", let's do this another way, shall we?

Back in 2012, a Scottish engineering student named -- you guessed it -- Alan MacMasters was in a class wherein the professor cautioned students against using Wikipedia as a source.  The professor said that a friend of his named Maddy Kennedy had "even edited the Wikipedia entry on toasters to say that she had invented them."  Well, the real MacMasters and a friend of his named Alex (last name redacted, for reasons you'll see momentarily) talked after class about whether it was really that easy.  Turns out it was.  So Alex decided to edit the page on toasters, took out Maddy Kennedy's name, and credited their invention to...

... his pal Alan MacMasters.

Alex got pretty elaborate.  He uploaded a photograph supposedly of MacMasters (it's actually a rather clumsy digitally-modified photograph of Alex himself), provided biographical details, and generally tidied up the page to make it look convincing.

When Alex told MacMasters what he'd done, he laughed it off.  "Alex is a bit of a joker, it's part of why we love him," MacMasters said.  "The article had already been vandalized anyway, it was just changing the nature of the incorrect information.  I thought it was funny, I never expected it to last."

Remember the errors that the Chesney study found didn't get corrected?

This was one of them.

The problem was suddenly amplified when The Mirror found the entry not long after it was posted, and listed it as a "life-changing everyday invention that put British genius on the map."  By this time, both Alex and MacMasters had completely forgotten about what they'd done, and were entirely unaware of the juggernaut they'd launched.  Over the following decade, the story was repeated over and over -- including by major news outlets -- and even ended up in one museum.

It wasn't until July 2022 that an alert fifteen-year-old happened on the Wikipedia article, and notified the editors that the photograph of MacMasters "looked faked."  To their credit, they quickly recognized that the entire thing was fake, deleted the article, and banned Alex from editing Wikipedia for life.  But by that time the hoax page had been up -- and used as a source -- for ten years.

(If you're curious, the actual credit for the invention of the electric toaster goes to Frank Shailor, who worked for General Electric, and submitted a patent for it in 1909.)

The problem, of course, is that if most of us -- myself included -- were curious about who invented the electric toaster, we'd do a fairly shallow search online, maybe one or two sources deep.  If I then found that Brand Scotland, various news outlets, and a museum all agreed that it was invented by a Scottish guy named Alan MacMasters, I'm quite certain I'd believe it.  Even if several of those sources led back to Wikipedia, so what?

Surely all of them couldn't be wrong, right?  Besides, it's such a low-emotional-impact piece of information, who in their right mind would be motivated to falsify it?

So what reason would there be for me to question it?

Now, I'm aware that this is a pretty unusual case, and I'm not trying to make you disbelieve everything you read online.  As I've pointed out before, cynicism is just as lazy as gullibility.  And I'm still of the opinion that Wikipedia is a pretty good source, especially for purely factual information.  But it is absolutely critical that we don't treat any source as infallible -- especially not those (1) for which we lack the expertise to evaluate, or (2) which contain bias-prone information that agrees with what we are already inclined to accept uncritically.

Confirmation bias is a bitch.

So the take-home lesson here is "be careful, and don't turn off your brain."  It's not really, as some have claimed, that bullshit is more common now; take a look at any newspaper from the 1800s and you'll disabuse yourself of that notion mighty fast.  It's just that the internet has provided an amazingly quick and efficient conduit for bullshit, so it spreads a great deal more rapidly.

It all goes back to the quote -- of uncertain provenance, but accurate whoever first said it -- that "a lie can travel all the way around the world while the truth is still lacing up its boots."

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The mother of all pranks

Have you ever heard of Mrs. Tottenham, of 54 Berners Street, Westminster, London, England?

I'm guessing probably not.  At least I hadn't, until a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link about why she's memorable.  Well, not her in and of herself, exactly; but what happened to the poor woman, through no fault of her own.

Mrs. Tottenham is described as a "wealthy woman of good social standing" who lived in one of the better parts of Greater London, and seems to have mostly led an ordinary life until the morning of November 27, 1810.  She was awakened at five in the morning by a knock on the door.  Hastily donning her dressing gown, she answered it, and was met by a chimney sweep who said he'd "been sent for."  No sooner had she dismissed him, saying she'd done no such thing, than she was alarmed to see several other chimney sweeps approaching, followed in quick succession by a dozen different coal wagons, the drivers of each claiming that they'd been told to deliver coal to that address that morning.

But that was only the beginning.

At seven, the bakers started arriving.  One of them carried an elaborate wedding cake.  The bakers were followed by bootmakers.  After that, according to The London Times, there followed "upholsterers' goods in cart-loads, pianofortes, linen, jewellery [sic] and every other description of furniture, [that] were lodged as near as possible to the door of No. 54, with anxious tradespeople and a laughing mob.  With each new wave of arrivals, the crowd around the property grew, as many stayed to watch who would be the next to arrive...  Police summoned to the scene arrived to find six stout men bearing an organ, surrounded by wine-porters with permits, barbers with wigs, mantua-makers with band-boxes, [and] opticians with the various articles of their trade."

As the day progressed, she was accosted by forty butchers and forty fishmongers, each bringing a delivery of their respective viands, and pastry chefs with an estimated 2,500 raspberry tarts.  The police attempted to put a stop to it by blocking off both ends of the street, but people simply climbed over the barriers, saying they had their jobs to do.  In the mid-afternoon the chairmen of the Bank of England and the East India Company arrived, and shortly afterward the Duke of Gloucester, the last-mentioned of which was told that he'd been summoned to the deathbed of an obscure relative.

At five in the afternoon, about fifty women showed up, saying that they'd been informed there was an opening for domestic servants.  But the real pièce de resistance came at six, when an undertaker arrived bearing a coffin -- made to Mrs. Tottenham's measurements.

The hilarity -- for everyone but poor Mrs. Tottenham -- kept up until after dark, when the crowds finally dispersed, and the disappointed and pissed off merchants et al. gave up and went home.

A drawing of the Berners Street hoax by William Heath (1810) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The entire day, from a rented room across the street, there was a young man watching.  His name was Theodore Edward Hook.  Hook was the scion of minor nobility, and had been a brilliant (and precocious) student at Oxford University, matriculating at the age of sixteen.  He was a talented writer and musician, and in fact published his first novel when he was a teenager.

He was also a wicked practical joker.

He had made a bet -- the winner received one guinea -- that he could turn any address in London into the most talked-about spot in the world.  Working with two accomplices (who have never been identified, but one was alleged to be "a famous actress") he sent out between one and four thousand letters and postcards in the weeks preceding November 27.  The instructions differed, of course, but most of the recipients were given a specific time to arrive.  A bevy of dance instructors were told that Mrs. Tottenham was looking for lessons in the art for her daughter.  Some estate salesmen were informed that she required assistance in selling some property.  The two aforementioned chairmen were sent sinister notes that there had been allegations of fraud against an (unnamed) employee, and they should come to that address to hear "information that would be to their benefit."

Once Hook saw that his prank had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, he got a little scared and decided it would be prudent to absent himself from town for a while, so he spent several weeks in the countryside with friends.  And sure enough, a search for the perpetrator(s) was undertaken, and significant rewards offered -- to no avail.

But it's an interesting thing about the psychology of people like Hook; they can't bear thinking that no one will ever find out how astonishingly clever they are.  (There have been murder mysteries predicated on this theme, my favorite of which is the brilliantly-crafted And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, which I first read at age twelve with the result of being hooked on mysteries for life.)  Hook knew he was suspected of having had something to do with the Berners Street hoax, but no one could prove it, so all too quickly the furor died down.

Exactly what an egotist like Hook didn't want.  So...

... he admitted it.

It was in his semi-autobiographical novel Gilbert Gurney, and spoken by the eponymous main character, but still, it's about as close to a confession as you can get:

[T]here's nothing like fun – what else made the effect in Berner's Street?  I am the man – I did it... copy the joke, and it ceases to be one; – any fool can imitate an example once set – but for originality of thought and design, I do think that was perfect.

Gilbert Gurney wasn't published until 1836.  There was no statute of limitations in England in the early nineteenth century, but after twenty-six years, the justice system didn't seem to think it was worth the trouble to go after Hook.  And interestingly, there was at least one allegation that he was laying claim to something he hadn't done.  Hook died in 1841 (of the effects of "dissipation"), and afterward his friend Nancy Matthews said that the prank wasn't Hook's doing, but had been perpetrated by "a young gentleman, now one of the most rigid churchmen in the kingdom." 

Most people, though, think that Matthews was trying to cover up for the lousy reputation of the Dearly Departed, and that Hook really was the guilty party.  Why he had targeted the unfortunate Mrs. Tottenham is unknown; some think he had a grudge against her for some reason, others that she was simply wealthy, a little uptight... and there was a room for rent across the street from where she lived.

I find it interesting to consider what would impel someone to do something like this.  It's funny, yes -- I have to admit laughing several times while reading the account -- but good heavens, consider the poor merchants and tradespeople who brought thousands of items thinking they were going to make some sales, and were turned away without so much as a ha'penny.  I'd have been pissed.  And Hook is damn lucky he wasn't caught; he'd likely have ended up in prison, and sued for everything he had to pay all the people whose services he'd fraudulently requested.

I've been the victim of practical jokes myself -- probably everyone has -- and there are ones that were genuinely good-hearted, like the students who put a huge wooden replica of the black obelisk from 2001: A Space Odyssey in my classroom on the last day of school, and arranged for the principal to play the theme music over the loudspeakers as soon as I walked in the door.  (I have never before or since been awake and so convinced I was dreaming.)  But practical jokes often contain a streak of cruelty, or (like Berners Street) at least a touch of "I don't give a damn whom I inconvenience."  "I was just joking" has been used way too many times to cover up for real harm done.  (It's why in general I loathe April Fool's Day.)

Anyhow, that's the story of one of the most elaborate pranks ever staged.  And I have to admit he planned the whole thing to a fare-thee-well.  Mrs. Tottenham came out none the worse for wear, and apparently told the story to uproarious laughter at cocktail parties for the rest of her life.  Me, though -- I'd much prefer having other stories to tell to my friends, so if any of you get any clever ideas, please don't.  For one thing, my three dogs would freak right the hell out.  For another, I have recently moved to an uncharted island off the coast of Mozambique, so you couldn't find me anyhow.

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Mental models and lying stones

Richard Feynman famously said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool."

This insightful statement isn't meant to impugn anyone's honesty or intelligence, but to highlight that everyone -- and I'm sure Feynman was very much including himself in this assessment -- has biases that prevent them from seeing clearly.  We've already got a model, an internal framework by which we interpret what we experience, and that inevitably constrains our understanding.

As science historian James Burke points out, in his brilliant analysis of the scientific endeavor The Day the Universe Changed, it's a trap that's impossible to get out of.  You have to have some mental model for how you think the world works, or all the sensory input you receive would simply be chaos.  "Without a structure, a theory for what's there," Burke says, "you don't see anything."

And once you've settled on a model, it's nearly impossible to compromise with.  You're automatically going to take some things as givens and ignore others as irrelevant, dismiss some pieces of evidence out of hand and accept others without question.  We're always taking what we experience and comparing it to our own mental frameworks, deciding what is important and what isn't.  When my wife finished her most recent art piece -- a stunning image of a raven's face, set against a crimson background -- and I was on social media later that day and saw another piece of art someone had posted with a raven against red -- I shrugged and laughed and said, "Weird coincidence."

Quoth the Raven, pen/ink/watercolor by Carol Bloomgarden (2025) [Image used with permission]

But that's only because I had already decided that odd synchronicities don't mean anything.  If I had a mental model that considered such chance occurrences as spiritually significant omens, I would have interpreted that very, very differently.

Our mental frameworks are essential, but they can lead us astray as often as they land us on the right answer.  Consider, for example, the strange, sad case of Johann Beringer and the "lying stones."

Johann Bartholomeus Adam Beringer was a professor of medicine at the University of Würzburg in the early eighteenth century.  His training was in anatomy and physiology, but he had a deep interest in paleontology, and had a large collection of fossils he'd found during hikes in his native Germany.  He was also a devout Lutheran and a biblical literalist, so he interpreted all the fossil evidence as consistent with biblical events like the six-day creation, the Noachian flood, and so on.

Unfortunately, he also had a reputation for being arrogant, humorless, and difficult to get along with.  This made him several enemies, including two of his coworkers -- Ignace Roderique, a professor of geography and algebra, and Johann Georg von Eckhart, the university librarian.  So Roderique and von Eckhart hatched a plan to knock Beringer down a peg or two.

They found out where he was planning on doing his next fossil hunt, and planted some fake fossils along the way.

These "lying stones" are crudely carved from limestone.  On some of them, you can still see the chisel marks.

More outlandish still, Roderique and von Eckhart carved the word "God" in Hebrew on the backs of some of them.  Making it look like the artisan had signed His name, so to speak.

One colleague -- who was not in on the prank -- looked at the stones, and said to Beringer, "Um... are you sure?  Those look like chisel marks."  Beringer dismissed his objections, and in fact, turned them into evidence for his explanation.  Beringer wrote, "...the figures... are so exactly fitted to the dimensions of the stones, that one would swear that they are the work of a very meticulous sculptor...[and they] seem to bear unmistakable indications of the sculptor's knife."

They were so perfect, Beringer said, that they could only be the work of God.

So as astonishing as it may seem, Beringer fell for the ruse hook, line, and sinker.  Roderique and von Eckhart, buoyed up by their success, repeated their prank multiple times.  Finally Beringer had enough "fossils" that in 1726, he published a scholarly work called Lithographiae Wirceburgensis (The Writing-Stones of Würzburg).  But shortly after the book's publication -- it's unclear how -- Beringer realized he'd been taken for a ride.

He sued Roderique and von Eckhart for defamation -- and won.  Roderique and von Eckhart were both summarily fired, but it was too late; Beringer was a laughingstock in the scientific community.  He tried to recover all of the copies of his book and destroy them, but finally gave up.  His reputation was reduced to rubble, and he died twelve years later in total obscurity.

It's easy to laugh at Beringer's credulity, but the only reason you're laughing is because if you found such a "fossil," your mental model would immediately make you doubt its veracity.  In his framework -- which included a six-thousand-year-old Earth, a biblical flood, and a God who was perfectly capable of signing his own handiwork -- he didn't even stop to consider it.

The history of science is laden with missteps caused by biased mental models.  In 1790, a report of a fireball over France that strewed meteorites over a large region prompted a scientific paper -- that laughingly dismissed the claim as "impossible."  Pierre Bertholon, editor of the Journal des Sciences Utiles, wrote, "How sad, is it not, to see a whole municipality attempt to certify the truth of folk tales… the philosophical reader will draw his own conclusions regarding this document, which attests to an apparently false fact, a physically impossible phenomenon."  DNA was dismissed as the genetic code for decades, because of the argument that DNA's alphabet only contains four "letters," so the much richer twenty-letter alphabet of proteins (the amino acids) must be the language of the genes.  Even in the twentieth century, geologists didn't bother looking for evidence for continental drift until the 1950s, long after there'd been significant clues that the continents had, in fact, moved, largely because they couldn't imagine a mechanism that could be responsible.

Our mental models work on every level -- all the way down to telling us what questions are worth investigating.

So poor Johann Beringer.  Not to excuse him for being an arrogant prick, but he didn't deserve to be the target of a mean-spirited practical joke, nor does he deserve our derision now.  He was merely operating within his own framework of understanding, same as you and I do.

I wonder what we're missing, simply because we've decided it's irrelevant -- and what we've accepted as axiomatic, and therefore beyond questioning?

Maybe we're not so very far ahead of Beringer ourselves.

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Moon madness

There's a general rule that once a lie gets out into wide circulation, trying to replace it with the truth is damn near impossible.  We've seen lots of examples of that here at Skeptophilia -- chemtrails, the HAARP conspiracy, the whole "vaccines cause autism" thing, and "Pizzagate" come to mind immediately.  No matter how thoroughly these are debunked, they never seem to die.  In fact, legislation in my home state of Louisiana to "ban chemtrails" just passed in the state House of Representatives.  It was sponsored by Kim Landry Coates (R-Ponchatoula).  When Coates was asked what chemicals were allegedly in these "chemtrails," she responded, I shit you not, "Barium.  There is a few, some with long words that I can’t pronounce."

Which illustrates another general principle, which is that there is no intelligence criterion for being elected to public office.

This is not a new problem, much as the Trump administration has cornered the market on egregious lies in the last few years.  Humans have always been credulous, and once convinced of a lie, unconvincing someone is the very definition of an uphill struggle.  Take, for example, the Great Moon Hoax of 1835.

In August of 1835, writers at The Sun (a New York City newspaper, not the British tabloid of the same name) dreamed up a scheme to boost circulation -- a hoax article (complete with illustrations) claiming that astronomers had spotted life on the Moon.  The discovery, they said, was made using "an immense telescope of an entirely new principle," with a lens that measured eight meters in diameter and weighed seven metric tons.  Using this, the researchers were able to see living things on the Moon, including bat-winged humanoids the scientists called Vespertilio-Homo, as well as single-horned goats, miniature zebras, and bipedal tailless beavers.

A drawing of one of the lunar inhabitants [Image is in the Public Domain]

The Moon, they said, was also covered with active volcanoes, but the beings there used them as power sources, allowing the Vespertilio-Homo to live in large thriving cities:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

And just like today, when Trump invariably precedes his lies with "my advisors are telling me" or "I've heard from reputable sources," The Sun gave this "research" an attribution -- but they boldly named names.  The source, they said, was one Andrew Grant (who was fictitious), the assistant and dear friend of John Herschel (who very much was not).

John Herschel was a highly respected British astronomer, mathematician, chemist, and polymath, son of William Herschel (who discovered Uranus).  The younger Herschel had established a name for himself in planetary astronomy, and in fact had studied and named seven of the moons of Saturn and four of the moons of Uranus.  So his was a canny choice by The Sun -- it gave automatic legitimacy to the article's contents.

It took over a month for the entire story to come unraveled.  Pressed by scientifically-literate readers to show them the amazing telescope, they responded that it had sadly been destroyed in a fire -- the enormous lens's capacity for "concentrating the rays of light" had proved its own undoing, and completely burned down the observatory where it resided.  It was only when Herschel was asked about the research and said he knew nothing about it that the owners of The Sun were confronted, and finally -- reluctantly -- they admitted it had been a hoax all along.

Interestingly, though, they never published an actual retraction of the articles.  Five years later, one of The Sun's reporters, Richard Adams Locke, admitted he'd written the story, but said he'd done it as satire, to "show how science can be and is influenced by the thoughts of religion."  Which seems like a pretty flimsy claim to me.  I think the great likelihood is that it was a publicity stunt to boost circulation, and as such, it worked brilliantly -- The Sun became one of the bestselling newspapers in the United States, and survived until 1950.

The lie also had astonishing longevity.  Even after the owners of The Sun admitted it had all been a hoax -- there were no bat-creatures, no miniature zebras, no bipedal beavers -- people still claimed it was true.  The admission, not the original story, had been the hoax, they said, and The Sun's owners had only changed course because they thought the American people couldn't handle how weird the truth was.  Years later, poor John Herschel was still being asked about the bat-winged Moon men and his role in discovering them.

My dad used to say that trying to clean up the results of a lie was about as easy as getting toothpaste back into the tube.  And the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 illustrates another dark truth; the fact that getting suckered by an attractive lie can cause you to swing all the way over into cynicism.  Some readers who found out about the hoax concluded that nothing in the newspaper could be trusted.  It's like Mark Twain's observation: "You can learn too much from experience.  A cat that sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again, but it probably won't sit on a cool one, either."

Cynicism, as I've pointed out more than once, is no smarter than gullibility.  It's just as lazy to conclude that everyone is lying to you as it is to believe that no one is.  But it's a tragedy when the media itself is the source of the lies.  While I can't condone cynicism about the media, I do understand it.  Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, "You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts."  Which is true enough, but that presupposes we can actually find out what the facts are.  And when the sources you are supposed to be able to trust are themselves lying to you, it creates a catch-22 that I'm damned if I know how to get out of.

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The undiscoverable country

After Thursday's post about nonexistent islands, a loyal reader of Skeptophilia asked me if I'd ever heard of the country of Listenbourg.

I said, "Do you mean Luxembourg?" but he assured me he was spelling it right.

"Islands aren't the only thing that can be nonexistent," he said, which is true, but when you think about it too hard is a very peculiar statement.

So I looked into Listenbourg, and it's quite a story -- especially since the whole thing started as a way to ridicule Americans for their ignorance about anything outside the borders of the United States.

In October of 2022, a French guy named Gaspard Hoelscher posted a doctored map of Europe on Twitter that looked like this:

He captioned it, "Je suis sûr que les américains ne connaissent même pas le nom de ce pays!" ("I'm sure that Americans don't even known the name of this country!")  One of his followers responded, "Qui ne connaît pas le Listenbourg?" ("Who doesn't know Listenbourg?")

You'd think anyone who'd ever given more than a ten-second look at an actual map of Europe would immediately know this was a joke, but no.  Even a closer look at this map would have revealed the curious fact that "Listenbourg" is actually a resized and inverted copy of the outline of France itself, simply pasted onto (and partially covering) the northwest corners of Spain and Portugal.

Apparently, this was not the case, as the original post caused a number of irate Americans to jump up and defend our superior knowledge -- almost none of whom, however, came right out and said that they recognized it was a prank.  You could tell that some of them had actually come damn close to saying, "Of course I know where Listenbourg is," but held back at the last minute.

This prompted a flood of hilarity online that the prank's originator, Hoelscher, said "totally overwhelmed" him.  Amused Europeans invented a flag, capital city ("Lurenberg"), culture, history, language, and even a national anthem for Listenbourg.  It has five regions, they said: Flußerde, Kusterde, Mitteland, Adrias and Caséière.  A post saying that Hoelscher himself was the president was met by universal acclaim.  Then it escaped social media into the wider world:

• An announcement prior to the Paris Olympics of 2024 stated that "The number of Olympic delegations has risen from 206 to 207 with the arrival of Listenbourg."
• Amazon Prime in Europe announced that a documentary on the history of Listenbourg was in production -- only careful watchers noticed that the projected release date was "February 31, 2025."
• Ryanair said in a press release that they were "Proud to be announcing their new base in Listenbourg."
• The French television network TF1 aired a realistic-sounding weather report for the country.
• French politician Jean Lassalle said in a speech that he was "just returned from a visit to an agricultural seminar in Lurenberg."
• The city of Nice said that they were happy to announce their intention to become a sister city to Lurenberg, and that there would be new inexpensive flights between the two.

I have to admit that as an American, my laughter over all this is coupled with a distinct edge of cringe.  I mean, being global dumbasses is not exactly the reputation I'd like my country to have.  Sadly, though, I can't really argue with the assessment.  You don't have to dig very hard to find highly embarrassing videos of interviewers stopping people in crowds in the United States to ask them tough questions like "What is the capital of England?" and finding numerous Americans who can't come up with the answer.  And with the Republicans currently doing everything in their power to destroy our system of public education, the situation is only going to get worse.

Oh, but don't worry.  At least we'll have the Ten Commandments on the wall of every classroom, and students will get Bible lessons every day and won't be exposed to scary books like Heather Has Two Mommies.

Hey, I wonder what would happen if you asked Donald Trump to find Listenbourg on a map?  I bet he'd never realize he was being pranked, considering that he once gave a speech to African leaders and confidently talked about the proud country of "Nambia."

Look, I know we all have holes in our knowledge; all of us are ignorant about some subjects.  The important thing is not to make ignorance a permanent condition -- or to flaunt it.  Stubbornly persisting in your state of ignorance has a name.

It's called "stupidity."

What's worse is when people think they are experts on stuff when they're clearly not, and publicly trumpet their own idiocy.  (Donald Trump is absolutely the poster child for this phenomenon.)  As Stephen Hawking trenchantly put it, "The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge."  Because if you're convinced you already know everything you need to know -- and that, I'm afraid, is the state of many Americans, including the majority of our elected officials -- you have no incentive to learn more, or worse, to find out you're actually wrong about something.

My dad used to say "there's nothing as dangerous as confident stupidity."  I think that's spot-on.  And sad that the Listenbourg incident -- funny as it is -- pointed out that in the eyes of many people in the world, that's what the United States represents.

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Mouse tales

Mice are kind of ubiquitous, and it's easy to think of them as all being pretty much the same, but the family they comprise -- Muridae -- contains no fewer than 870 different species.

And new ones are being discovered all the time, including the Sulawesi snouter, Hyorhinomys stuempkei.  It's a peculiar-looking little thing, with a pointy nose and incisors long even for a rodent, and is (as far as we know) only found in one location on the slopes of Mount Daro in northern Sulawesi.

Hyorhinomys stuempkei [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Kevin C Rowe and Museum Victoria, Hyorhinomys07, CC BY-SA 4.0]

But the reason the topic comes up isn't mice, nor even anything about this particular mouse's evolutionary history, behavior, or physiology.  

It's about its name.

Both its common name of "snouter" and the species name, stuempkei, come from zoologist Harald Stümpke and his most famous work, The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades, an exhaustive study of Order Rhinogradentia.  The members of the order lived on a small archipelago in the Pacific Ocean which had no human occupants.  However, the island chain was known to the natives of nearby islands, who gave each of the eighteen islands their names (Annoorussawubbissy, Awkoavussa, Hiddudify, Koavussa, Lowlukha, Lownunnoia, Mara, Miroovilly, Mittuddinna, Naty, Nawissy, Noorubbissy, Osovitissy, Ownavussa, Owsuddowsa, Shanelukha, Towteng-Awko, and Vinsy; the entire chain was called Hyiyiyi).  Other than occasional visits from Polynesians, the first person to go there and do a thorough mapping of the archipelago was Swedish explorer Einar Petterson-Skämtkvist in the 1940s, but it fell to Stümpke to do a biological survey.

Unfortunately, the story doesn't end well.  Stümpke's book is the only remnant of them that survives.  Stümpke and his assistants, along with all the snouters they studied, were wiped out by nuclear bomb testing on a nearby atoll.  Fortunately, before his death he'd mailed a proof copy of his manuscript to German zoologist Gerolf Steiner, or we might not know anything about these unique mammals at all.

Sad story, yes?

However, if by now you are -- pardon the expression -- smelling a rat, you're not alone.

Some questions you might be asking yourself:

1. If all the "rhinogrades" were wiped out, where did the "Sulawesi snouter" come from?
2. And how can one be from Sulawesi if they all lived on the archipelago of Hyiyiyi?
3. Those island names don't sound very Polynesian.  ("Annoorussawubbissy"?  Really?)
4. Then there's "Hyiyiyi," which is the noise an elderly family friend used to make when he was annoyed.
5. How come you never hear anything about an entire group of zoologists being killed in the bomb testing?
6. Aren't all mice in Order Rodentia?  Where the hell did Order Rhinogradentia come from?
7. I mean seriously, what the fuck?

The truth is that the entire thing -- the mysterious island chain of Hyiyiyi, both Harald Stümpke and the intrepid Einar Petterson-Skämtkvist, Order Rhinogradentia and the book detailing their biology, and the tragic bomb test that wiped all of 'em out -- were the invention of Gerolf Steiner (who was a very real biologist with a puckish sense of humor).  However, not only were some people taken in by the joke at the time, Order Rhinogradentia (and the fictitious Harald Stümpke) still occasionally find their way into real publications -- sometimes without any notes making it clear that neither one exists.

Fortunately, by now most zoologists know about Steiner's role in the story, so it's unlikely anyone these days is really taken in by it.

However, in celebration of one of the most elaborate pranks in the history of biology, a recently-discovered (real) mouse species on Sulawesi was named by its discoverer, zoologist Jacob Esselstyn, not after Steiner, but after the fictitious Stümpke!  And even its common name -- the Sulawesi snouter -- is an hommage to Steiner and his masterful monograph.

Keep this story in mind if you ever are inclined to think of scientists as humorless, dry-as-dust pedants.

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The strange story of the Priory of Sion

I'm often astonished at the lengths people will go to to perpetrate hoaxes.

What can possibly motivate them?  Is it just about getting their fifteen minutes of fame?  Or the superior feeling of being able to laugh at the suckers who fall for their shtick?  Or the fun of creating a wild story -- something that, as a novelist, I can certainly understand?

It was some combination of all of those that motivated the main characters in my all-time favorite novel, Umberto Eco's twisty, labyrinthine masterpiece Foucault's Pendulum.  We meet three cynical, bored book editors who work for Manutius Press, a publishing company that specializes in esoteric woo.  None of the three believe a word of what they publish; it's a job, pure and simple.  But then they realize that having done this for years, the three of them can come up with a better book than any of the writers they publish.  Skip the middle-man, out-woo the woo-practitioners.  So using their extensive knowledge of history and esoterica, they cook up the be-all-end-all conspiracy theory, involving the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, Nostradamus, the Roman Catholic Church, the Bogomils, the Crusaders, and the final resting place of the Holy Grail.  Their book leaves the reader hanging, though -- implying that part of the mystery was too catastrophically powerful and dangerous to reveal in print.

But their plan backfires spectacularly, because the book catches the attention of a (very serious) secret society, who believe it's all true -- and they kidnap one of the editors and threaten to kill him if the three don't reveal the rest of their secret.

Which doesn't exist, remember?  Because they made it all up?

But, of course, the more they protest, the more convinced the secret society is that they are hiding something.  Why else would they be arguing so vehemently?

I was immediately reminded of Foucault's Pendulum when I stumbled across the (true) story of Pierre Plantard (18 March 1920 - 3 February 2000), a French artist who is best known for perpetrating one of the most byzantine hoaxes I've ever heard of.  It's called "The Priory of Sion," and what strikes me is the lengths to which he went to create it, and the number of apparently intelligent people he suckered into believing.  Like the creation of the jaded editors in Eco's novel, the whole thing kind of turned into a juggernaut -- although there's no indication anyone ever threatened to kill Plantard to force him to reveal more of his secrets.

In fact, calling them "secrets" is kind of inaccurate, given that he pretty much never talked about anything else.

Plantard himself seems to have been a rather unsavory character.  During World War II he established himself as an ultranationalist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Masonic agitator.  In fact, he offered to help out Philippe Pétain, the leader of the collaborationist Vichy Régime, but apparently his views were too out there even for Pétain, and he was refused.  So Plantard decided to strike off on his own and founded the Alpha Galates, an "order of knighthood" with sacred rites and the whole shebang, but despite his best efforts, according to Paris Police Prefect Claude Charlot who investigated it, it "only ever had four regular members."

But hey, if at first you don't succeed...

After the war ended, Plantard decided to give it another shot, and this time, it took off beyond his wildest dreams.

The gist is that Godfrey de Bouillon, leader of the First Crusade, had created a secret society called "the Priory of Sion" in 1099 as he stood atop Mount Zion in Palestine, which was dedicated to making certain that the bloodline of the Merovingian dynasty would be installed on all the thrones of Europe.  The reason, you see, is that the Merovingians weren't (as you may have learned in history class) the leaders of the Franks, a confederation of Germanic tribes from northern Europe.

Oh, no.  They are actually the direct descendants of Jesus Christ and his wife, Mary Magdalene.

Yes, I know, there's no mention in the Bible of Jesus being married, much less to Mary Magdalene.  Just play along, okay?

Plantard tells us that clues include some paintings by seventeenth-century painter Nicolas Poussin, whose mythological studies Plantard interpreted as representing such themes as the reincarnation of the assassinated Merovingian king Dagobert II, who in Plantard's scheme was a "holy martyr" who had been killed by the Bad Guys because (1) he knew too much, and (2) he was Jesus's descendant and the Bad Guys couldn't have that.

Et in Arcadia Ego by Nicolas Poussin (1630), one of the paintings that supposedly has hidden messages about the Priory of Sion [Image is in the Public Domain]

Since then, the Big Secrets had been perpetuated through a lineage of Grand Masters, which includes some famous names, such as Nicolas Flamel, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and Claude Debussy. 

Well, the problem with Plantard's scheme is that there's no hard evidence for it, because he made the entire thing up.  But hey, that's no problem!

Because you can always make that up as well.

Working with two guys named Philippe de Chérisey and Noël Corbu, Plantard created fake documents -- medieval-looking parchments that had information supporting the whole scheme.  He then planted them all over, in churches and in libraries specializing in ancient texts -- including the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.  But he and his collaborators weren't content to just sit back and wait for them to be discovered, so he enlisted the help of author Gérard de Sède to write a book about the forged manuscripts, alleging that a Catholic priest in the late nineteenth century, Bérenger Saunière, had found them while supervising the renovation of his church at Rennes-le-Château, but had recognized how dangerous they were and hid them again.  

The book became a bestseller.

At this point, it becomes hard to sort out who actually fell for the hoax, who simply thought it was entertaining fiction, and who had nothing to do with it but was accused of being an initiate and so got tangled up in it unfairly.  The whole thing even ensnared a couple of close associates of President François Mitterand and Prime Minister Pierre Bérégovoy.  Even after Plantard's death in 2000 at the age of 79, the claim lived on -- in fiction such as Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code and in (supposedly) non-fictional form in books like The Sion Revelation: The Truth About the Guardians of Christ's Sacred Bloodline, by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, and "documentaries" like Bloodline.

It is, in fact, the conspiracy theory that refuses to die.

But to go back to my original point: the whole thing was made up.  We know this for a fact.  The documentary evidence was forged; the story of those manuscripts being found in a church by a Catholic priest in 1891 was a lie invented by a novelist Plantard had hired to help him.

So how does this still have momentum?  I guess the answer is that you can't convince people who don't want to know the truth.  That, at least, is the conclusion Eco had his character Casaubon come to at the end of Foucault's Pendulum:

I left Paris this morning.  I left too many clues.  They've had time to guess where I am.  In a little while, They will be here.  I would have liked to write down everything I thought today.  But if They were to read it, They would only derive another dark theory and spend another eternity trying to decipher the ancient message hidden behind my words.  It's impossible, They would say; he can't only have been making fun of us.  No.  Perhaps, without his realizing it, Being was sending us a message through its oblivion.

It makes no difference whether I write or not.  They will look for other meanings, even in my silence.  That's how They are.  Blind to revelation.

But try telling Them that.  They of little faith.

So I might as well stay here, wait, and look at the hill.

It's so beautiful.

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The writing on the stone

It can often be difficult to sort fact from fiction, especially when multiple people become involved, each with his or her own agenda -- and varying determination to adhere to the truth.

Take, for example, the Brandenburg Stone.  It's a 74 by 39 centimeter slab of oolite (a sedimentary rock) that appears to have writing-like marks scratched into the surface.  Without further ado, here's a photograph of the alleged artifact:

It was found in 1912 near Brandenburg, Kentucky by a farmer named Craig Crecelius.  Crecelius clearly thought the marks were writing -- and you can see for yourself that they look like it -- and he made a good effort to contact linguists who might be able to identify the script, but without success.  He exhibited the stone several times in nearby towns, but wasn't able to drum up much in the way of interest.

In 1965, the stone passed into the hands of one Jon Whitfield, and that's where things start to get interesting.

Whitfield thought he knew what the script was.  The letters, he said, were Coelbren y Beirdd (Welsh for "Bard's Lot"), a script for writing the Welsh language that in the early nineteenth century was the center of a linguistic controversy regarding its origins.  The man who promoted it, one Edward Williams (more often known by his "bardic name" of Iolo Morganwg), was absolutely obsessed with ancient Welsh history and traditions, and achieved fame as a collector of rare medieval Welsh manuscripts.

But why would there be Welsh script on a stone in Kentucky?

Whitfield thought he knew the answer.  There was a story circulating that the medieval Welsh prince Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd had crossed the Atlantic in around the year 1170 C. E. with a handful of friends, and the lot of them had stayed in North America and intermarried with Native Americans.  (Fans of Madeleine L'Engle will recognize this legend from her book A Swiftly Tilting Planet.)  This, said Whitfield, was proof that the legend was true -- and that Welsh-speaking Natives who descended from Madoc and his comrades had gotten as far inland as Kentucky.

There's only one problem with this.  Coelbren y Beirdd almost certainly wasn't an ancient script at all, but had been invented by Iolo Morganwg in 1791 -- who then passed it off as authentic.

It's pretty clear that despite his legitimate work in preserving ancient Welsh manuscripts, Williams/Morganwg also was a champion forger.  He was exposed as such long after his death by Welsh linguist and poet John Morris-Jones, who decried Williams's dishonesty, saying "it will be an age before our literature and history are clean of the traces of his dirty fingers."  Several of the works he "transcribed" were apparently written by him -- weaving his own fiction and philosophy into allegedly ancient legends and poetry, thus confusing the hell out of scholars who simply wanted to know what historical cultures actually believed.

So even if the marks on the Brandenburg Stone are actually Coelbren y Beirdd, it can't be any older than 1791, and probably much more recent than that.  Skeptic Jason Colavito points out that Morganwg's writing became really popular in the mid to late nineteenth century, when his son Taliesin began publishing and promoting his father's works.  Colavito writes:

The alphabet was widely published in the 1830s and 1840s, and whoever forged the Brandenburg Stone (it was not actually either Williams, who were never in Kentucky) almost certainly used such publications, possibly Taliesin Williams’s widely-read book about the alphabet, in forging the stone.  The younger Williams’s popular book was published to scholarly acclaim in 1840 (having won a prestigious prize two years before) and the alphabet was exposed as a hoax in 1893 (though suspicions had been raised earlier, until Taliesin successfully combated them), which makes it much more likely that the stone was actually carved between 1840 and 1912, though a date as early as 1792 cannot be excluded.  In the United States, libraries had dozens of different volumes on Coelbren y Beirdd, including the Iolo Manuscripts (1848), Bardaas (1862 and 1874), etc., but I am not able to find evidence that the alphabet itself would have been widely available in rural America prior to Taliesin’s book, though it is possible that some of Edward’s specialist publications imported from Britain were available in some places.  After 1862, the largest collection of the Williams forgeries was in print and the alphabet was at the height of its popularity.  Thus, the latter nineteenth or early twentieth century seems the best candidate for the time of forgery.

So we have Craig Crecelius, the farmer who found the stone, and who appears to have been genuinely unaware that it was a forgery; Jon Whitfield, who was the one who identified the writing as Coelbren y Beirdd, but was too young to have been responsible for the creation of the stone, and seems to have thought it was authentic as well; and Edward Williams, who created the fake script but never went to Kentucky and so can't have been the stone's creator, either.

In the end, we're left with a mystery.  An unknown person scratched some mysterious letters on a stone, probably in the last half of the nineteenth century, and left it for someone to find.  And someone did... starting a domino effect of speculation that still shows up on television shows specializing in archaeological weirdness.  The fact remains, though, that everything about it is certainly a forgery -- not only the artifact itself, but the script in which the inscription is written.

But as far as who perpetrated the hoax, we'll probably never know.

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