April Fools’ Special: History’s Hoaxes
Happy April Fools’ Day. To mark the occasion, National Geographic News has compiled a list of some of the more memorable hoaxes in recent history. They are the lies, darned (可恨的) lies, and whoppers () that have been perpetrated on the gullible(易受骗的) and unsuspecting to fulfill that age-old desire held by some to put the joke on others.
Internet Hoaxes
The Internet has given birth to a proliferation (增殖) of hoaxes. E-mail inboxes are bombarded on an almost daily basis with messages warning of terrible computer viruses that cause users to delete benign (良性) chunks of data from their hard drives, or of credit card seams that entice the to give all their personal information, including passwords and bank account details, to identity thieves. Other e-mails give rise to wry(歪曲的) chuckles, which is where this list begins.
Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide (一氧化二氢)
City officials in Aliso Viejo, California, were so concerned about the ers of dihydrogen monoxide that they scheduled a vote last month on whether to ban foam (泡沫) cups from city-sponsored s after they learned the chemical was used in foam-cup production.
Officials called off the vote after learning that dihydrogen monoxide is the scientific term for water.
"It’s embarrassing," city manager David J. Norman told the Associated Press. "We had a paralegal(律师助手) who did bad research."
Indeed, the paralegal had fallen victim to an official-looking Web site touting the ers of dihydrogen monoxide. An e-mail originally authored in 1990 by Eric Lechner, then a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, claimed that dihydrogen monoxide "is used as an industrial solvent and coolant, and is used in the production of Styrofoam(聚苯乙烯泡沫塑料)."
Other ers pranksters (爱开玩笑的人) associated with the chemical included accelerated corrosion and rusting, severe burns, and death from inhalation.
Versions of the e-mail continue to circulate today, and several Web sites, including that of the Coalition to Ban DHMO, warn, tongue-in-cheek, of water’s ers.
Alabama Changes Value of Pi
The April 1998 newsletter put out by New Mexicans for Science and Reason contains an article titled "Alabama Legislature Lays Siege to Pi". It was penned by April Holiday of the Associmated Press (sic) and told the story of how the Alabama state legislature voted to change the Value of the mathematical constant Pi from 3.14159 to the round number of 3.
The ersatz(假的) news story was written by Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist Mark Boslough to parody(滑稽地模仿) legislative and school board attacks on the teaching of evolution in New Mexico.
At Boslough’s suggestion, Dave Thomas, the president of New Mexicans for Science and Reason, posted the article in its entirety to the Internet newsgroup Talk. Origins on April 1. (The newsgroup hosts a lively debate on creation vs. evolution. ) Later that evening Thomas posted a full confession to the hoax. He thought he had put all rumors to bed.
But to Thomas’s surprise, however, several newsgroup readers forwarded the article to friends and posted it on other newsgroups.
When Thomas checked in on the story a few weeks later, he was surprised to learn that it had spread like wildfire. The telltale signs of the article’s satirical intent, such as the April 1 date and misspelled "Associmated Press". dateline, had been replaced or deleted.
Alabama legislators were bombarded with calls protesting the law. The legislators explained that the news was a hoax. There was not and never had been such a law.
TV and Newspaper Hoaxes
Before the advent of the Internet, and even today, traditional media outlets such as newspapers, radio, and television, have sometimes hoaxed their audiences. The deceptions run the gamut from purported natural disasters to wishful news.
Swiss Spaghetti (意大利式细面条) Harvest
Alex Boese, curator of the Museum of Hoaxes, a regularly updated Web site that also appeared in book form in November 2002, said one of his favorite hoaxes remains one perpetrated by the British Broadcasting Company.
On April 1, 1957, the BBC aired a report on the television news show Panorama about the bumper spaghetti harvest in southern Switzerland.
Viewers watched Swiss farmers pull pasta off spaghetti trees as the show’s anchor, Richard Dimbleby, attributed the bountiful harvest to the mild winter and the disappearance of the spaghetti weevil.
The broadcaster detailed the ins and outs of the life of the spaghetti farmer and anticipated questions about how spaghetti grows on trees. Thousands of people believed the report and called the BBC to inquire about growing their own spaghetti trees, to which the BBC replied, "Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best."
"It was a great satirical effect about British society," Boese said. "British society really was like that at that time. The British have a tendency to be a bit insulated(绝缘的) and do not know that much about the rest of Europe."
Taco Liberty Bell
On April 1, 1996, readers in five major U.S. cities opened their newspapers to learn from a full page announcement that the Taco Bell Corporation had purchased the Liberty Bell from the U.S. government. The announcement reported that the company was relocating the historic bell from Philadclphia, Pennsylvania, to Irvine, California. The move, the corporation said in the advertisement, was part of an "effort to help the national debt".
Hundreds of other newspapers and television shows ran stories related to the press release on the matter put out by Taco Bell’s public relations firm, PainePR. Outraged citizens called the Liberty Bell National Historic Park in Philadelphia to express their disgust. A few hours later the public relations firm released another press announcement stating that the stunt was a hoax.
White House press secretary Mike McCurry got into the act when he remarked that the government would also be "selling the Lincoln Memorial to Ford Motor Company and renaming it the Lincoln-Mercury Memorial".
Crop Circles
Strange, circular formations began to appear in the fields of southern England in the mid-1970s, bringing busloads of curious onlookers, media representatives, and believers in the paranormal out to the countryside for a look.
A sometimes vitriolic (讽刺的) debate on their origins has since ensued (跟着发生), and the curious formations have spread around the world, becoming more and more elaborate as the years go by.
Some people consider the crop formations to be the greatest works of modern art to emerge from the 20th century, while others are convinced they are signs of extraterrestrial communications or landing sites of UFOs
The debate rages even today, although in 1991 Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, two elderly men from Wiltshire County, came forward and claimed responsibility for the crop circles that appeared there over the preceding 20 years. The pair made the circles by pushing down nearly ripe crops with a wooden plank suspended from a rope.
Moon Landing-a Hoax
Ever since NASA sent astronauts to the moon between 1969 and 1972, skeptics have questioned whether the Apollo missions were real or simply a ploy to one-up (领先)the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The debate resuced and reached crescendo levels in February 2001, when Fox television aired a program called Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon
Guests on the show argued that NASA did not have the technology to land on the moon. Anxious to win the space race, NASA acted out the Apollo program in movie studios, they said. The conspiracy theorists pointed out that the pictures transmitted from the moon do not include stars and that the flag the Americans planted on the moon is waving, even though there is thought to be no breeze on the moon.
NASA quickly refuted these claims in a series of press releases, stating that any photographer would know it is difficult to capture something very bright and very dim on the same piece of film. Since the photographers wanted to capture the astronauts striding across the lunar suce in their sunlit space suits, the background stars were too faint to see.
As for the flag, NASA said that the astronauts were turning it back and forth to get in firmly planted in the lunar soil, which made it wave.
According to Boese, many people believed the report of Swiss spaghetti harvest because the British did not know ______.