Enlightening interview with David Mikkelson of snopes.com in the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review today. Here's Mikkelson on the trustworthiness (or not) of online information: 'There's never been a medium ... Read More

[NASA photo]  Mars is perturbed — or its orbit is, at any rate — meaning that during the month of August the angry red planet will swoop closer to earth ... Read More

I'm kidding, of course. First came the announcement on July 1st that acclaimed filmmaker Werner Herzog ('Nosferatu the Vampyre') is making a documentary on the elusive Loch Ness monster, the ... Read More

Proving once again that it pays to read the fine print, a new email flier warns that signing up for promotional giveaways may grant telemarketers the right to call you ... Read More

'How cool is this,' begins the fast-spreading email. 'It's the new Jamie Oliver cookbook, it was sent out over email by mistake and is now circling the U.K., no need ... Read More

After weeks of lying to the media, Las Vegas promoter Michael Burdick finally came clean last Thursday, admitting to city officials that 'Hunting for Bambi' is a hoax and that ... Read More

Here, in no particular order, is a short list of sites that fairly demand a daily visit for purposes of keeping up on Internet folklife, breaking weird news, pop culture ... Read More

Pat Cashman of the King County Journal has breathed new life into the old sneakers dangling from utility lines controversy by compiling a list of downright novel theories to explain ... Read More

Plumb the mysteries of Scary '50s Foods; marvel at Toast Portraits of Famous People; shrink in horror as you browse the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices and other odd and ... Read More

Author Peter Kohler probes the deep roots of human culture in this series of wry essays unearthing universal pathos, humor and abiding wisdom in folktales, myths and legends from all ... Read More

'A natural offspring of America's industrialized democracy, the tabloid has learned to time its beat with the pulse of the common people. With an exaggeration shared by all the national ... Read More

'This is the story about Mike the chicken. Mike, of course, was not your ordinary chicken. No, not ordinary at all. You see, Mike was a headless chicken. If you ... Read More

Here are 37 entries in Worth1000.com's Photoshop contest challenging participants to create images 'proving' that some of the world's best-known urban legends and hoaxes are really true. Among the most ... Read More

In a new but hardly surprising development in the Hunting for Bambi saga, an acquaintance of George Evanthes, who was cited in earlier reports as a wealthy customer who forked ... Read More

AP says: 'Borrowing from technology for tracking pets, a U.S. company on Thursday launched Mexican sales of microchips that can be implanted under a person’s skin and used to confirm ... Read More

Notable quote from Connie Chesner, who tracks Internet rumors and advises companies on coping with same: 'We have entered this skeptical age, and the longer people use the Internet and ... Read More

A Web hoax so convincing it fooled radio stations and news outlets across the U.S. had the Internet abuzz with rumors on Wednesday that Metallica is suing a Canadian group ... Read More

Provoking outrage and skepticism in equal measure, local reports of a Las Vegas company offering men the opportunity to hunt and shoot naked women with paintball guns burgeoned into an ... Read More

Researchers have found a recipe for lasagna — heretofore considered a quintessentially Italian dish — in 'The Forme of Cury,' a cookbook compiled in 14th-century England and thought to be ... Read More

U.S. Route 666, a highway running through New Mexico, Colorado and Utah long saddled with the Biblical 'number of the beast,' will be redesignated "Route 491" on July 30, 2003, ... Read More

Peter Carlson's paean to the so-called 'Real Facts' on Snapple bottle caps in Monday's Washington Post opened with a doozy of an example: 'A duck's quack doesn't echo.'  Huh?  I ... Read More

Just because it's an urban legend doesn't mean it can't happen: Police say a dead body stuffed under the mattress of a bed in the Capri Motel in Kansas City, ... Read More

The first documented instance of a public figure 'flipping the bird' was in 1886, pop culture historians say, when famed ball player Charles 'Old Hoss' Radbourn covertly extended his ... Read More

The BBC says scientists have identified the mysterious giant blob that washed up on a Chilean shore a few weeks ago as a 'skeleton suspended in a semi-liquid mass within ... Read More

An email is currently circulating with an attached .PDF file containing a letter from McDonald's and a coupon for a free Premium Salad. The offer is not valid in this ... Read More

A breathalyzer test on a New York man pulled over for drunk driving July 9 showed he had twice the legal limit of alcohol in his blood despite the fact ... Read More

Historically the subject of jokes, satire and performance art, the oft-ridiculed idea of male pregnancy (stop snickering!) came one step closer reality last week (or so we're told) with the ... Read More

Rob Rosenberger's Vmyths.com, since 1995 the Web's premiere clearinghouse for information on network security hype and hoaxes, needs your support to stay in operation. Rosenberger, who has often confronted the ... Read More

No, Virginia, there is no Baby Ink. The Website promoting a tattoo parlor catering to infants and children is a hoax — an April Fools joke, actually — conceived by ... Read More

Wright Thompson in the Kansas City Star: 'Around Table Rock Lake they whisper about cats as big as cars, fish that could eat a man. Many scoff at that, but ... Read More

A reader wants to know if a story published today in the London tabloid The Sun claiming that a six-year-old girl won a Hulk doll in a local contest, pulled ... Read More

Re: Dork definitionIn spite of what you're apt to read on any of over 10,000 Web pages, the word "dork" does not mean (and has never meant) "whale penis." ... Read More

The brouhaha over G.W. Bush's latest exhibition of 'cowboyism' brings to mind the following anecdote plucked not so long ago from the Internet grapevine: When an aircraft approaches the carrier for ... Read More

They're not exactly saying Sunday's predicted mass hacker attack won't happen, but security experts are now dismissing the threat as 'mostly hype.'

It doesn't have a backbone and it's too big to be a whale skin. 'We'd never before seen such a strange specimen,' a befuddled scientist confided to Reuters. What is ... Read More

Sure, Indiana University's library was designed by an architect from a competing school and has exceeded its recommended capacity by over a million books, admits librarian Moira Smith, but that ... Read More

Officials of Milton Hospital in Massachusetts had just figured out how to cope with the tens of thousands of gawkers flocking to see a fuzzy apparition of the Virgin ... Read More

'Black Jack' Pershing update: I queried Dr. Frank Vandiver, Texas A&M history professor and author of 'Black Jack: The Life and Times of John J. Pershing,' as to the historical ... Read More