/Interview/ The brains behind: Museum of Hoaxes
13/12/2007 | Filed under Discover > Interview
10 years after Alex Boese created the Museum of Hoaxes as research for his doctoral dissertation, the site is still growing strong. Just don’t mess with Hufu!
.net: How did you come up with the idea for the Museum of Hoaxes?
AB: The museum initially grew out of my graduate school studies. It was the mid-90s and I was pursuing a degree in American History. As part of the work for my dissertation, I was researching some nineteenth-century hoaxes. Purely for the sake of convenience, I put my research notes (which consisted of a short list of famous hoaxes) online. That way I could always pull them up when I was at the library. The list began to grow, and people started to find the list and email me about it. The feedback I received encouraged me to keep adding to it. It got so that I was spending more time working on the list than I was doing my graduate school work.
Finally, I decided that I needed to create a more permanent place online for the material I had collected, so I created the Museum of Hoaxes. The name seemed an obvious choice because museums are where we store our history, and what I had created was a huge collection of hoaxes, with a particular emphasis on the history of that phenomenon.
But I also liked the fact that the name makes it sound as if the museum really exists somewhere in the real world, which it doesn’t. I’ve had hundreds of people contact me over the years trying to find out where it is, including reporters from USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. It just seemed appropriate that a site about hoaxes should itself involve a hoax.
.net: How has it changed in the last 10 years?
AB: The museum has grown quite a bit since its origin as a single page of HTML. Obviously, there’s a lot more content on it now than there was 10 years ago. In 2002, I added a blog to the site, and around the same time I also added a member forum. I think the members are one of the best things about the site. In 2006, a group of us met in Edinburgh and travelled up to Loch Ness. It was amazing. People came from as far away as Australia. I’ve recently added a Wikipedia section to the site, called Hoaxipedia, and I’m porting most of the content of the site into that, as it’s a lot easier to add articles and edit them in that format. But it’s going to take a while until that project is completed.
.net: What kind of effect has the museum had on your life?
AB: The most immediate impact was that it attracted the attention of a publisher who invited me to write a book about hoaxes. It enabled me to leave academics and pursue a career as a writer. I’m now on my third book, though the most recent one isn’t about hoaxes. It’s about bizarre science experiments. The title is Elephants on Acid: and Other Bizarre Experiments.
.net: How do you make money from the site, and how lucrative is it?
AB: The money comes from advertising, mostly through the Google AdSense program, and I also use FM Media. The site was, from the beginning, more of a labour of love than something I imagined I would get rich from. I only began running ads once the traffic to the site increased so much that it was costing me a significant amount of money to fund it.
The ads cover the cost of running the site, and generate some pocket money on top of that, but I’m still not getting rich from the site. If I had more of a commercial sensibility, I could probably figure out a way to make more money from it, but that would probably mean moving away from the historical focus, which I’m reluctant to do. It would also mean devoting a lot more time to the site, which is difficult, especially when I’m writing a book.
.net: What’s your favourite hoax?
AB: This is always the most difficult question because there are so many to choose from. The ones I most enjoy usually involve the media falling for something totally ridiculous. Josh Whicker of the Hoosier Gazette has been responsible for a few classics. For instance, I loved his faux story about Indiana Interstate 69 having its name changed to the more “moral sounding” Interstate 63. It fooled a lot of people in the media, as did his story alleging that a five-year study had found that new parents experience a sudden loss of intelligence. The parent IQ story even got reported as real news by MSNBC.
.net: How do you determine what’s real and what’s fake?
AB: The most important rule to remember is that information is only as good as its source. So if you want to find out if something is real or fake, do as much research as possible about the source of the information. A lot of the time, the research is as simple as doing a quick Google search, but some people can’t be bothered to do even that much, which is why hoaxes spread as far as they do.
.net: How many people help you out in uncovering hoaxes?
AB: A lot. It’s hard for me to even approximate a figure. Running a site like the Museum of Hoaxes wouldn’t be possible without all the tips and help I receive from people on a daily basis.
.net: How often have you been wrong? And have you received complaints from people claiming that their “hoax” was real?
AB: Over the years, I think I’ve developed a pretty good intuition that lets me spot hoaxes pretty quickly, and be right the majority of the time. But I’ve also learned that intuition can never substitute for careful research. I have, however, received numerous complaints from people who think I’ve incorrectly labelled something a hoax. For instance, the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot supporters can be quite vocal in their complaints, particularly the Bigfoot crowd. Even though I’m careful not to label the legends themselves as hoaxes, only specific sightings.
But I’ve also received complaints from people such as the manufacturer of Hufu, which supposedly was human-flavoured tofu. I pointed out that he offered no evidence that the tofu really tasted like human flesh, which got him mad. He claimed, bizarrely enough, that my questions were "murdering Hufu”. Then there was the Time Travel Mutual Fund people. They claim to operate a mutual fund in which you invest $10 now and they’ll let this money sit in a bank account and gather interest for the next 500 years, or however long it takes to perfect time travel, at which point they’ll use the money to travel back in time and transport you into the future. I said it sounded like a joke, but they strongly disagreed.
.net: What does it take to pull off a good, successful hoax on the internet these days?
AB: The internet has provided hoaxers with new ways to disseminate their creations, but the key element in successful hoaxing is the same as it has always been: having a good imagination. A good hoax has to be simultaneously totally ridiculous and totally believable. That’s a much harder combination to pull off than people realise. Most people make the mistake of coming up with things that are so ridiculous, they’re not believable. Or they come up with hoaxes that are simply plain lies, lacking the element of the absurd.
.net: What’s planned next for the Museum of Hoaxes?
AB: It’s my dream to one day open a real brick-and-mortar Museum of Hoaxes. Let the hoax finally become a reality! But who knows when that might be.
Comments
Joe / 03/04/2008 / 03:19 / http://www.ambetenergy.com
Oh my gosh what a great post!! I have heard about this guy and his website!! I love reading those stories.
Plus I had no idea how it ever got started. If you have ever been to this site he has 1000s of different crazy stories. Thanks for sharing this post!! It is great stuff!!
