The Museum of Hoaxes is a

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Wikip ...

created by

Alex Boese Alex is a given name. It can refer to a shortened version of Alexander, Alexandra, Alexis. People Multiple *Alex Brown (disambiguation), multiple people *Alex Gordon (disambiguation), multiple people *Alex Harris (disambiguation), multiple peop ...

in 1997 in

San Diego San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the eighth most populous city in the United States ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the ...

as a resource for reporting and discussing

hoax A hoax is a widely publicized falsehood so fashioned as to invite reflexive, unthinking acceptance by the greatest number of people of the most varied social identities and of the highest possible social pretensions to gull its victims into pu ...

es and

urban legends An urban legend (sometimes contemporary legend, modern legend, urban myth, or urban tale) is a genre of folklore comprising stories or fallacious claims circulated as true, especially as having happened to a "friend of a friend" or a family m ...

, both past and present. In 2004, PC Magazine included the site as one of the "Top 100 Sites You Didn't Know You Couldn't Live Without", and Sci Fi Weekly named it "site of the week" for the week beginning 7 February 2007. Boese has published two books on hoaxes: ''Museum of Hoaxes'' and ''

Hippo Eats Dwarf Hippo Eats Dwarf is the title of a hoax news article which claims that a dwarf was accidentally eaten by a hippopotamus. The urban legend has been circulating via the internet since the mid-1990s. Many print newspapers have been fooled into publish ...

: A Field Guide to Hoaxes and Other B.S.'' A third book by Boese, ''Elephants on Acid'', focuses on unusual scientific experiments, with the follow-up ''Electrified Sheep'' published in 2011. His latest book ''Psychedelic Apes'' is about the weirdest theories in science and history was published in 2019.

Notable hoaxes covered

90 Day Jane ''90 Day Jane'' was a blog and hoax run by an anonymous woman, known as Jane, who promised to commit suicide 90 days after launching the blog, with the tagline, "I'm Going to Kill Myself in 90 Days". Her blog posts chronicled her life in the days l ...

References

External links

* * Fact-checking websites Publications established in 1997 Hoaxes Urban legends {{website-stub