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Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
From: het3@crash.cts.com (Harry MF Teasley)
Subject: AFU Book Review: Hoaxes!
Date: Sat, 19 Aug 1995 22:59:29 GMT

Hoaxes! Dupes, Dodges, & Other Dastardly Deceptions by Gordon Stein and Marie J MacNee
218pp, with introduction, acknowledgements, and index Visible Ink Press, ISBN 0-7876-0480-1
$13.95US. I got mine at the local Tower Records.

The acknowledgements page indicates that this book was culled from Gordon Stein's _Encyclopedia of Hoaxes_, published by Gale Research Inc. (Visible Ink is a subdivision of Gale). JHB is thanked on this page, he being the only name I recognised other than the Amazing Randi.

The nature of the book is, as the astute among you have already guessed, to describe famous hoaxes and how they have either been debunked or how they are doubted but not proven false. The authors do this in an engaging manner and magazine-style layout, where supplementary information to the main text is provided in little call-out paragraphs, excitingly done in a typewriter style font, oooh, they're so hip and postmodern.

The book is divided into major sections with titles like, "Weird Creatures and Visitors from Beyond," "Saints, Spirits, and Supernatural Scams," and "Heroes, Bad Guys, and Imposters." Each section is then subdivided further if the topic is especially broad (the Weird Creatures section is split into Man-Monsters (Bigfoot/Cardiff Giant/Piltdown Man), Sea Monsters (Loch Ness Monster), and UFOs), and these subsections deal with each case individually, making the book a fine one to pick up and put down, reading bits here and there.

Reading each case, I found that the authors were very commendable overall, not hypothesizing without good evidence, and not jumping to conclusions about truth or even probability in most cases. For instance, there is the section on Pope Joan, the man-impersonating female who held the holy office from 853 to 855. Records are pretty scanty on her, and there is much doubt on whether or not she existed at all. The book presents two accounts of her having a baby while travelling as Pope John VIII, the first being _The Chronicle of Metz_ (350 years after Joan was supposed to have been Pope), and the second being the _Chronicon Pontificum et Imperatorum_ by Martinus Polonus, dating fifty years after the Metz book. Quoting these, the authors then present the theory of Horace Mann, who suggests that she's just an invention of someone's imagination, due to the fact that there are coins with Pope Benedict III and Emporer Lothaire together on the same coin, which, due to the dates that folks died and such, would mean that there was no time during 853-855ad that the Papal office was free for strange women to come along and occupy it. The authors' conclusion is that somebody perpetrated a hoax, but no one knows who. The Church waffled on the issue, muddying things further. The authors did not take sides or present anything other than the evidence for both sides.

Cites are given frequently, but unfortunately no bibliography is provided; I assume the longer _Encyclopedia_ from which this book derives is not quite so sloppy in this regard.

But some of your favorite things are discussed: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Backward Masking, Nostradamus, Biorhythms, the Shroud of Turin (all of them quite firmly given the big HOAX stamp), and of course the Death of Hitler.

This section stuck with me because of one thing the authors said that made me wish more than anything that a bibliography was provided. The authors describe how, discovered in a Russian text by intelligence officer Lev Bezymensky, the Russians captured a German guard who had witnessed the bodies of Hitler and Braun being taken from the bunker to the garden, where they were burned and buried.

SMERSH apparently did not believe that the two bodies they dug up along with Goebbels and his wife were Adolf and Eva, but they didn't find their bodies anywhere else in the bunker. They examined the bodies in detail.

"The autopsy report: The teeth tell all. The autopsy report of the two bodies buried in the garden said that both had died after they had bitten into cyanide capsules: Glass fragments had been found in the mouths of both corpses. The male body had also been shot in the head- after he had taken the poison. And, like Hitler, the man had only one testicle."

This last remark is of course the one I would appreciate further citation on, but the authors treat it as a given and do not elaborate upon it. This struck me as unusual on the authors' part, to assume certain knowledge to be true, and it stuck out like a sore thumb from just about everything else they examined.

This minor point aside, a great many Hoaxes are dealt with in very lucid fashion, and a few pages reading can provide one with all the information needed to humiliate a Protocols believer pretty quickly. Nostradamus folks will also cease liking you after you lay the facts gleaned from this book before them.

My judgment: Good book. Not complete enough with its sources, but enough details are provided within each chapter that the sources could probably be located fairly easily in most instances. Excellent for the bathroom when you're having a little Quality Time. Handy reference that covers many topics, and should arm you quickly and well for most trivia discussion encounters. On the AFU scale, it gets a seven out of ten.

Harry "It'll be on my shelf next to the computer, within easy reach" Teasley

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"It's an example of my new maturity." -David Levy