I had interviewed Alex Boese via email, sometime in 2001

I had interviewed Alex Boese via email, sometime in 2001. At the time, he was a doctoral student at the University of San Diego, studying the relationship between science and popular culture. He was also the guy who, in 1997, had launched The Museum of Hoaxes (www.museumofhoaxes.com).

I have often tried to figure out what it is that drives people like Boese to create the content they do: quirky, but compelling. What I find most interesting about his museum -- apart from its coverage of the woman who gave birth to rabbits -- is how it uses the medium to service a twisted human need for novelty.

Back in the 1630s, a man called Lazarus Colloredo toured Europe with his twin brother John Baptista; the latter was attached to Colloredo's sternum. In eighteenth-century Russia, Peter the Great spent years collecting human oddities, real and fake. By the mid-nineteenth century, a certain PT Barnum introduced London to a midget called Tom Thumb -- a 4-year-old passed off as 11, and marketed as 'the smallest person that ever walked alone.'

By choosing to look at hoaxes -- from April Fool's Day pranks down the ages to fake websites, what Boese has done, for 13 years now, is to hold a mirror to the gullibility that is innate in human nature. It's what Barnum understood better than most of his contemporaries. It also explains why, seven years after the museum of hoaxes was launched, PC Magazine listed it among its 'top 100 sites you didn't know you couldn't live without.'

My favourite part of Boese's site has always been the Gullibility Testsu00a0 -- quizzes to help figure out how many fibs we have fallen for over the years. On my last visit, I was duly informed that my belief regarding lemmings committing mass suicide was false. Apparently, this myth was perpetuated by a 1958 Disney documentary titled White Wilderness, in which the filmmakers herded those poor animals off a cliff to show supposedly natural behaviour!

And yes, that port-a-potty -- called the Microsoft iLoo -- wasn't real either.

-- Lindsay Pereira is Editor, MiD Day Online

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