5 Lamest Hoaxes of All Time

It's official: the Balloon Boy Affair was a hoax. Yes, earlier this week Larimer County sheriff Jim Alderden exposed the Heene family as the pack of weirdo hucksters that those who saw the episode of Wife Swap they appeared on already knew they were. I guess it's hard to keep the story straight when one of your co-conspirators is a toddler named Falcon. Of course, being named Falcon is the least of this kid's worries. Apparently, Heene family patriarch, Richard, believes mankind descended from extraterrestrials. That probably makes for a comfortable parent-teacher conference. Plus, he has a lot to say about Britney Spears tits for some reason. Oh, yeah, and the Heenes are possibly homeless.

In honor of this new super lame hoax, Giant Electric Penguin is taking a look at 5 other hoaxes too stupid to believe.

1. STEVE BRODIE: CHAMPION BRIDGE JUMPER...OR NOT

Apparently, the late 1800's were so boring that simply suggesting you'd jumped off of a bridge was enough to make you an instant celebrity. Take Steve Brodie. In 1886, he started telling people that he had jumped off of the Brooklyn Bridge and a star was born. Brodie opened a successful saloon and had his name entered into the cultural lexicon with the birth of the phrase "pull a Brodie," which was used to describe a situation in which an individual would participate in some kind of dangerous activity and survive.

I guess he also had the above poster made. The balls on that guy.

MEMORABLE MOMENTS IN BRODIE PULLING:

-Arthur "The Fonz" Fonzarelli jumps over a deadly shark while water skiing.

- Frodo takes the One Ring to Mount Doom.

- Carrie Prejean denies gays the right to marry at the 2009 Miss USA pageant.

- Columbus faces his fear and clubs a clown zombie to death.

-Britney Spears' performance of "Gimme More" at the 2007 VMAs.

2. Binjamin Wilkomirski: Holocaust Opportunist

In 1996, the English translation of Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood reached American shores and became an instant hit, even winning the National Jewish Book Award. Fragments told the harrowing tale of Wilkomirski's time spent in Nazi concentration camps as a young child. His story of survival struck a chord in the hearts and minds of people everywhere and his book was compared favorably with those of Elie Wiesel and Anne Frank.

There was just one problem: Wilkomirski had never been in a Nazi concentration camp, not as a child anyway. Daniel Ganzfried, the Swiss journalist who exposed Wilkomirski, suggested the author may have visited the camps as a tourist, but much of his story was not backed up by those pesky historical records. Many critics who had initially praised Fragments turned against it, while others argued that it still worked as a pseudomemoir. Whatever side of the issue you fall on, there's no escaping the fact that Wilkomirski tried passing off the story as his own and there's something a little icky about that.

3. Jackalopes: The Other, Other, Other White Meat
Jackalopes are not intrinsically lame, in fact, the idea of bunny rabbit with antlers is pretty sweet. What's lame is the virus that started the whole jackalope rumor in the first place. The Shope papiloma virus causes cancerous tumors to grow on and around a rabbit's head, often making it difficult for the creature to eat, resulting in a slow death by starvation. That's terrible, sad, and lame! What colors are still available? I want to make some ribbons.

Another lame thing to come out of the whole jackalope thing: Dave Coulier's stupid-ass jackalope videos:

Fun Fact: America's Funniest People sponsored a "Name the Jackelope" contest and the winning name was "Jack Ching Bada-Bing." For real.

4. Darwin's Death Bed Conversion

Charles Darwin! Scourge of the Religious Right! Champion of Evolution! Beard enthusiast! Some people have got a real problem with Mr. Darwin, mostly because they believe this theory of evolution to be anti-God and, therefore, pro-Satan and all his demonic minions. Some individuals were so afraid that Darwin and his evolution nonesense would be the downfall of Christian society, that on August 15, 1915, the Watchman Examiner, a Baptist newspaper, reported that on his death bed, the English naturalist had turned his back on his heathen past and given his life to Christ. He apparently made this startling about face in the company of a mysterious woman named "Lady Hope," who may or may not have been Elizabeth Hope the popular British evengelist.

Upon it's publication, Darwin's children refuted the article's claims and historians have taken their side. Sorry, Baptists, but evolution lives on. Epic fail.

5. Psychic Surgery: Lame

One of my favorite scenes in 1999's Man on the Moon, shows Andy Kaufman visiting a psychic surgeon in the Phillipines in a last ditch effort to rid himself of cancer. He watches as the scam artist removes a concealed chicken liver from his fist and begins chuckling to himself. This powerful shot fades into my least favorite shot: a bald, dead Andy in his coffin. Ick.

Pyschic surgery is the Andy Kaufman of medical procedures when you think about it. It's silly, strange, and speaks with a foreign accent sometimes. It's a ruse and the joke, unfortunately, is on the poor, dying bastard who has put his hope in the hands of a flim flam man. Remember this the next time you're considering involving anything psychic in the maintaining of your health: if the word "psychic" appears before something (surgery, healing, reading, etc.), it's total bullshit.