Hoax Spectacular! with Chelsey Weber-Smith

Sarah talks with Chelsey Weber-Smith, host of American Hysteria, about some of their favorite hoaxes—from the Loch Ness Monster to the Taco Liberty Bell—and ponder the value of pranks in a world of misinformation. 

You can find Chelsey here.
You can find American Hysteria here.

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Links:

https://www.chelseywebersmith.com/
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Transcript

Sarah Marshall: Because I think pranks are for people who don't have complex PTSD.

Welcome to You’re Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall. And today I am bringing you our Hoax Spectacular, a co-production with Chelsey Weber-Smith of American Hysteria. Which also has a brand-new episode out today, which you can find wherever great podcasts are distributed. 

Chelsey and I love to talk about urban legends. We love to talk about hoaxes. We love to talk about clowning around. And in this episode, we run down a bunch of our personal favorite hoaxes, with points of origin ranging from Taco Bell to Thomas Edison. And we also talk about what the value of hoaxes and pranks are for a friend group, a culture, or a society, in the age of misinformation. And what it means to clown around.

This was a really fun episode to make. We hope you have a fun time listening to it. And if you want more episodes and haven't signed up yet to listen to You're Wrong About on Patreon or Apple+ this is a great time to do it, because we are in the middle of our four-part saga on the Britney Spears memoir, The Woman in Me, with our friend Eve Lindley.

We put episode one on our main feed last week, so you could check it out. So give it a listen. See if you want to hear more. And we are putting Britney part three out on Patreon and Apple+ this month. 

Thank you so much for being with us. Thank you for being April fools. Here's your episode.

Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the podcast where we have decided that we are no longer going to be a millennial aesthetic podcast, and instead are becoming a drive time, prime time, happy hour show. With me is my fellow shock jock, Chelsey Weber-Smith. 

Chelsey: Whazzup? 

Sarah: Whazzup! And then we put in a toilet flushing sound somewhere.

Chelsey: No, you guys, that was a prank. I would never do that. And I would never prank you for more than 20 seconds. 

Sarah: I would never put a toilet sound on this podcast. Because I think pranks are for people who don't have complex PTSD. 

Chelsey: So true. So true. 

Sarah: But I'm Sarah Marshall. With me today is Chelsey Weber-Smith, who is our many things correspondent, but I would also say our clowning around correspondent.

Chelsey: An honor. If only that were my official job title in the rest of my life. I would love that. 

Sarah: We can work towards that. 

Chelsey: All right. Okay. 

Sarah: Chelsey, you've been coming on our show for four years now. You're the host of American Hysteria. Tell me about you for a minute. 

Chelsey: Oh, about me. About me. Well, I am obsessed with things like hoaxes and things like moral panics and urban legends, much like what you cover on your show. And I love getting to the bottom of tales that appear one way but are really another. And I'm excited to talk about hoaxes with you because it probably, it's really high up there on my most favorite things in the world, period. Along with roses and walks through haunted houses.

Sarah: Aww. Yeah, those are all really great things. I think hoaxes are also one of my favorite things. And we talked most recently about our dearest fears for Halloween, you came by recently. Hoaxes feel like part of the tapestry of folklore in a way that I want to try and delineate today. Especially in, I hate to bring it up, but it is 2024.

So I was looking at a New York Times article today that was like, people might have amnesia about how bad Trump was. And I was like, I don't even think it's amnesia, it's just that adults can't remember what four years ago was like, generally. But the idea of Misinformation hasn't gone away as a problem since Trump left office. And some could even argue that there are ways in which it's gotten stronger, I'm sure. But it's a big part of our all of our lives today and the sort of work that we have to do trying to communicate with people, while living in a society where we can't agree on a very basic level about what's going on.

And I feel like the question of, when is it productive socially to lie or to trick people is an interesting question. Happy April Fool's Day! We're fun! I am fun! Happy 

Chelsey: April Fool's Day, everybody! 

Sarah: We're going to talk about themes. This is not a trick. 

Chelsey: No, and these are important questions. And I think we'll get to the heart of these types of things throughout this episode. And we'll also, I always like to, what do you do? You hide the medicine. So we're going to probably tell you some pretty fun hoaxes. But I have a feeling we'll build to some less fun points. 

Sarah: Yay!. But first, the fun hoaxes. You're talking about April Fool's related stuff specifically. And what do you have going on American Hysteria today?

Chelsey: As also fellow Monday podcast, we have an episode out today about probably the most prolific hoaxer in American history. He had decades and decades of hoaxes out there that are just so weird and fun and socially relevant, while at the same time being totally absurdist. And so we're going to go through his life, and how those hoaxes tricked Americans, and what his points were to doing all of these kind of weird pieces of performance art. So make sure you check that out. It's out now. 

Sarah: That's so exciting. In terms of April Fool's Day stuff, I was reminiscing. And we were wondering if some of our favorite April Fool's Day hoaxes overlap. And so let me tell you about one of them, which I remember reading about in Nickelodeon magazine when I was like nine, probably, which is the Taco Liberty Bell.

Chelsey: Stop, Sarah. That is literally my first. 

Sarah: YAY! We're historians! We’re baby historians.

Chelsey: I'm looking at a giant piece of text that says, Taco Liberty Bell. 

Sarah: Yes! Oh, tell us about the Taco Liberty Bell! You're my soulmate.

Chelsey: Oh, it's true. It's true, babe. I didn't think we would have the same first. I was like, there's going to be overlap, but God, are we twin flames. 

Sarah: This is a nice way to warm up. You're my soulmate. 

Chelsey: You're my soulmate. You may be asking, what the fuck is the Taco Liberty Bell? 

Sarah: And it's a 90s kid thing, not to brag. 

Chelsey: Yeah, absolutely. So we're gonna weeweeweeweewee, we're going back to April 1st, 1996. A full-page advertisement is ran in seven major newspapers, and this is what it says. Beneath a picture of the Liberty Bell, that you and I are so familiar with. You and I, the greater culture of America. It says, “Taco Bell buys the Liberty Bell. In an effort to help the national debt, Taco Bell is pleased to announce that we have agreed to purchase the Liberty Bell, one of our country's most historic treasures. It will now be called the ‘Taco Liberty Bell’ and will still be accessible to the American public for viewing. While some may find this controversial, we hope our move will prompt other corporations to take similar action, to do their part to reduce the country's debt.” And then below that, the Taco Bell symbol with a little crack in the Taco Bell. 

Sarah: It's brilliant. 

Chelsey: Oh, yep. So this is on its own really funny, but this was only the beginning of the prank, right? It was apparently a very slow news day. So the Clinton administration White House press secretary, Mike McCurry, decided to have a little fun with it. And he said, quote, “We will be doing a series of these things. Ford Motor Company is joining today in an effort to refurbish the Lincoln Memorial. It will now be the Lincoln Mercury Memorial.” 

Sarah: I love that he's like, The American people have a sense of humor. 

Chelsey: Yeah, but do we, or did we freak the ffff hell out?

Sarah: I just, I don't remember, but I have a feeling that we freaked out about it. 

Chelsey: We freaked. So over the course of the day, before it was announced that this was a joke, people got really upset. They were very, very, very angry that such an important symbol… 

Sarah: Of something we can't remember, but we're sure it was important. I have no idea why the Liberty Bell is historically significant. I just know it's a big deal. It's a big fucking bell. I'm happy we have it, even if I don't know what it did.

Chelsey: Let's see what the hell it was, because I don't know either. 

Sarah: I have gone on record saying it's big. So yeah, we should probably get deeper.

Chelsey: An iconic symbol of American independence, commissioned by Pennsylvania, boring, boring, who cares? Oh, a biblical reference to the best book of the Bible, the book of Leviticus, is apparently part of the bell. 

Sarah: And Leviticus is the book with all the rules in it, right? 

Chelsey: Yeah. You can't have shellfish, you can't wear mixed fibers, you can't have sex with your friend, Sean. I don't know. We still didn't really find out what the Liberty Bell was. But nah, I don't care. 

Sarah: I don't care either. 

Chelsey: I care about the Taco Liberty Bell and the Taco Liberty Bell only. 

Sarah: And I'm sure that's partly what people were freaking out about at the time. But what I remember is that there was an episode of Brotherly Love, the Lawrence Brothers vehicle sitcom, where as a joke, a museum guide guy, when the littlest Lawrence brother went to touch the Liberty Bell, he was like, “You cracked that!” And then the kid was like, “Oh no, my family's going to lose all our money because I cracked the Liberty Bell.” And so I just associate it with children being anxious. 

Chelsey: God, that reminds me of when I didn't return The Shining that I checked out from the school library. And I found it in my closet a year later and I couldn't sleep.

Sarah: Yeah. 

Chelsey: I was like, my parents are going to owe tens of thousands of dollars because I saw a Seinfeld episode about this. 

Sarah: Right. And I feel like the anxieties of children are can be so intense without them ever mentioning them to anybody, in a way that at least when I was a child. At least for anxious children.

Chelsey: Yeah. 

Sarah: Yeah. But the anxieties of adults are more revealed by this kind of thing. And I feel like one of the things we're going to come up against in a lot of these stories is the issue of credibility. And I feel like part of what this is playing on is that in a more mundane way, we all have to deal with corporations running our lives and also changing the names of things that are a part of our memories. 

Like how the Rose Garden in Portland became the Moda Center, and now I think it's a third thing that I refuse to start calling it. Or Crypto.com Arena, which is somehow an even worse name than whenever it was called before.

Chelsey: Yeah, that was like when people summed up this whole experience of the Tac Liberty Bell. It was like, the fact that this was believable at all was so indicative of the 90s and this new world where corporations had the ability. It wasn't new. It's like corporations were always presented by, this entire TV show, this entire comedian is presented by Vitameatavegamin, or something like that.

Sarah: Right. If you watch the George Burns and Gracie Allen show when it was first on, they're sponsored by, their entire episodes where they keep taking breaks to talk about Carnation Milk, which if anything is like the way podcasts are now. 

Chelsey: God, truly guilty as charged. So everybody was freaking out. The phone lines at the Philadelphia Inquirer, which is one of the big newspapers where this was printed, were totally jammed. Everybody was yelling. The historical park nearby, the city hall, all these civic organizations where the public thought maybe they could get through to somebody about their outrage, were just totally overwhelmed. And somehow talk show hosts that night were already talking about the country's values and how lost we were.

So the National Park Service actually had to host an impromptu news conference that they weren't planning on having, to confirm to the public that everything was okay and that this was all a prank. But this campaign really worked. It cost $300,000 total to, I don't know why it cost that much, but that's how much it costs to create this whole campaign.

Sarah: I guess just for running the full-page ads probably mostly, right? Because it was just print and then you're done. And then people do all the work for you. 

Chelsey: Yeah, and then vastly overpaying the marketing executive that came up with this. 

Sarah: Look, if you're a newspaper in 1996 selling ad pages, you're just printing money, and it'll never be over. Things will never be different. 

Chelsey: No. It's going to be top of the world for the rest of your life. But they made, over the next two days, more than a million dollars more than they had typically been making. So it was a massive success. 

Sarah: It makes sense, right? Because if everyone is talking about Taco Bell, and all you hear is Taco Bell, some number of people, including myself, are going to be like, I could really eat one of those Mexican pizzas right now.

Chelsey: Yeah. Or if you're like, that was funny, I'm going to go get some Taco Bell, because it is funny. I think it's funny. 

Sarah: Where you're like, I'm so angry that it's making me hungry for Taco Bell. 

Chelsey: Yeah, maybe I can eat them to death. So that's pretty much the whole story. That was really it. And then it took a few weeks for people to fully adjust to the fact that it wasn't true, of course. That was a beautiful moment, a pure moment, in 1996, it feels like. And yeah, I'm so happy we had the same first hoax. There are many hoaxes we could have chosen. 

Sarah: This feels to me like a great example of an April Fool's Day prank slash hoax. For one thing, it's using a joke to point out something that is, in a way, very credible. And to cause people maybe not to reflect, but to at least in some way think and talk about the way that the world is changing around them. And it's not so different from, I mean, there's some art pieces that are essentially just pranks in that way.

Chelsey: Yeah. And I mean, there's a weird irony to the fact that it is a kind of social, corporate, capitalistic, like a commentary. 

Sarah: Yeah. 

Chelsey: But it is still by a corporation. So it's like meta in a way. If it were true, not that I have a lot of love for the Liberty Bell, but I don't have a lot of love for things being renamed other things that sounds stupid.

Sarah: What is it? Climate P Arena in Seattle. Because it's very nice to pledge to do things for the climate. I make little climate pledges all the time. But it’s sort of like an arena calling itself, Shut up, I'm sorry, leave me alone, Arena.

Chelsey: Yeah, it really hurts. 

Sarah: Tell me another April Fool's Day hoax or prank that you want to talk about. 

Chelsey: Okay, I think you're going to really like this one if you don't know it already. Alright, again, it's April 1st, 1992, and NPR's Talk of the Nation is reporting that former President Richard Nixon has officially declared that he is running for the Republican presidential nomination.

Sarah: Again, kind of believable.

Chelsey: 100%.  

Sarah: You're not like, that would never happen. 

Chelsey: It's funny, because I didn't really know how people really wanted him to run again. 

Sarah: I didn't know that. That's a little worrying. 

Chelsey: Yeah, I know. And by ‘88, at the end of the Reagan administration, one of the articles that I read on newspapers.com, our favorite website. 

Sarah: Not a sponsorship. It's just the truth. 

Chelsey: Yeah. Thank you. There was a big selling t-shirt back in ’88, that then was printed again in ‘92 at the next election that said, “He's tanned, rested, and ready, Nixon in ‘88”. Which is a reference to the debate that he lost to John F. Kennedy, when he was famously sallow, sweaty, and generally unkempt.

Sarah: They're like, 28 years later, he's finally got this wellness thing down. 

Chelsey: I was like, I don't think Nixon will ever be rested with those undereye bags. 

Sarah: I feel like it maybe feels tempting to feel nostalgic in a general kind of way for Nixon. But I have to point out that he was also an extremely paranoid, anti-Semitic person, so it fits in with what we know today. Doesn't seem that different. Who loved lying to the American public almost as much as he loved lying to himself. Again. 

Chelsey: Yeah, he was a very bad man. They announced this, and they actually had a soundbite that sounded very much like it was Richard Nixon, but it was a comedian named Rich Little, who was impersonating his voice.

Sarah: And think he was la well-known impressionist, like he's Monet. But I feel like you hear his name a lot in terms of great impressionists. So they got somebody good. That's nice. At least people aren't fooled by a hack. 

Chelsey: I'd never heard of him before. I like that you had heard of him. So he apparently did a great job, and this is what he said. Here we go. Can I do Nixon? 

Sarah: You can. You can. It's all about wanting it. 

Chelsey: “I would not boast of a career in which so many tragedies and setbacks have occurred. I would only say that it is the true leader who stands alone. Having marched up this hard road and won back your confidence, I ask you once more, my fellow Americans, to make me your president.”

Sarah: Ah! I loved it. That was beautiful. Look, the point is not to sound exactly like the person, but to do a character that feels true. And I felt it. I felt Nixon. 

Yeah, and again, it's 1992. Reagan has recently left office as, at the time, a very old president. Reagan, who I believe was younger when he left office than Trump was when he entered the White House. Certainly than Biden was when he entered the White House. I wouldn't worry about it too much. 

Chelsey: When they creaked open that crypt and led him out by the hand. 

Sarah: So yeah, it does make sense to me that you just never know what's going to happen in the Republican Party. And it's truer now than it was then, but I think it was still very true in 1992. 

And again, this kind of actually fits in with the broader question of misinformation. Which is that if you hear a hoax that feels credible and also freaks you out, like the Taco Liberty Bell, I think that you're actually probably more likely to believe it, because you get into a heightened state and you're not thinking as well. Which is the same way telemarketing scams work. 

Chelsey: Yeah. Absolutely. To make this NPR report even more credible, they had Harvard professor Lawrence Tribe, as well as Newsweek reporter Howard Fineman on, to give their professional political opinions about this landmark announcement. And then they also played a clip from the press secretary of the Bush/Quail campaign. That's a throwback. And she said, “We are stunned, and think it's an obvious attempt by Nixon to upstage our foreign policy announcement today.” Which I don't know what that was. 

Sarah: Who knows? Nothing good. 

Chelsey: Nope. So then, they opened up the phone lines and let people call in about this announcement. And the really fun thing is, that before callers were put on the air, they were told that this was a joke. And those that agreed to play along, did. 

Sarah: Oh, that's fun. I like that. 

Chelsey: Which I love. And that was probably so fun. And I wish, I couldn't find a recording of this, but I would have loved to get to hear it. I'm sure it's out there somewhere in a dusty basement at the NPR headquarters. 

Sarah: Yeah, I'm having a vision of the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's somewhere in there. And so did this story get traction, or did people, how big did this get? 

Chelsey: It got big. It was again, the calls, as we say, were flooding in, and people were expressing shock and outrage.

And then eventually, during the recording at the very end, they revealed that it had been an April Fool's Day joke. But apparently, according to the news articles I read, people were rushing out to tell their mailman, people were crying, people were yelling in the street about this thing that actually people had been really afraid of happening.

It wasn’t like the Taco Liberty Bell, obviously people wanted Nixon to run again. And again, I think it's interesting because at this point before Clinton was elected, it had been 12 years since a Democrat was in the White House. So they were like, who was a couple before this guy? Let's go back and find out. 

Sarah: Little did they know that around the bend was William Jefferson Clinton and the saxophone.

Chelsey: Oh, yeah. Famously left leaning. 

Sarah: You can have a liberal in the White House as long as he's a bona fide sex pest. 

Chelsey: God, Sarah, that's hot. It's sexy when you act like Bill Clinton. I don't know what that means. 

Sarah: I gotta work this into my drag king cabaret show, because I also have a Sean Connery. The night of a thousand toxic men. 

Chelsey: Write in, people, if you want to see Sarah Marshall do Bill Clinton in drag. 

Sarah: But what song would I lip sync to? On a self-addressed stamped envelope. 

Chelsey: You would just do a saxophone lip sync. 

Sarah: I would. I would do Baker Street. That's what I would do.

Chelsey: So it took a while for people to, again, adjust to the fact that it was a joke. But eventually it calmed down. And I think this is a pretty good one. 

Sarah: And also again, it feels like it's a prank because there's some element of oh, no, this is a disaster. And then the relief of being de-hoaxed. And that’s a prank for fun, maybe, is one where, or a prank. What is a prank? What is a prank alongside the definition of a hoax? Because I would say maybe at this moment that pranks are a variety of hoax, but one that is at least allegedly intended to be in good humor. 

Chelsey: To me, a prank is shorter lasting than a hoax, and less in depth. But I do think that a prank generally doesn't have the same attempt at some kind of either commentary or deception. Because a hoax can also be propaganda. I think a hoax, as we have seen recently especially, there's been a lot of misinformation in the political arena recently. These stories being told that are not true, and then those are being used to justify horrific things that are happening. And so I think when you have a prank, I think pranks can be really mean spirited.

Sarah: Oh yeah, especially when frat boys do them. 

Chelsey: Yeah, when blonde YouTubers do them. 

Sarah: Oh my god. 

Chelsey: They're really similar, but I do think a hoax has much farther-reaching implications than a prank does, whether positive or negative. 

Sarah: And then, I was thinking about what is a hoax and what isn't a hoax, right? Because it isn't just a lie, necessarily. Many lies are just lies, and they're intended to be deceptive. And there isn't some kind of deeper meaning behind them. And you're not expected to complete the experience when you learn the truth. You're just ideally supposed to never know what really happened.

And so in terms of defining hoaxes, I find that interesting, right? Because some of the things that get defined as hoaxes, I'm actually not sure if by my own definition I would call them that. Because for example, you have something like Clifford Irving writing a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes, is a famous example. Where he was actually able to secure a $650,000 advance for publishing and serializing what he claimed to be an ‘as told to’ autobiography of Howard Hughes, where he essentially was Hughes's ghostwriter.

And it was on the verge of publication when Howard Hughes was forced to make a statement and say that he didn't know and had never met Clifford Irving, who then actually went to prison for a time, and who said that it was a hoax. And so it's called a hoax. There's a movie made about it called, The Hoax, starring Richard Gere. But is it a hoax if your intent is to deceive people and then never undeceive them?

Chelsey: Yeah, that's a good question. 

Sarah: And in terms of misinformation and propaganda meant to inspire war, and meant to inspire destruction, and death, and murder. That also feels connected to monster hoaxes, right? Because we have our harmless cryptids, Bigfoot and his friends, who exist through folklore. Which is meant to explain mechanical failures or to express some of the realities of, in the case of the original Bigfoot, stories of people working in the timber industry.

But then you have the stories that a society will tell in order to, just as we did at the start of the war on terror when we allegedly had information about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction. The goal is to deceive a God fearing people, and then never undeceive them.

Chelsey: Yeah, I think that hoaxes can exist with the hope that they are never uncovered. 

Sarah: Yeah. And under Nixon, we had the idea of the domino effect. Which we get to hear about from Baby's sister in Dirty Dancing. The idea that we have to go to war in Vietnam as the United States and to stay in a war beyond the point of it being potentially winnable, because we have to stop the spread of communism. And that being the particular piece of, I would say, misinformation that's selling that war at that time. And if you look at any war, there's inevitably a pattern of propagandas and hoaxes and misinformation. And I think, yeah, you can't have a war without hoaxes, really. 

Chelsey: No, absolutely not. And you can't have one because hoaxes exist to completely dehumanize a population by making them out to be monstrous. So you're going to tell the worst stories that you can possibly think of so that you have the justification to act however you would want to, under the pretense of being on the defense.

It's this is crazy, common, it happens in every war. And it's arguably sort of the vehicle that carries the war. That's why I love hoaxes so much, but they also scare me so deeply. 

Sarah: Yeah, and they're frequently, and more broadly within folklore, about what we desire and what we fear. And one of the best ways to get a person by the short hairs and keep their attention is to talk to them about what they fear. If you arouse people's emotions or their fears specifically, whether you're talking about Taco Bell or weapons of mass destruction, then their ability to think will be compromised.

And that's part of what we like about acknowledged fakery and something like the Taco Liberty Bell, or the Blair Witch Project, or Ghostwatch, is that there's something wonderful about people standing there saying this is fake. We're doing this and this is fake. Okay, let's do it. That allows everybody to witness, in a slightly scientific way within themselves and the people around them, the reactions and the dynamics that make hoaxes so powerful. And then to understand more about them when the consequences are dire. 

Chelsey: Yeah, absolutely. And each hoax is so individualized to what could be believed at that moment. You can't go too big. It has to still be within the realm of possibility. And I think that's why hoaxes can teach us a lot about what was in the realm of possibility when they occurred. 

Sarah: Yeah, completely. I wonder if this is on your list. Google always does April Fool's Day stuff, and in 2000 they said that Google would now be doing telepathic searches. They'll be releasing a new device that would allow you to search telepathically. Which again, in 2000 seemed, I think, very futuristic and far off. But today I'm like, give them two years. 

Chelsey: Is an algorithm anything other than a psychic?

Sarah: We're approaching the point where the difference is going to be technical, at best. And I think that at that point, we already had a sense of that. Because the internet felt, and was, so beyond what we what our worlds had been like from a technological perspective. And we knew that. And so I think that fits with the sort of credibility pattern we've been talking about. 

And then another one I love, this is just from last year, 2023. Whales Online announced that there would be a 20 mile per hour speed limit imposed on the M4, to reduce crashes that people had while trying to read Welsh signage.

Chelsey: Wow. Wow. Did people freak out? 

Sarah: Probably. I don't know. I'm sure that there is at least some degree of freaking out in Wales about it. But again, I like that because it feels like a joke that people can share together, that there's a little trip inside of that prank. And at the end of it, you get to enjoy the fact that felt real to you because it's something that relates to your life as you live it and it allows you to agree that you're sharing an experience of the world. 

Chelsey: Yes. Absolutely. Would you like another one? 

Sarah: I would love another one. 

Chelsey: Let's go way back to April 1st, 1878, all right? When the front page of several major newspapers reads, The Wonder of Wonders, Edison's Marvelous Invention, The Food Machine.

Sarah: Oh, Edison. 

Chelsey: Quail on toast and every delicacy brought forth by the slight turn of the wrist. Have you heard about this one? 

Sarah: No, I haven't. This makes me a little bit emotional because I'm like, what a dream. 

Chelsey: I know. Edison was very involved in this prank. He was part of it. 

Sarah: Oh no, Edison, don't be a jerk. So many people are hungry, and you're rich. It's not funny. And you don't get to be the voice of your horrible little dolls. Listen to American Hysteria to learn about Edison and his scary dolls. 

Chelsey: Haunted Dolls is the episode where you can hear that audio. Highly recommend my own podcast, because that audio is some of my favorite audio that's ever existed.

So at the time, if we're talking about how could people believe that this could happen. Edison has recently invented the phonograph, Which is, as you and I have talked about quite a bit whenever we talk about spiritualism and talking to the dead, was just something that completely rocked the psyche of America and the world abroad. Because it felt like magic.

Sarah: Yeah, because it is magic. I don't understand the science of phonographs, really. It's magic to me. 

Chelsey: And you would not be alone in… I guess you believe it's magic now. But yes, it was just something that, like the lightbulb, it just felt impossible. It felt impossible that you could hear a person's voice coming out of a machine. It was just incomprehensible for people. 

Sarah: It's not something that we were evolved to know what to make of. And we're just jogging behind a mail truck for the past century and a half, I would say, as organisms trying to make sense of the world we've made for ourselves.

Chelsey: Ugh. That's a great way to put it. 

Sarah: Thank you. 

Chelsey: He goes to these newspapers that are in on the joke. But he says that essentially by combining dirt taken from the cellar and water taken from the pipes, he can combine these essential elements. And he goes into really boring detail about carbon and all of the different elements that exist. 

Sarah: They're like, it's got to be real, he's talking about carbon. He's the wizard of Menlo Park, honey. 

Chelsey: I actually read that this might have been one of the roots of that nickname coming about.

Sarah: They were like, he's the wizard of Menlo Park because he says he can do things that are impossible, and he can't do them.

Chelsey: He said here's a quote from him, “All of our food comes primarily from the earth. The plants and fruits we eat come from moist ground. And the animals we eat live on the plants or other animals which the plants have kept alive.” 

Sarah: Can't argue with that. 

Chelsey: “So all the food comes from the elements that are stored up in the earth, air, and water. You can eat a grain of wheat, for instance. The wheat is mainly composed of a few simple gases and salts…” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 

Sarah: So he, at this point, I know you've stopped listening, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 

Chelsey: Yeah, exactly. won't keep going. 

Sarah: But that's the Edison hoax. He just keeps droning on, and then you're like, ‘and food’.

Chelsey: Yes. Ta da! And yeah, so he really just droned on until people zoned out enough to just be like, alright, I just believe you, just stop, I believe you, please. 

And he said, the head of every family, by turning a crank, or perhaps without turning a crank, if clockwork be attached, can produce more delicious fruits and wines at a tenth of the cost.

Sarah: That Amanda Seyfried show about Theranos should have opened with just an unexplained seven-minute-long vignette telling this story, because the birth of Silicon Valley is, promise something impossible, profit, the end. Not that I think profit was the goal here, or was he actually having fun?

Chelsey: Yes, this was a prank. It was not a money-making scheme. It was just an April Fool's joke. And the idea, of course, as you mentioned earlier, was that he had said this will solve the world's problems. Because part of it was the journalists being like, “But what will become of the farmers, Mr. Edison?” And then he said, “You forget that men work chiefly to obtain food. When food costs them nothing, they will need to work only for shelter, clothes, and luxuries”. 

Again, a commentary, a bit, on maybe the kind of industrialization that was happening at this time and had really changed everything about the American landscape, especially the American rural landscape.

And, I think the fact that people could believe this to be true probably said a lot about what we dreamed our lives could actually be like. And that didn't include child labor and 80-hour weeks in factories where our arms get cut off. 

Sarah: Yeah. And this feels like such an innocent kind of a prank because it's like, it's a machine. It'll take care of everything. And it turned out that we were the caretakers of the machines. 

Chelsey: Yeah, that was it. It just immediately added to Edison's status as this kind of spiritual figure, almost, like this genius sorcerer. And again, it took a while for it to get around that it wasn't true, especially at this time. I was seeing articles in late April that were still acting as if this were true. 

Sarah: Because the technology has changed, but the dynamic socially seems similar. Where if you hear an outrageous story, that's going to travel farther than the debunking of it. And we know that very well through the way we use social media today.

And of course, I imagine it's something that if you read that or heard about that from somebody, then it was a story you might repeat to people that you met. It could travel around orally and just become part of the fabric of how people felt when they saw the word ‘Edison’.

Chelsey: Definitely. Sarah, do you have any more hoaxes for me? 

Sarah: I do. Yeah, one of the things I wanted to talk about takes us just a little bit forward in time. But now we're in the early 1930s in Scotland, where the legend of another cryptid is about to be augmented by technology. Who could it be?

Chelsey: Who could it be? 

Sarah: It's little Renesmee herself, the Loch Ness Monster. 

Chelsey: She rises from the depths. 

Sarah: Yeah. And Chelsea, how do you feel about the Loch Ness Monster? Do you feel an attachment to they/them? 

Chelsey: The only real attachment I have to the Loch Ness Monster comes when I went to a wine and painting night with my mother and her best friend and her daughter, who's also one of my best friends. And you know how these wine and painting nights are just the ugliest you could possibly imagine. With the silhouette of a tree, and the light on the water, just with colors that are so primary that it makes me want to chop my own head off. 

But I was done with it, and I was like, I think my painting needs a little something extra. So I just painted in a little Nessie. And the person who ran the wine and painting night was slowly approaching, and I was like, is she going to be mad at me because they went out of the bounds of her sanctioned creativity? But no, she enjoyed it. I think that she got a little chuckle out of it. But that's really the only thing that I feel about the Loch Ness Monster. 

Sarah: Nessie deserves to see the sunset. And I love that you say that you painted Nessie, because I think most people listening understand intuitively exactly what that means. And in our Amy Winehouse episode with Eve Lindley, I think Eve talked about silhouette theory and the idea that you're truly an icon if just from your silhouette, people would know who you were. So Dolly Parton is an icon. Amy Winehouse is an icon. And the Loch Ness Monster is an icon, I would say. Because, what did your Nessie look like? 

Chelsey: A pinup. No, my Nessie looked, it was just the kind of brontosaurian, long neck and head, and just the partial bit of the body popping out of the water. 

Sarah: Exactly. And that's the iconic Nessie. And that comes from a photo that is known generally as ‘the surgeon's photograph’. Which I love as a name for something, because it was taken by a gynecologist who was on holiday in Scotland, allegedly. 

And so the surgeon's photograph, most of us have seen it. If you haven't, actually, let's take a look at it, Chelsea. Just look it up. I don't even have to send you a link. You'll get a million of them. The surgeon's photograph.

Chelsey: There it is. 

Sarah: Yeah, what do you see? 

Chelsey: I see exactly what I painted on painting night. Yeah, it's just the long neck, the little head. It does just look like a dinosaur to me. And, yeah, just the sort of ripples around what appears to be part of its body. 

Sarah: Yeah, and it's a great photo because it's very high contrast. You can't see any features on the creature. And it's alone, silhouetted against the waves, without anything to give you perspective. So it could be 30 feet high. It could be 30 centimeters high. 

It does turn out to be closer to the latter. We're getting ahead of ourselves. So the surgeon's photograph is printed in the Daily Mail, which we all know is an unimpeachable news source, in April 1934. And it's at the crest of a wave of recent Nessie sightings that actually have been building. Because in May of 1933, a woman named Aldi McKay says that she sees a creature that is rolling around like a whale in the water while she and her husband are driving next to Loch Ness. 

And so a couple months after that report, we have what's called the ‘Spicer letter’. We have the surgeon's photograph and the Spicer letter. And I'm going to pull up the Spicer letter to send to you. Hold on. 

Chelsey: Alright, I'm looking. 

Sarah: On July 31st, Mr. G. Spicer sends this letter to the London Courier. And Chelsey, I would love for you to read it to us. 

Chelsey: “Dear Sir, I have just returned from a motoring holiday in Scotland. And am writing to inform you that on Saturday afternoon, 22nd July last, whilst traveling along the east side of Loch Ness between Doris and Foyer's Hotel, about halfway in fact, I saw the nearest approach to a dragon or prehistoric animal that I have ever seen in my life.

It crossed my road about 30 yards ahead and appeared to be carrying a small lamb or animal of some kind. It seemed to have a long neck, which moved up and down in the manner of a scenic railway, and the body was fairly big, with a high back. But if there were any feet, they must have been of the web kind. And as far for a tale I cannot say, as it moved so rapidly. And when we got to the spot, it had probably disappeared into the loch, length from six feet to eight feet, and very ugly. I am wondering if you can give me any information about it, and am enclosing a stamped addressed envelope, anticipating your kind reply. 

Whatever it is, and it may be a land and water animal, I think it should be destroyed. As I am not sure whether, had I been quite close to it, I should have cared to have tackled it. It is so difficult to give a better description as it moved so swiftly and the whole thing was so sudden. There is no doubt that it exists. Yours, et cetera, G. Spicer.”

Sarah: I love it. 

Chelsey: I also love ‘yours, et cetera’ as a sign off.  

Sarah: We can start signing emails that way. And so we don't know what this animal was, but if you were to guess, is there anything that comes to mind for you?

Chelsey: Long neck, I don't know. Like a fucking giraffe, like a big fucked up giraffe. 

Sarah: One of your fears? That would be terrible. Some have theorized, just based on some of the other aspects of the description, that it was a river otter. 

Chelsey: What? 

Sarah: Yeah, because part of the problem, too, is that people generally are not great at describing things that they're seeing from a distance or that are moving quickly. We would like to be, and it's one of maybe the areas that we feel a little bit ashamed of, evolutionarily, that we're not so great at it. But there's definitely elements of it that fit otter. And also elements, the neck doesn't really fit that well. But also, an otter has a small head and a tubular shaped body. I don't know. 

Chelsey: I take issue with this. Because not only is an otter not six feet to eight feet, but it's also not very ugly. 

Sarah: I know. That's very true. He didn't say it was very cute and had little whiskers, did he? 

Chelsey: No. And eats little shells on its tummy. And holds hands. Although, I hear that they're very mean.

Sarah: Oh, yeah. And I think the hand holding is for non-cute reasons that I forget what they are. Yeah. Anthropomorphizing animals is only going to embarrassingly show us how we want to make everything we love more like ourselves in the end. But otters are sick, in a good way.

Chelsey: Now Sarah, do people generally believe that this Loch Ness monster is one dinosaur that has survived or whatever, or that there are several of them that continue to breed? 

Sarah: Again, because we don't have any in custody. 

Chelsey: Famously. 

Sarah: There's a lot of people in either camp. But there's a great Jean McPhee piece called, Pieces of the Frame, which is in a collection of the same title. Where he goes to a Loch Ness Monster Research Center and talks to somebody who believes that there's a population of Loch Ness Monsters in there, that there's a whole community of them, and that this is a population as yet undiscovered by science. And actually, let me read you a little bit from that article. 

Chelsey: Okay. 

Sarah: “With the exception of one report recorded in the 6th century, which said that the monster, fitting the description of the contemporary creatures in the lake, had killed a man in a single bite, there have been no other examples of savagery on its part.

To the contrary, its sensitivity to people seems to be acute, and it keeps a wide margin between itself and mankind. In all likelihood, it feeds on fish, and particularly on eels, of which there are millions in the lake. Loch Ness is unparalleled in eel fishing circles, and has drawn commercial eel fishermen from all over the United Kingdom.

The monster has been observed with its neck bent down in the water like a swan feeding. When the creatures die, they apparently settle into the 700-foot floor of the lake, where the temperature is always 42 degrees Fahrenheit, so cold that the lake is known for never giving up its dead. And Loch Ness never freezes despite its high latitude. So if the creature breathes air, as has seemed apparent from the reports of observers who have watched its mouth rhythmically opening and closing, it does not lose access to the surface in winter.

It clearly prefers the smooth, sun-baked waterscapes of summer, however. For it seems to love to bask in the sun, like an upturned boat slowly rolling, plunging, squirming around with what can only be taken as pleasure. By observer's reports, the creature has two pairs of lateral flippers, and when it swims off, tail thrashing, it leaves behind it a wake as impressive as the wake of a small warship. When it dives from a still position, it inexplicably goes down without leaving a bubble. When it dives as it swims, it leaves on the surface a churning signature of foam.” 

Chelsey: Beautiful. 

Sarah: Yeah, I love that description. And this is a piece that is describing Nessie as if she were as real as any other creature. Which, to be clear, I'm going to de hoax you in a minute, so I'm sorry. But describing an entire community of people who have shaped their lives around Nessie, and a cryptid who people are reporting sightings of all the time. Which is a fascinating thing, and just thinking about how many times, and maybe this is a problem I have more than other people, but when somebody gives you binoculars or when you don't have binoculars, and they're pointing at something on the horizon or in a forest, and they're like, “Do you see that tree I'm pointing at?” They're like, “See that thing?” And you're, like, I'm trying to see the thing you mean. 

And then you see so many things that could be the thing they mean you're like, “Is that the thing they mean?” And then when you really see it, you're like, oh no, that's the thing they mean. But when you're looking for something, everything looks like something sometimes, especially if it's the surface of a loch, with waves and sun glancing off of it, and foam and other living creatures.

Chelsey: And I wonder if there is, because the way that was describing Nessie felt almost spiritual in its gentleness, could we believe that something this big and mysterious could still be gentle and playful? It feels like there's something there. And I wonder, do you know anything about whether there are people who feel spiritually connected to the Loch Ness monster?

Sarah: I don't specifically. But let me try and read you a quote from one of the Nessie hunters. Let's see. I shouldn't say ‘hunter’, that's too aggressive. One of the Nessie searchers. So this is a guy named Clem Lister Skelton. 

And McPhee writes, “Skelton drank some more tea and refilled a cup he had given me. ‘I must know what it is’, he went on. ‘I shall never rest peacefully until I know what it is.’ Some of the largest creatures in the world are out there, and we can't name them. It may take 10 years, but we're going to identify the genus. Most people are not as fanatical as I, but I would like to see this through to the end, if I don't get too broke first.”

And that's not spiritual, exactly, but to me that does express something about what cryptids bring out, even in me, and definitely me as a kid watching all these History Channel specials about Nessie. That were 45 minutes of padding of the surgeon's photograph. Is she real? Is she not? Who knows? By Prilosec OTC.

But the feeling of wanting to know, but also wanting to preserve the earth as a place where there were still mysteries and as a place where there could be a whole world of sea monsters or mermaids or Bigfoot or whoever who were living peacefully. And also there being enough wilderness to protect them.

Chelsey: Totally. It's a cliche, but we've only explored 5% of the ocean. One of my big fears, the ocean. And that is really wild. 

Sarah: Yeah. And I love the idea that the ocean is so big, and we've only explored 5% of it. We probably polluted much more than that. But the dream is still that nature is able to outpace the damage we can do to it.

And the truth about the Loch Ness monster, or at least the surgeon's photograph, despite all of those History Channel specials I watched growing up, is that we've known since 1994 that the surgeon's photograph was a fake. It was done by a small group of people, but it was led by a guy named - and I am not shitting you Chelsey - Marmaduke Wetherell.

Chelsey: No. 

Sarah: Yes. 

Chelsey: It's like a margarine animal mascot. 

Sarah: Or a marmite mascot. 

Chelsey: Sorry, I mean a marmalade animal mascot. 

Sarah: Marmaduke Wetherill's marmalade. That's what I want. And so he had first attempted to hoax the Daily Mail with some large Nessie-type footprints that he turned out to have used with a rhinoceros foot umbrella holder. Which is just a thing that people own, just a normal everyday item if you're a Marmaduke Wetherell.

Chelsey: Okay, of course. 

Sarah: So Marmaduke Wetherell was a big game hunter, among other things. So a very sympathetic protagonist. And so in December of 1933, he went hunting for Nessie for the Daily Mail. And he said that he found the footprints of a, quote, “very powerful soft footed animal about 20 feet long.” And these were actually examined by the Natural History Museum, and they determined that it looked like a hippopotamus foot. Which you'd think would be hard to come by in Scotland, but if you're a big game hunter, you actually would be rather likely to have one around for decorative purposes, because that's very normal and nice to have. Which, big game hunting is strange and disgusting. But also, hippopotamuses are actually very dangerous, and I just want to point that out, if nothing else. Don't fuck with hippopotami. 

Chelsey: Oh, they're very scary. Almost as mean as an otter, I've heard. 

Sarah: And bigger. And so after this, Marmaduke Weatherell drafts his son Ian, and Ian's stepbrother, a sculptor named Christian Sperling, to build a model monster, which he does. 

And this is quoting a New York Times article from 1994 that reports all this, quote, “the monster in the photograph was a bogus 12-inch-high model made from plastic wood and a toy submarine, purchased for two-shilling sixpence in Woolworths in Richmond, a London suburb, two researchers say.”

But yeah, you could, and maybe still where it exists, get anything there. Including a little submarine, which you can then modify. And then all you have to do is take it to just a shallow bit of the loch and take some photos. And that's what they did. And they stabilized it with a little bit of lead on the bottom. 

Chelsey: Wow And then they all got lead poisoning. Wow, it's that easy. It's funny, because I don't think that I knew that it had been thoroughly debunked. 

Sarah: That’s the thing. You have to go looking for that information. The History Channel is not going to eat its own lunch by being like, “in these debunked photos that everyone has known were fake for 30 years”, you have to kick the ball down the road. Same as with the Shroud of Turin. 

And so then Colonel Robert Wilson is just the front man for this, and he's the one who submits the photographs and says that he was there on a fishing trip and took these photos after his friend noticed the monster and said, “My God, it's the monster.” It's a quote. And Colonel Wilson gets in on it because he loves a prank. And all this is confirmed by Christian Sperling, at the age of about 90, when all this comes to light. 

And the surgeon's photograph was debunked in 1994 by researchers named David Martin and Alastair Boyd. Go look up how they did it. It's very interesting, and it involves newspapers.com-type research, as most things do. 

But yeah, and I think that to me, there's something appropriate about the fact that this has been public knowledge for about as long as we've been alive, but we grew up not knowing or caring. And we were cryptid kids.

Chelsey: Absolutely. It's that whole thing of we want to believe, we're not generally, maybe not you or I specifically, but culturally once we start to believe, we just want to continue to. Whether that be in a positive or negative way. Whether it be like, oh, I like to believe this because it gives me a sense of whimsy and possibility. Or, I want to believe this because it confirms a narrative that I need confirmed for me to take some kind of action that otherwise I wouldn't feel justified in taking.

Sarah: Maybe part of what we have to work with is that as humans we are irrational creatures, for the most part, who are able to use reason to some extent but not as a given, and not all the time and not always for everyone. And thinking about what are the things that I want to believe that are helpful for me to want to believe, what are the innate beliefs I have that are helping me in some way. 

You know, I want to believe that the three inmates got away from Alcatraz on their raft. And I want to believe that D.B. Cooper got away with all that money, or some of it, because they kept finding it for years. And I want to believe that Bigfoot is there, and that the Nessies are swimming under the water. And these are all beliefs about freedom, and in a way, the sanctity of life, I guess, for people and cryptids and animals to be able to live on.

And then I was taking a walk today and I was actually thinking about how one of my innate beliefs learned incorrectly is that I'm unworthy of love. And that's a belief I have that's not serving me. And I can find things that I can use to confirm it for myself. And I can only seek out stories that allow me to keep believing it, but that's just me hurting myself. And that's even in the scheme of things, not that worrying a belief, because it's not about how I need to kill anybody else. 

Chelsey: Sarah, it's a hoax. It's a hoax. The self-hate is a hoax. You definitely deserve love. I know about hundreds of thousands of people who would tell you that. It's nothing more than a hoax.

Sarah: I don't believe it. 

Chelsey: Believe it. 

Sarah: Okay. 

Chelsey: Just come over and have a slumber party, and we'll make you believe it with some sweet treats and watching movies from the 80s. 

Sarah: And that was our episode. Thank you so much again for joining me and Chelsey Weber-Smith on this romp through history and hoaxes and pranks. You can listen to Chelsey over on American Hysteria, which continues to be an essential show for understanding the world we are in. 

Thank you so much also to American Hysteria's own, and our own, Miranda Zickler for editing this episode. And thank you so much, as always, to Carolyn Kendrick for producing it. Thank you for being here with us. We will see you again in two weeks.