Category: Fact Checking

Claim:

A video shows a group of customers shooting an armed robber in a store.

Rating:

A video purportedly showing a gunman attempting to rob a store, only to be confronted (and shot) by several gun-carrying customers is frequently shared by pro-gun groups on social media with the caption: “Armed suspect robs convenience store gets shot by every customer inside”:

The video footage of the incident (which can be glimpsed at the bottom of this article) is real, but it is often shared with incomplete or inaccurate information.

This incident was captured by a security camera at a pharmacy in Brazil, not the United States. Also, the “customers” seen pulling their weapons in this video were actually plainclothes police officers.

The video comprises security camera footage of an incident that took place on 31 May 2017 at a pharmacy in Itumbiara, a municipality in the southern Brazilian state of Goiás, which resulted in the death of a 17-year-old. Although the video is frequently accompanied with the claim that it shows the teenager being shot by “every customer,” a contemporaraneous report from Globo 1 News noted that it was unclear how many officers actually fired their weapons at the robber:

The crime took place around 9 PM at a pharmacy on Avenida Afonso Pena. The video shows the robber entering the store wearing a helmet. While several customers wait in line, he points his gun at the woman behind the counter.

From another angle, it is possible to see that one of the policemen notices what is occurring and shoots the young robber, who drops his gun and then falls to the ground.

According to the PM, a mobile emergency service unit (Samu) went to the scene, but the teenager was already dead. According to the police, he already had a record involving several different crimes.

In a statement to the G1, the Military Police’s communications adviser reported that the four military police officers involved in the case appeared before the police station “with their respective firearms, which were made available to the competent authority.”

According to the Civil Police, the case will be investigated by the 2nd Police District of Itumbiara, and it is not yet known how many police officers shot the youth.

This security footage (as well as a second angle of the shooting) can be glimpsed in a video news report from Globo 1:

Claim:

A photograph shows a 110-pound squirrel shot by a hunter in North Texas.

Rating:

A photograph purportedly showing a 110-pound squirrel shot by a hunter in North Texas was shared on Facebook in October 2018:

Although this photograph may appear to show a rodent of an unusual size, it does not picture a 110-pound squirrel. This image is another example of forced perspective, an optical illusion which can obscure the true size of an object, making it appear much smaller or larger than it really is:

Forced perspective is an optical illusion where an object may appear smaller or larger, or nearer or further away, than it actually is. This is done by controlling the distance and vantage point of the camera.

When something is further away it will appear smaller than it actually is, but if you are careful with positioning and depth of field you can create the illusion that all the objects in a scene occupy the same space. So you can have something far from the camera, that is larger than an object in the foreground, appear to actually be much smaller.

One well-known example of forced perspective can be found in Italy, where tourists regularly pretend as if they are holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Here are some other visual examples of forced perspective:

In the case of the 110-pound squirrel, the hunter is actually kneeling several feet behind the log. This makes the squirrel appear unusually large since it is deceptively much closer to the camera lens than the hunter is.

Instagram user Wyatt Brewer, who originally posted this photograph back in November 2016, confirmed in the comments section that he was sitting several feet behind the squirrel when this photograph was taken:

Forced perspective has been used in the creation of a number of other online hoaxes. This photography trick can also be seen in rumors about giant frogs, rodents, and turtles.

Claim:

A video shows an abnormally large leatherback turtle on a beach.

Rating:

A video purportedly showing an enormous leatherback turtle making its way across a beach to the ocean caught our attention in August 2018:

This video has been online since at least May 2018, when it was posted to Facebook by “Colonel DUDU Fils Inspiration.” That posting was followed by numerous comments claiming that the animal was impossibly big, that the footage had been digitally manipulated, or that the video was another example of forced perspective.

Leatherback sea turtles are the largest turtles on earth, growing to upwards of 7 feet in length and one ton in weight. The largest leatherback ever recorded was just shy of 10 feet long and weighed more than 2,000 pounds (although some debate still exists over the accuracy of these measurements). While it’s difficult to determine the exact dimensions of the turtle featured in the video seen here, it certainly appears that the subject might be a contender for the largest turtle in the world title.

However, looks can be deceiving.

A second video of this turtle making its way to the ocean that was posted by Facebook user Eric Laurent provided a more clear look at the size of this turtle. Laurent said that his video was taken on a beach called “Les Perles” in Guadeloupe, a French overseas region in the southern Caribbean Sea:

We compared the people visible in the background of these videos to confirm that they indeed captured same turtle making a journey to the sea. Although these clips show the same animal, the turtle’s size appears drastically different between the two videos.

Here’s a look at how the turtle’s apparent size changes from the video posted by “Colonel DUDU Fils Inspiration” (top) to the video posted by Laurent (bottom):

Why the size discrepancy? Our best guess is that the first video was filmed with a longer lens and at a further distance than the second video. Longer lenses tend to compress depth in photographs, making objects in the background (the crowd of people) appear closer to objects in the foreground (the turtle) than they actually were. In this case, that phenomenon created the impression that turtle was abnormally large.

Laurent posted a second video from the same day which presumably showed the same turtle:

This viral video truly does show a large leatherback turtle, but it also likely left many viewers with a false impression of the animal’s size.

Claim:

Several cities have started to use “silent fireworks” in order to make the shows more enjoyable for children, pets, and people with PTSD.

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What’s True

A number of cities and organizations have staged relatively quiet firework displays.

What’s False

These firework shows are not entirely silent, and they typically don’t include the large aerial explosions found in traditional shows nor make use of some new form of ‘quiet’ decorative explosives.

Origin

As the 4th of July approached in 2018, some social media users were surprised to learn about the existence of “silent fireworks” when they came across an article published by the web site “DogTime” a few years prior about a town in Italy which had supposedly switched to these seemingly noiseless pyrotechnic displays:

One town in Italy is taking a big step to reduce the fear of fireworks in their non-human population. The local government of Collecchio made a law that fireworks in their town must be silent. It’s a way of reducing the stress that the loud noises cause to animals–not just pets, but wildlife, as well. There’s a company called Setti Fireworks that makes these silent explosives and can customize them for each event.

The phrase “silent fireworks,” however, is a bit misleading.

Many readers seemed to come away with the impression that these “silent fireworks” would appear just as big and bright as traditional fireworks, but without the loud explosive booms normally associated with them. That’s not the case, however: No matter how advanced pyrotechnicians may be at developing fireworks, they haven’t quite yet figured out a way to remove noise from these large explosions.

In fact, these “silent firework” displays (which are probably better described as “reduced noise” displays) don’t typically include the big aerial explosions found in traditional fireworks shows. Rather than employing some new form of pyrotechnology that dampens the noise of traditional fireworks, such “quiet” displays mostly make selective use of existing non-loud forms of fireworks:

Quiet fireworks are not a new invention. In fact, they are used routinely in classic firework shows as visual effects to accompany the loud bangs. Think of the “comet tail,” which shoots into the sky with a trail of sparkles before quietly fizzling out. Or the “flying fish,” which features tiny tadpole embers scattering away from a silent burst.

What is new is the emergence of a genre of low-key, quiet fireworks displays for audiences that want the fanfare of fireworks without the auditory disturbance.

[But] quiet fireworks can be more colorful.

The colors in a firework are packed in pellets called “stars.” When certain chemical compounds are heated, they emit signature colors to get rid of their excess energy. For instance, barium compounds emit green, red comes from strontium and blues are made with copper.

As such, these types of displays are generally more appropriate for smaller crowds rather than for large, city-wide celebrations:

From a strictly visual standpoint, there are pros and cons to a quiet fireworks show. Because they do not include big aerial explosions, quiet shows cannot entertain a large audience, said John A. Conkling, a professor emeritus of chemistry at Washington College in Maryland. As a result, traditionally big shows — like those on the Fourth of July — would need to be divided into smaller viewings.

Although many readers may have only recently learned about the concept of “silent fireworks,” most of them have probably already seen forms of these relatively noiseless displays, such as roman candles and sparklers.

Here’s a video of the “flying fish” firework referenced above:

 

Thus, reports about “silent fireworks” are less about the development of new noiseless products and more about how some towns are focusing on putting on quieter displays. These shows range from nearly silent displays featuring large sparklers, fountains, and roman candles, to aerial shows that employ most everything other than the massively loud aerial “skyrocket” shells.

Paul Singh, the director of Epic Fireworks in England, said that his quiet firework displays are typically softer than the accompanying music and are well below the 120 decibel limit placed on fireworks sold in the UK:

For people, loud fireworks can lead to hearing loss. The World Health Organization lists 120 decibels as the pain threshold for sound, including sharp sounds such as thunderclaps. Fireworks are louder than that.

“They’re typically above 150 decibels, and can even reach up to 170 decibels or more,” said Nathan Williams, an audiologist at Boys Town National Research Hospital in Nebraska.

Quiet fireworks are not completely silent, but they are nowhere near the 120-decibel cap placed on consumer fireworks in Britain, said Paul Singh, director of Epic Fireworks in England.

The fireworks he uses in quiet shows are softer than the music he plays to accompany the visuals, Mr. Singh said. His company has done quiet firework shows for school groups, senior citizen homes and venues near easily spooked animals like horses.

A 2012 video from Gala Fireworks shows just how quiet (or loud) these “silent firework” displays can be. This footage was taken during a wedding at Browsholme Hall in England, and the company explained that they used “low-noise” fireworks because the venue was surrounded by farm land and they didn’t want to scare the livestock:

 

Although companies may bill these displays as “silent” or “quiet,” the fireworks can still generate a good bit of noise. In fact, when the Birmingham Botanical Gardens advertised a quieter fireworks show in 2015, a number of parents still complained that the “silent” explosions were far too loud:

Helen Panayi posted on Facebook: “Very disappointing that the advertised ‘silent fireworks’ weren’t actually silent, in fact they were very loud. Lots of upset children and angry parents.”

Katie Harrison wrote on the same site: “Very disappointed that the advertised ‘silent’ fireworks were far from silent. My frightened two-year-old (who I never would have taken to a normal display) did not appreciate them.”

So, the term “silent fireworks” does not refer to a new form of firework that produces huge explosions with little or no noise, but rather to shows that selectively utilize existing forms of relatively quiet fireworks.

Claim:

Snopes.com ignored reports of a large child trafficking ring bust in Arizona.

Rating:

On 7 June 2018, Neon Nettle — a web site that frequently weaves nonsensical allegations into its stories — pushed out a disingenuous article maintaining that we had “ignored” a huge child trafficking bust:

Snopes has ‘debunked’ recent allegations of a child trafficking camp made by veterans even though it has been reported that the FBI has rescued 60 children as part of a massive pedophile ring bust.

The fact-checking site said that the story about the discovery of an Arizona child trafficking camp was completely “false” with all references to it on social media hidden.

The sting saw 150 child traffickers snared along with approximately 160 children rescued, some as young as 3 years old.

“They are crimes of special concern to the FBI and to law enforcement generally,” [FBI special agent Matt] Alcoke said. “Because the victims are so vulnerable as children and because the offenders could be from just about any walk of life, from a gang member all the way up to someone who is highly successful and wealthy.”

This passage reproduced an accurate quote from a real FBI agent speaking about a legitimate trafficking bust — but that bust was part of an FBI sting operation which took place in Atlanta, 1,700 miles away from the site of the debunked “child trafficking camp” in Tucson. Neon Nettle deliberately and misleadingly conflated these two stories to make is seem as if we were disclaiming a successful child trafficking raid in Georgia rather than debunking a false report of child trafficking in Arizona.

The FBI sting in Atlanta, code-named Operation Safe Summer, was specific to the state of Georgia and had nothing to do with the false report of a “child trafficking bunker” allegedly discovered by a group in Arizona:

NORTH FULTON COUNTY, GA. — A sting on the sex-trafficking trade in metro Atlanta netted dozens of arrests and the rescue of dozens of children forced into sexual servitude, the FBI announced this week.

Operation Safe Summer was a collaborative effort between the FBI’s Atlanta field office and 38 law enforcement agencies in six metro counties, assistant Special Agent in Charge Matt Alcoke told Channel 2’s Mike Petchenik.

The Neon Nettle story was apparently sourced from fellow conspiracy theorists The Free Thought Project, who engaged in similar deceptive headlining:

As Snopes ‘Debunks’ Child Trafficking Camp, 160 Kids as Young as 3 Rescued in Georgia

After Snopes called allegations of child trafficking made by a veterans group a ‘conspiracy theory’, 160 children, as young as 3-years-old, were rescued from traffickers in Georgia.

Free Thought Project insinuated, in an impressive combination of logical fallacies, that because we (and others) debunked the false “pedophilia bunker” in Arizona story, we must not believe child trafficking exists anywhere in the world at all:

Snopes — whether deliberately or not — is actively engaging in censorship of content that could actually help children by engaging others and fostering discussion. Instead of allowing the discussion to continue, Snopes deliberately shut down the conversation, insuring that the very important topic of child trafficking is forced into the memory hole and never heard of again.

As the above case illustrates, child trafficking is a horrifying reality. While Pizzagate scenarios may not be real, there are far worse incidents taking place across the country.

Child trafficking is, indeed, a horrifying reality, which is why we choose to cover it responsibly rather than making the job of law enforcement and advocacy groups immeasurably more difficult by irresponsibly propagating false information about child trafficking (as sites such as Neon Nettle and the Free Thought Project do).

For example, the “veterans’ group” that stumbled across the abandoned homeless camp on private property in Tucson decided that the presence of child’s toys at one end of the camp and pornographic magazines elsewhere was obvious evidence of child sex trafficking, rather than ordinary detritus left behind at a temporary site where those migrating from one region to another chose to stop for a while and perhaps have a moment or two alone to tend to some rather common needs.

That group also decided (again, without any evidence) that straps tied around trees were “restraints” for holding children in bondage, rather than for some other more prosaic use, such as tying up tarps to provide shade from the relentless Arizona sun. When local and federal authorities investigated the site and found nothing but an abandoned homeless encampment, the same “veteran’s group” immediately accused law enforcement of orchestrating a massive cover-up.

The Polaris Project provides information on recognizing genuine signs of human trafficking and responsibly reporting it. We recommend them as a resource, rather than clickbait-driven, irresponsible purveyors of misinformation.

Claim:

Actor James Doohan, best known for his role as “Scotty” from the original Star Trek, was shot six times during D-Day.

Rating:

A meme purportedly relaying the heroic exploits of James Doohan, who is best known as the actor who played Scotty in the original Star Trek series, was shared by the “Meanwhile in Canada” Facebook page in June 2018, in remembrance of D-Day:

The story presented in this meme is largely accurate. Doohan was one of some 14,000 Canadian soldiers who landed in Normandy, France, in June 1944 during World War II. He did suffer several gunshot wounds during the invasion, which ultimately resulted in the loss of his middle finger. It’s also true that one of these bullets was stopped by a cigarette case in his pocket. 

However, this meme doesn’t identify the likely source of these gunshots: A nervous Canadian sentry. 

Doohan was a commissioned lieutenant with the 14th Field Artillery Regiment of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division, and was tasked with invading an area of Normandy code-named Juno Beach. As the meme states, Doohan successfully led his men across the beach littered with anti-tank mines, and also managed to take out two German snipers:

The first Canadians reached Juno Beach at 7:35 AM and were cut down. Fortunately for them, the HMS Ajax had bombed Juno earlier, doing more damage to the coastal defenses than the planes had. After two hours, they had swept aside most of the Germans on their stretch of the beach.

Doohan led his men across the sands and got lucky. Despite the anti-tank mines beneath their feet, none went off, as the men were not heavy enough to activate them. As they made their way to higher ground, Doohan managed to take out two German snipers – his first kills of the war.

By noon, they had secured their positions. They could rest, as well as deal with their dead and wounded. There was, however, a problem.

Although Doohan escaped the initial moments of the invasion relatively unscathed, his luck didn’t last: 

At about 11:20 that evening, Doohan finished a cigarette and patted the silver cigarette case he kept in his breast pocket. It had been given to him by his brother as a good luck charm… and a good thing, too.

Some ten minutes later, he was walking back to his command post when he was shot. Six times. By a Bren Gun. The first four bullets slammed into his leg, the fourth whacked him in the chest, while the sixth took off his right middle finger.

It was not a German sniper. He had been shot by a nervous, trigger-happy Canadian sentry. Fortunately, the cigarette case stopped the bullet aimed at his chest. Doohan later joked it was the only time being a smoker saved his life.

Doohan attempted to hide his missing finger in episodes of Star Trek (a hand double was even used in some close-up scenes), but he wasn’t always successful. For example, Doohan’s injury can be briefly glimpsed in the famous episode “The Trouble with Tribbles”:

There is at least some debate over the provenance of the bullets that wounded Doohan. Although books such as D-Day: The Essential Reference Guide and Fight to the Finish: Canadians in the Second World War state that Doohan was wounded by friendly fire, Doohan’s mother was told, at least initially, that her son had been hit by German bullets. We have also encountered varying reports about the number of times Doohan was shot (ranging from six to eight.)

We attempted to locate accounts from Doohan himself about the incident, other than the one presented in his autobiography, but didn’t turn up much additional information. The most revealing report appears to come from a New York Times article that centered around a letter Doohan sent director Steven Spielberg shortly after the release of the film Saving Private Ryan in 1998 (which mentioned Doohan being hit by “German” bullets):

“When I wrote Spielberg I told him I’d landed on Juno on D-Day, which was nothing as horrid as the Omaha disaster.”

Not horrid, perhaps, but bad enough. He and his men landed unscathed on Juno then fought their way successfully into the Normandy peninsula as far as the town of Courseulles that first day. But Artillery Lt.  James Doohan of D Company, Winnipeg Rifles, 13th Field Regiment, Royal Canadian Army, ended up just before midnight plugged by eight German bullets. 

Four hit his left knee, three took out the middle finger of his right hand, and one was deflected from killing him by a sterling silver cigarette case in the breast pocket of his jacket. “I still have that cigarette case today,” the husky 78-year-old Doohan said through his walrus mustache, shooting his eyebrows. 

Doohan also downplayed his heroics, saying that the mines on the beach were anti-tank mines and that his men were not heavy enough to trigger them. Doohan also said that he wasn’t sure if he had truly killed two German snipers and added that he didn’t notice the gunshot wounds in his legs until he got to the medic:

“We landed safely, thank God, through those Y-shaped steel barriers you see in the film, tracer bullets, all that, none of our men hurt, and dashed 75 yards to the 7-foot tall dunes,” Doohan said. 

“Crossed a minefield, found out about it later: It was meant to blow up tanks, and we weren’t heavy enough. Moved up through a down – hardly a town just a village – called Graye Sur Mer, saw a church tower that was a machine-gun post, firing off to our left. 

Doohan took out the machine-gun post with a couple of shots. “I don’t know if they were killed or wounded, but it shut them up,” he said. 

His mother was told that German bullets had hit him at 11:30 p.m. on D-Day as he was returning from a forward gun position. He waled a quarter-mile – “the adrenaline lets you do it” – to the regimental aid post, Doohan said. He know about his right hand and the wack on his chest against that cigarette case, but that was all.

“The medic said: ‘You also have four bullets in your left knee.’ I said: ‘Well, I walked here.’”

Claim:

A photograph shows a twelve-pound rat that was caught in London.

Rating:

In May 2018, for reasons that remain obscure, an old photograph purportedly showing a twelve-pound rat that was caught in London was reposted to Facebook by a variety of pages:

This is a genuine photograph. However, the size of the rat appears exaggerated in both the claim and the image. The large rodent was captured by an electrician in Hackney Downs in March 2016. When the snapshot first appeared, it was accompanied by the claim that the pictured animal was at least four feet (1.21 meters) long and weighed more than 25 pounds (over 11 kilograms). Neither of these dimensions came from a tape measure or scale, however; the estimates were given by the man who took the photograph:

Engineer Tony Smith discovered the animal’s corpse, which he says weighed about 25lbs, while working on a block of flats in Hackney, east London.

He says that he found the monstrous creature lying in a busy next to a children’s playground which backed onto a railway line near Hackney Downs.

Tony, 46, said: ‘This is the largest rat I’ve ever seen in my entire life. ‘I’ve got a cat and a Jack Russell and it was bigger than both of those put together. I’d say it was about four foot. ‘We were going to stick it in the bin, but before we did we thought we better take a picture or people won’t believe it’s real.’

It appears that the more modern claim that this rat weighed twelve pounds comes from a conversion error. When experts in London weighed in on the size of this rat in 2016 (they mostly said that the claimed size was preposterous), they used kilograms instead of pounds. When this weight (almost 12 kg) was converted back to pounds, the number stayed the same.  

But even this claim, which is less than half of the original estimate, appears to be widely overblown. The measurements are too big for London rats. The brown rat, which is commonly found in London, “only” grow to around a foot long:

“In our study that surveyed over a hundred brown rats from all over the UK, the maximum body length of fully-grown rodenticide ‘super rats’ was 26 cm (10.3 inches) with a tail length of 25 cm (9.8 inches),” says (Dougie Clarke from the University of Huddersfield, UK.) “So they are no different than what is expected for brown rats.”

One of the biggest rats in the world — the Gambian pouched rat — can grow up to about three feet long. Other giant rats, such as New Guinea’s woolly rats and the Northern Luzon giant cloud rat also get uncomfortably large, but fall well short of the claimed measurements.

That the London rat appears unusually monstrous may be a result of forced perspective, which can make an object appear much larger than it actually is since it is closer to the camera lens than the other objects in the image. The Hackney Council posted an example of forced perspective in order to quell fears that the neighborhood was experiencing an infestation of rodents of unusual size:

 

Claim:

Hillary Clinton used a hammer to smash her mobile phone during an FBI investigation.

Rating:

What’s True

One of Hillary Clinton’s aides told the FBI that on two occasions he disposed of her unwanted mobile devices by breaking or hammering them.

What’s False

Hillary Clinton did not personally destroy her phone with a hammer.

In September 2016, the Federal Bureau of Investigation made public documents relating to its now-closed investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server for government business, posting them to its public document platform known as The Vault.

At the time of the document dump, both Clinton’s then-presidential campaign rival Donald Trump and the news media picked up on what seemed to be a salacious detail: that at some point in the past, an aide had used a hammer to destroy Clinton’s old mobile devices. The document underlying that tidbit of information stated that “[Clinton aide Justin] Cooper did recall two instances where he destroyed Clinton’s old mobile devices by breaking them in half or hitting them with a hammer.”

That sentence, pulled from a 47-page document, made it into one of now-President Donald Trump’s famous Twitter tirades against a Department of Justice’s Special Counsel-led investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which has swept up some of Trump’s circle of associates with indictments:

Crooked H destroyed phones w/ hammer, ‘bleached’ emails, & had husband meet w/AG days before she was cleared- & they talk about obstruction?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 15, 2017

According to FBI documents, investigators determined a total of thirteen devices were associated with Clinton’s two phone numbers and personal email domain, eight of which she used during her tenure as Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013. The FBI requested that all thirteen devices be handed over, but Clinton’s attorneys informed the FBI that they were “unable to locate any of these devices,” so the bureau was unable to examine them. Another Clinton aide, Huma Abedin, told FBI agents that the whereabouts of Clinton’s unwanted devices would “frequently become unknown.”

The FBI, then headed by former director James Comey, famously and controversially cleared Clinton of any criminal charges, with Comey announcing on 5 July 2016 that the FBI found no evidence of intentional misconduct, although the Secretary and her aides were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”

As the technology magazine Wired reported at the time, destroying an unwanted device is not in and of itself suspicious, and such an action could well have been an earnest (if clumsy) effort to ensure that any data stored on the devices would not be retrieved and fall into the wrong hands after they were thrown away:

On the question of transparency rather than security, none of this should let Clinton off the hook entirely. It’s still not clear whether her efforts to eliminate her data were motivated by the desire to conceal information as her critics imply or dedication to information security — or a bit of both. But given that Clinton was relying on a handful of aides with limited resources to act as her entire IT infrastructure, it was the right idea from a security standpoint to attempt to destroy the devices rather than letting them sit exposed in a local Goodwill, says Jonathan Zdziarski, an iOS forensics expert and security researcher. He says the FBI report “shows that [Clinton’s aides] were very serious about wanting to destroy the content, but very inexperienced with how to do it.”

Claim:

An “extreme snuff film” in which Hillary Clinton and aide Huma Abedin are seen raping and mutilating a prepubescent girl is circulating on the dark web under the code name “Frazzledrip.”

Rating:

Somewhere on the dark web there exists a video of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and longtime aide Huma Abedin raping and mutilating a young child — at least, according to web sites devoted to promulgating outrageous “deep state” conspiracy theories.

An article from Your News Wire (now NewsPunch) published on 15 April 2018 reported, for example, that the “horrific” video was found on the hard drive of a laptop belonging to Abedin’s husband, former Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner (who was jailed in 2017 for sexting with a minor):

An “extreme snuff film” featuring Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin raping and mutilating a prepubescent girl is circulating on the dark web, according to sources familiar with the material.

The video, code named Frazzledrip, has been circulating on the dark web since Monday, according to reliable sources who have viewed the material and confirm the content is “worse than any nightmare.”

“The people who are coming back from viewing this tape are just not the same.”.

Many people are unable to watch the video due to the horrific nature of the content, according to sources familiar with the tape.

In the video, they take a little girl and they fillet her face, according to reports, and then they take turns wearing the little girl’s face like a mask. It is believed they were terrorizing the young girl, deliberately causing the child’s body to release Adenochrome into her bloodstream before bleeding her out and drinking the blood during a Satanic ritual sacrifice.

Adrenochrome is an oxidation product of adrenaline (ephinephrine, norepinephrine) that is extracted from a living donor’s adrenal gland. According to those familiar with the elites’ drug of choice, the high is “intense” and “exotic”.

The reports amounted to an escalation of a thoroughly discredited conspiracy theory (associated with such hashtags as #Pizzagate, #SpiritCooking, and #QAnon) alleging that Clinton and other so-called “deep state” conspirators run a massive Satanic pedophile ring based out of a Washington, DC pizzeria. YourNewsWire has granted uncritical credence to such theories in the past.

The article’s author, “Baxter Dmitry,” took his cues from social media posts featuring still images allegedly extracted from the mysterious “#Frazzledrip” video. One of the earliest such posts appeared on Facebook during the first week of April 2018:

(Facebook screenshot)

Similar posts were widely shared on Twitter:

(Twitter screenshot)

However, it only took a few moments of investigating to determine that the sepia-toned images came not from incriminating footage found in some dank corner of the dark web, but rather from a maniacally inscrutable YouTube video uploaded (coincidentally or not) on April Fools Day 2018 (regrettably, that video has since been deleted).

We found, moreover, that the image purporting to show Huma Abedin wearing a mask made from the face of a mutilated child (discernible at the 1:23 minute mark in the above video) was actually taken from the website of a well-known “underground” Indian restaurant in Washington, DC, called Hush Supper Club. The masked woman is the restaurant’s proprietor, Geeta, who has been profiled in a number of national news venues.

Here is the photograph in its original context:

Insofar as it’s supposed to serve as evidence that Huma Abedin participated in a Satanic ritual involving the mutilation of a child, then, the video is demonstrably a hoax. However, that hasn’t stopped social media users from trying to find other imagery in the video to support the “snuff film” thesis, though the results — even with the addition of visual aids — remain laughably incomprehensible:

(Screenshot)

In point of fact, there appeared to be some disagreement among conspiracy theorists as to whether the two-minute YouTube clip and the much-ballyhooed “Frazzledrip” video were even one and the same. Some claimed the YouTube video was only a teaser, and that somewhere a full-length version existed, which if and when it were made public — would finally expose Hillary Clinton for the murderous Satanic pedophile ringleader she truly is. Others suspect “Frazzledrip” may not really exist, that the persona is actually a deep-state prank meant to make them look foolish.

We were only able to find one other probable contender for the title of “the real Frazzledrip video,” and though we’ve not been able to vet its authenticity, we include it here so interested parties can make up their own minds (caution, the content linked below, with our sincere apologies, may not be suitable for all viewers):

https://t.co/T5bwLUihz7#frazzledrip. Here is the vid

— Jeff Adams (@gonetobeans) April 15, 2018

In March 2018, a video purportedly showing a street performer “levitating,” one of many, was shared nearly a million times on Facebook. Although most viewers were aware that this woman is not actually harnessing some sort of dark art in order to make her float in midair, many were still curious about how she managed the appearance of levitation with such ease.

The viral Facebook video can be viewed here. Another video can be viewed below:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzxwEhMkb7k

The trick performed in this video is actually a well-known optical illusion that has been performed by a number of magicians for more than a century. Viewers may be amazed at the optics of the trick when witnessing a single performer, but when these levitating illusionists are viewed in a group, it’s clear that something is afoot:

 

Every one of the levitating street performers that we have encountered have used some sort of cane or pole in their trick. These support systems are disguised in various ways, but they all serve the same purpose — to lift the performer off the ground. These poles are installed in some sort of base (which is hidden in some manner underneath a carpet, cloth, or rug) and connect to a support system that is carefully threaded through the magician’s sleeve. 

Here’s a simple diagram of how one trick might have been set up:

As this trick is often performed in the public square, these illusionists have to set up and take down their tricks in plain view of tourists and other passersby. This has given many people the opportunity to reveal the secrets behind this levitating ruse:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aETxlGz83Vg

This trick has become popular among street performers in recent years, but it dates back to at least the late 1800s, when John Nevil Maskelyne performed a similar trick in London’s Egyptian Hall. Harry Keller later modified Maskelyne’s illusion (there are different accounts about how he came into the plans for the illusion) to make it more mobile for his touring act:

 

An important part of every year was Kellar’s annual summer trip to London’s Egyptian Hall. One year he watched Maskelyne do the best levitation he’d ever seen. Although Kellar already performed a levitation, he wanted something more baffling and unforgettable.

He attended many shows at Egyptian Hall and studied the stage carefully, but he couldn’t figure out the details of Maskelyne’s levitation. Maskelyne refused to reveal its seret. Harry’s solution was to hire someone who knew how the illusion worked.

A German magician, Paul Valadon, had performed at the Egyptian Hall for five years. In 1904, Kellar invited Valadon to join his show. After Valadon described the mechanism behind the illusion, Harry made changes to it. Unlike Maskeleyen, who performed every night in the same theater, Harry had to move the illusion as he toured. That meant adjusting the equipment so that it could easily be taken down and set up again without breaking.

These magicians, too, used some sort of support system hidden from the audience’s view to create the illusion of levitation.

Claim:

President Richard Nixon hid a time capsule in the White House containing evidence of alien life and human contact with extraterrestrials.

Rating:

It is an article of faith among UFO conspiracy theorists that every United States president since Franklin Roosevelt has been privy to top secret evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial life. 

According to the 2015 book The Presidents And UFOs: A Secret History From FDR To Obama, virtually all of them wanted to go public with the knowledge of who (or what) is responsible for sightings of unidentified flying objects, but were blocked by intelligence officials.

Richard Nixon — who, according to the book’s author, Larry Holcombe, was convinced that “a limited level of UFO disclosure” would ensure his place in history — went to extraordinary lengths to preserve that information for posterity, if more recent reports are to be believed.

A 20 March 2018 article on the conspiracy-oriented blog YourNewsWire.com featured quotes from a phone interview with Robert Merritt, a sometime police informant and — according to him — covert domestic intelligence operative for the Nixon administration, in which he says he was shown proof of extraterrestrial life during a face-to-face meeting with the president:

… In what appears to be a startling new twist, Merritt reveals to Liszt that he met three times with President Nixon in a “deep underground location beneath the White House. In the first, Nixon read him a letter stating that U.S. was protecting an extraterrestrial being and that scientists at Los Alamos were able to communicate with it and obtain “advanced technology and science.”

Nixon then sealed the letter in a “time capsule” that he hid somewhere in the White House.

In another meeting, Merritt says Nixon told him to deliver a copy of the letter (which Nixon allegedly taped to Merritt’s stomach) to National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and not to tell anyone about it. Now, Merritt says co-author Douglas Caddy has notified the National Archive that Nixon’s so-called time capsule is still in the White House and he (Caddy) will reveal the location if the National Archive agrees to read the letter to the public.

It’s more than a little preposterous. We listened to the entire 75-minute interview with Merritt, conducted by self-styled “Dark Journalist” Daniel Liszt, in hopes that we could make better sense of it.

We couldn’t. The absurdities and contradictions are too glaring and too many.

Merritt says the last of his three one-on-one meetings with Richard Nixon occurred in July 1972, just after news of the Watergate burglary broke. He found Nixon in tears, fearing for the survival of his presidency. But that wasn’t the reason Nixon had asked him there. He wanted to talk about aliens. This is from a partial transcript of the interview provided by EarthFiles.com:

MERRITT: He had this letter. He pulled it out, and he read this one piece of paper to me. And then he put that letter in a manila envelope, and he put a gold seal over top of the middle, and then he put a piece of tape across that, and on the front was handwritten, “To Henry Kissinger.” He asked for it to be hand-delivered or mailed, whichever was best or safest to do.

LISZT: Now, this letter was very important. Can you describe the letter for me?

MERRITT: It was two red lines. They looked like a scientific formula with letters, numbers, and other scientific symbols that would be used, like chemistry symbols. He said, “We possess the knowledge, and we have in our protection,” and he said, “subjects from the Planet X.” And I asked him one question, and he didn’t seem to like what I asked him, but I said, “Are these the things in Mexico or Area 51?” He seemed to be offended by the fact that maybe I knew this.

LISZT: Okay, now in this final meeting with Nixon, he’s reading you this letter, he shows you this formula, and he’s now mentioning an alien that they have in protection, and he’s a little annoyed that you mentioned the being was in custody or being held. 

MERRITT: Yes. The word he used was “protected,” not “captured,” not “in captivity.” He didn’t used any words that would mean against the will. You know as well as I do that if we had a being like that, yes, it would be in captivity. I don’t think we’d let it walk down the street.

LISZT: You said he mentioned that scientists at Los Alamos had learned to communicate with this being. What did he say about that?

MERRITT: That we had obtained a very vast amount of knowledge, very powerful, to possess this knowledge and was able to learn from it, would be the most powerful nation or government in the entire world and could rule the world.

Merritt would have us believe that almost a half-century ago, Nixon had earth-shattering evidence that the U.S. government possessed advanced scientific knowledge gleaned from aliens (knowledge that made the television show Star Trek look “antiquated,” the president supposedly said), and what he chose to do with it was hide it in a time capsule  of which Nixon never spoke again.

Moreover, Nixon allegedly shared this revelation with only two other people: Merritt, a shadowy dirty tricks operative the president barely knew, and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, who himself has never spoken of the matter.

Nixon said whatever nation possessed this advanced knowledge could “rule the world.” What became of it? What became of the alien(s)? What became of their alleged home planet, “Planet X” (which, in astronomers’ parlance, refers to a hypothetical, yet-to-be-discovered planet beyond the orbit of Pluto)? What became of the manila envelope taped to Merritt’s stomach?

Actually, we do know what became of the latter. According to Merritt, he popped it in a mailbox. (So much for Nixon’s adhesive tape spycraft.) The rest is a mystery wrapped in an enigma inside a bad science fiction novel.

Merritt is, without a doubt, a colorful figure, and no stranger to conspiracy theories. His previous claim to fame was a book co-written in 2010 with Douglas Caddy, an attorney who briefly represented the Watergate burglars in 1972, which was billed as an “exposé” of the Watergate scandal. Merritt maintains that Nixon was innocent of complicity in the break-in and cover-up. Instead, he was supposedly “set up” by conspirators inside the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who concocted the scandal to bring the president down. The historical record says otherwise.

As to Richard Nixon’s supposed interest in and knowledge of extraterrestrial life, apart from unsourced quotes cited by UFO enthusiasts and a dubious supermarket tabloid story published in 1983, there’s little evidence that he gave it much thought at all.

Said story, which ran in the infamously unreliable National Enquirer under the byline of Beverly Gleason (the ex-wife of television comedian Jackie Gleason), describes an incident that had allegedly occurred ten years before:

Space aliens exist! Ask Jackie Gleason — he’s actually seen them.

I’ll never forget the night in 1973 my famous husband came home, slumped white-faced in an armchair and spilled out the incredible story to me.

He was late. It was around 11:30 p.m. and I’d been worried. As soon as I heard his key turn in the lock of our golf course home in Inverary, Fla., I jumped to my feet and asked, “Where have you been?”

His reply stunned me:

“I’ve been at Homestead Air Force Base — and I’ve seen the bodies of some aliens from outer space.

“It’s top secret. Only a few people know. But the President arranged for me to be escorted in there and see them.”

[…]

“And there were the aliens, lying on four separate tables.

“They were tiny — only about two feet tall — with small bald heads and disproportionately large years.

“They must have been dead for some time because they’d been embalmed.”

Gleason’s story was incredible indeed — though not too incredible to be published in the National Enquirer, the pages of which were often filled with outlandish reports of supernatural occurrences. There is little reason to believe that it’s anything other than a tall tale.

An entry in Richard Nixon’s daily diary confirms he was with Jackie Gleason at a celebrity golf tournament in Lauderhill, Florida on 19 February 1973. The president’s tight schedule left zero room for a side-trip to gawk at alien corpses, however. At 12:10 p.m. he was delivered by helicopter to the Inverrary Golf and Country Club, where he was greeted by Jackie Gleason. After motoring to the eighteenth green in a golf cart, Gleason introduced the president to the assembled guests, to whom he spoke for around 10 minutes. By 12:30, Nixon was back at the helipad, and on his way to his Key Biscayne compound. We found no other records of Nixon and Gleason meeting in 1973.

The fact is, according to Nixon confidant Frank Gannon, who spent many hours interviewing him and editing his memoirs during the late 1970s and early ’80s, the ex-president evinced no interest in UFOs or extraterrestrial life at all:

At one point during our labors in San Clemente, I asked RN if he believed in UFOs and if there was anything to the whole Roswell Area 51 business. He raised his eyebrows and rolled his eyes and I moved right on to the next subject.

In a coda to the E.T. time capsule story, Robert Merritt’s co-writer Douglas Caddy penned a February 2018 missive to the National Archives and Records Administration offering to disclose the location of Nixon’s secret letter on the condition that its contents — “if the document is discovered” — be made public. He has yet to be taken up on the offer.

Claim:

NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre was disqualified from the draft due to a psychological condition.

Rating:

Context

It is true that NRA executive president Wayne LaPierre received a medical deferment from the draft in 1971, but to date no evidence has come to light proving it was because of a “nervous disorder” (feigned or real), or any other psychological condition.

It was originally organized in 1871 to “promote and encourage rifle shooting on a scientific basis” in the United States, and it seems to have succeeded; generations later, the National Rifle Association has become the United States’ most high-profile gun rights lobbying group.

The organization’s executive vice president and CEO is Wayne R. LaPierre, an outspoken defender of the Second Amendment and critic of all but the most minimal gun control policies.

In the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012 which resulted in the deaths of more than two dozen children and adults, LaPierre famously suggested that a “national database of lunatics” would do more to solve the nation’s gun violence problem than banning the assault-style weapons so often used in such crimes.

LaPierre’s repeated assertions linking gun violence with mental illness (assertions vigorously challenged by mental health professionals) appear to have backfired on him, at least on the Internet, supplying fodder for rumors and memes promoting the claim that he obtained a medical (4-F) draft deferment during the Vietnam War by reason of a “nervous disorder.” Most variants state or imply that he actually faked the condition:

NRA President Wayne LaPierre rec’d Viet Nam draft deferment for mental illness labeled “nervous disorder”. Shouldn’t be able to own a gun.

— Shayne (@Zoocritter) September 24, 2013

Wayne LaPierre faked a “nervous disorder” to squirrel out of serving his country in Vietnam. Coward with a gun. Great combo #NRAFail

— Progressive Texas (@ProgressiveTex) February 8, 2013

NRA Lapierre dodged Vietnam draft by claiming “nervous disorder”. Due to this mental illness, it’s time to give his guns back #gunsense :

— US Gun Violence (@usgunviolence6) January 3, 2017

Although we were unable to ascertain precisely when or where this claim first appeared, it dates back at least as far as 2006, when the following entry was added to an informal online database called “Who Served in the Military?”:

Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association — did not serve (apparently pulled lottery #97 in 1969 as a campus radical at SUNY-Albany, but weaseled out by getting a family doctor to claim he had a nervous disorder).

No sources were cited to corroborate this entry.

According to the registrar’s office of the State University of New York in Albany, Wayne LaPierre never attended the school. On the contrary, after graduating from Patrick Henry High School in Roanoke, Virginia in 1967, LaPierre entered Siena College in Loudonville, New York, from which (according to a statement from the college) he graduated in 1972. He went on to earn a postgraduate degree at Boston College.

Given his birthdate (8 November 1949), LaPierre would indeed have been assigned the number 97 in the first-ever Selective Service lottery of the Vietnam era, placing him in the “most likely to be drafted” category for 1970. However, we’ve found no public record or published mention of LaPierre ever having served in the military. Our queries to the NRA public affairs office concerning Mr. LaPierre’s military service and/or draft deferment status went unanswered.

We were able to obtain Wayne LaPierre’s Selective Service record from the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, however. It shows that he registered for the draft on 13 November 1967, a few days after his 18th birthday, listing his occupation as “student.” Under the rules then in force, a registrant could qualify for a student deferment “if he could show he was a full-time student making satisfactory progress in virtually any field of study,” the Selective Service web site says.

LaPierre’s Selective Service classification record shows that he was classified 2-S (registrant deferred because of activity in study) in January 1968. His student deferment was renewed every year through 1970.

Although the student deferment should have kept him immune from the draft until he graduated in 1972, the record states that LaPierre reported for an armed services physical exam in August 1971 (while still at Siena College), and shortly thereafter was reclassified 1-Y (registrant qualified for service only in time of war or national emergency).

During the Vietnam War period, receiving a 1-Y classification was essentially the same as being classified 4-F (registrant not qualified for military service). The 1-Y deferment was eliminated at the end of 1971, at which time all registrants who had previously received it, LaPierre among them, were administratively reclassified 4-F.

Like that of Donald Trump, who also received a 1-Y draft deferment, LaPierre’s classification record includes the notation “yxx,” meaning he was found unqualified for military service based on medical reasons. However, it does not state the exact nature of the disqualifying condition(s).

We can confirm, then, that NRA executive president Wayne LaPierre received a medical deferment from the draft in 1971, but to date no evidence has come to light proving it was because of a “nervous disorder” (feigned or real), or any other psychological condition.

Sources

Claim:

A video shows a device automatically sorting hundreds of small balls by color.

Rating:

In January 2018, the Anonymous Facebook page shared a video that seemingly showed a simple machine automatically sorting hundreds of small balls by color along with a request for someone to explain how the device worked:

Some viewers theorized that the video (which can be viewed in full below) was actually upside down and and showed  colored balls in separate containers falling and mixing together through the machine. Others suggested that the device actually sorted the balls by size, not color. 

The truth, however, is that this machine doesn’t exist. The viral video is a computer simulation that was originally posted to Reddit by “the_humeister.” The Redditor explained that he created this simulation of a “Galton board” (a device used to demonstrate a mathematical theorem) with Blender, an open-source 3D computer graphics software.

They originally ran the simulation with all white balls. When the objects all settled, they assigned each ball a color and ran the program again. Or as the_humesiter explained:

Run the simulation. Color the balls afterwards. Render from the beginning.

Here’s the original video of the “somewhat flawed Galton Box”:

 

 

 

A Galton board, also known as a bean machine, quincunx or Galton box, was developed by Sir Francis Galton in the 1800 to demonstrate the central limit theorem.

A similar video has also made the social media rounds:

Claim:

A series of images show a “direct energy weapon” striking a city in Michigan.

Rating:

The night of Jan. 16, 2018, was an odd one in Michigan. Not only did a meteor flash across the sky, causing a small earthquake, but a garage went up in flames, and over the border in Ohio, an oil refinery conducted a controlled burn — all at the same time. As images of these three events started to make their way around the Internet, conspiracy theorists concocted a bizarre explanation that tied them all together: the government (or possibly aliens, or maybe both) had unleashed a direct energy weapon on the world:

The website Before It’s News collected some of the most compelling images and summarized the theory: 

The Rod of God. A Directed Energy Weapon. Main stream presstituts will have you believe this was a meteor, a meteor that fell at a perfect 90* angle. SMH.. This just happened a few hours ago in Taylor, Michigan. 01/16/18. This energy blast was seen and heard in 4 US states and Canada.

The United States Geological Survey reports a 2.0 magnitude earthquake at 8:09 p.m. January 16, 2018 – exactly the same time a meteor flashed through the sky in Michigan.

The earthquake was a very weak earthquake having what is called a “local magnitude” (Ml) of 2.0. This USGS map shows a “meteorite” notation for the quake. A 2.0 magnitude earthquake would not be felt by humans.

This is confusing because all the Meteor videos I can find for this day on YouTube show something else entirely than these photographs. The videos show like a regular ole meteor going thru the air. But these pictures show a percise ray of energy beamed down lighting the ground on fire. Could this be the same tech causing the wildfires all over the USA aka California etc? I don’t know. That is why I am sharing this for discussion.

A meteor really was visible over Michigan on Jan. 16, 2018. This was confirmed by the United States Geologic Society, NASA, the National Weather Service, astronomy experts, and a number of eyewitness videos:

 

 

It’s also true that the videos of the meteor passing over Michigan do not resemble the photographs that appeared to show a ray of light. But that’s because those photographs don’t actually show the meteor.

The center photograph in the collage above was most likely taken near a garage fire in the city of Taylor, Michigan. As news of the fire spread, so did rumors that the blaze was caused by a meteor crashing into the garage. Michigan news outlet MLive published a story about the phenomena, informing worried readers that the blaze was not actually started by a meteor crashing into it:

A fire that destroyed a pickup truck inside a garage in the metro Detroit community of Taylor was not started by a piece of falling meteor fragment.

Fire crews were called to a garage fire at about 8:24 p.m., Jan. 16, on Merrick Road after the homeowner noticed smoke coming from the engine compartment of a pickup he was working on inside the garage, according to the Taylor Fire Department.

Images showing a bright streak of light soaring up into the sky likely show an oil refinery in Ohio conducting a controlled burn which caused “light pillars” (a visual effect that can occur in very cold winter weather) to appear in the sky. A number of people captured images of this refinery fire and the resulting light pillars:

Local news outlets such as Click On Detroit, Cleveland 19, and Fox 2 Detroit all published articles in January 2018 about these light pillars’ forming:

They look like lights from an alien spaceship, but they are actually light pillars, a spectacular sight most commonly seen during the colder winter months. 

The phenomenon’s name describes narrow rods that appear to extend from the sky to the ground.

Although the images do show something that resembles alien weapons used in movies such as Independence Day, these particular photographs do not document the deployment of such a device. Rather, the light pillars just happened to appear around the same time that a meteor was spotted streaking across the sky in Michigan, creating the perfect conditions for conspiracy theorists to spread rumors about otherworldly weaponry. 

See also: Were 2023 Maui Fires Caused by a ‘Direct Energy Weapon’?

Claim:

A photograph shows President Trump with balloons stuffed into his shirt.

Rating:

In June 2017, a stream of hoax images featuring now-president Donald Trump appeared on social media, pushed by Twitter accounts such as @TrumpSnapshots with no explanation or context. One such picture appeared to show a sweaty-looking Trump with balloons stuffed into his shirt:

This is not genuine; it is an image was created by digitally manipulating Trump’s face onto another person’s body. The same tactic was used to create a faked image of Trump wearing a diaper, partying with Liberace, and posing with a stripper.

Here is the original photograph, which was evidently culled from an eBay listing:

The eBay page for this photograph did not provide much information about the photograph, other than it was apparently taken at some point during the 1970s. Regardless, it is not a photograph of Donald Trump in any decade.

Claim:

Dangerous cosmic rays will pass near Earth tonight, causing bodily harm if you keep personal electronics near you.

Rating:

 

Rumors of dangerous cosmic rays passing by Earth “tonight,” largely identical in their phrasing, have been steadily collecting in our inbox for well over a year. The warning, which has been around since at least 2014, and whose timelessness is assured by the lack of specific dates or a discussion of time zones, is generally phrased as such:

VERY URGENT! Tonight at 00:30 to 03:30am make sure to turn off your phone, cellular, tablet etc & put far away from your body! Singapore TV announced on the news! Please tell your family & friends! Tonight 12:30pm to 3:30am for our Planet will be very high radiation! Cosmic rays will pass close to Earth, So please turn off your cell phone! Do not leave your device close to your body, it can cause you terrible damage! Check Google & NASA BBC News! Send this message to all the people who matter to you! Thank you

Equally imprecise is the science involved in the warning. When astronomers discuss cosmic rays, they are almost always referring to high energy protons from outside our solar system that travel at nearly the speed of light and are thought to be ejected from supernovae, the explosion of stars. Sometimes, however, the term also includes high-energy particles from the sun, as described by Caltech astronomer Richard Mewaldt:

Cosmic rays are high energy charged particles, originating in outer space, that travel at nearly the speed of light and strike the Earth from all directions. Most cosmic rays are the nuclei of atoms, ranging from the lightest to the heaviest elements in the periodic table. […] The term “cosmic rays” usually refers to galactic cosmic rays, which originate in sources outside the solar system, distributed throughout our Milky Way galaxy.

However, this term has also come to include other classes of energetic particles in space, including nuclei and electrons accelerated in association with energetic events on the Sun (called solar energetic particles), and particles accelerated in interplanetary space.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (among other agencies) constantly monitor the sun for events that would eject solar particles in the direction of Earth. They do this not because of the health risk they pose to humans (unless you are an astronaut in space) but because of the risk they can pose to electrical grids and devices, as described by NASA:

When struck by […] a coronal mass ejection, our planet’s magnetic fields jostle back and forth. This generates electric currents, radio waves, and accelerates particles. As the atmosphere changes, GPS satellite frequencies that must travel through the ionosphere can be disrupted, resulting in errors of […] a couple of yards. For airlines, military operations, farmers’ vehicles, and financial transactions that rely on GPS, this interference can prove damaging.

Another type of eruption from the sun, called a solar flare, can interfere with shortwave radios. These low frequency radio waves use the ionosphere as a mirror to reflect transmissions around the globe; but during a solar storm, they simply disappear up into the sky—unable to bounce off of an atmosphere so changed by these storms.

These events would cause no direct health risk to humans on the surface of Earth, and as such that non-existent risk would not be exacerbated by the presence of a cell phone near you. The idea that NASA would send out a warning to that effect is belied by the fact that not a single warning regarding solar activity from 2010 to 2015 provided any guidance on the placement of your cell phone during such an event. Additionally, the three hour window for avoiding your cell phone is nonsensical, given the fact that such events generally disrupt our magnetic field for a longer period of time.

If, however, the warning was referring to a more classical definition of cosmic rays — the high energy (mostly) protons that come from supernova explosions — then the warning is on even shakier scientific ground. That’s because cosmic radiation, which is bouncing around all over the place and deflected by any magnetic field it runs into, is not easily tied to a single origin. In fact scientists only conclusively proved that cosmic rays generally come from supernovas in 2013, despite suspicions for a century prior. Cosmic radiation is a slowly varying background process that does not necessitate any action on your part.

The only conceivable source of an acute cosmic radiation spike would be a stream of particles ejected directly at Earth from a nearby supernova explosion. In addition to the fact that such an event would conceivably offer decades of warning, and therefore make an exclusive scoop by Singapore TV unlikely, there are also no stars both close enough to us and close enough to the end of their life cycle to produce such an event, according to NASA:

Astronomers estimate that, on average, about one or two supernovae explode each century in our galaxy. But for Earth’s ozone layer to experience damage from a supernova, the blast must occur less than 50 light-years away. All of the nearby stars capable of going supernova are much farther than this.

In terms of health effects to humans on the ground, this background cosmic radiation, similar to the solar radiation, poses no immediate harm and cannot be considered a health risk only unless you are chronically exposed to higher radiation levels in polar regions, according to NOAA:

When these particles hit the atmosphere, large showers of secondary particles are created with some even reaching the ground. These particles pose little threat to humans and systems on the ground […]. The Earth’s own magnetic field also works to protect Earth from these particles largely deflecting them away from the equatorial regions but providing little-to-no protection near the polar regions […]. This constant shower of GCR particles at high latitudes can result in increased radiation exposures for aircrew and passengers at high latitudes and altitudes.

Because this identical warning has been online for years, and because neither interpretation of the warning’s text makes scientific sense, we rank this claim false.

Claim:

The Masai Tribe donated 14 cows to the United States after 9/11.

Rating:

A popular meme holding that Kenyan Masai tribe members donated 14 cows to the United States in the wake of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack is frequently posted on social media: 

Although this meme is accurate, its brief text brings up a few questions:  Did the Masai ship the cows to the United States? Were the cows meant to be a food source? Were they taken to the White House? 

The story of the Masai and their 14 cows begins with Kimeli Naiyomah, a member of the tribe who left Kenya to study medicine in the United States. After the September 11th attacks, Naiyomah returned to Kenya, where he told the tribespeople, many of whom were unaware of the incident, about 9/11. The New York Times reported in 2002: 

… [W]hen Kimeli Naiyomah returned recently to this tiny village from his studies in the United States, he found only the vaguest understanding among his fellow Masai of what had happened in that far-away place called New York on Sept. 11.

Some in this nomadic community of cattle raisers had missed the story entirely. ”I never knew about Sept. 9,” said William Oltetia, chief of the young warriors known here as morans, who was still confused as to the date. ”I just never heard about it.”

Most Masai had learned of the attacks from the radio soon after they occurred. But the horrible television images passed by many Masai, who got electricity in their village only shortly before the attacks. In the oral tradition they rely on, Mr. Naiyomah sat them down and told them stories that stunned them.

The Masai, saddened by the tragedy and relieved that Naiyomah had not been hurt, wanted to show solidarity with the United States. They decided to donate cows, an animal they hold sacred. On 1 June 2002, the Masai held a ceremony in the village of Enoosaen, where tribe elders presented U.S. Ambassador to Kenya William Brencick with 14 cows. The BBC reported at the time:

The cattle – regarded as sacred by the Masai – were handed over to William Brancick, deputy head of the US embassy in Kenya in a remote village near the border with Tanzania.

The ceremony was marked by tribespeople in traditional red robes and jewellery, some of whom carried banners saying “To the people of America, we give these cows to help you”.

Brencick called the gift the “highest expression of regard and sympathy.”

”The cow is almost the center of life for us,” Naiyomah explained. ”It’s sacred. It’s more than property. You give it a name. You talk to it. You perform rituals with it. I don’t know if you have any sacred food in America, something that has a supernatural feel as you eat it. That’s the cow for us.”

However, logistical constraints prevented the animals from actually being transported to the U.S. It wasn’t until 2006 that American diplomats finally decided to use the cows to start an education fund:

American diplomats flirted with the idea of shipping the animals to the Central Park Zoo. That proved too complicated. Then someone suggested selling them and using the proceeds to buy Masai jewelry for New Yorkers. But that seemed a little heartless.

The indecision went on and on, and by Year 3, some of the Masai were feeling spurned. The cattle were growing fat — and going nowhere. In Masai culture, it is disrespectful to dillydally over such a gift.

[…]

On Sunday, American diplomats returned to this town in the carpeted hills of southern Kenya and announced, much to the delight of the hundreds of Masai gathered in their best beaded finery, that the cattle were not going anywhere, especially not to the slaughterhouse.

Instead, they will be blessed, and their offspring will be used to pay for education for the children of Enoosaen. To get the cow trust fund going, the Americans are donating 14 high school scholarships.

 

“What you did to help us will not be forgotten,” said the new American ambassador to Kenya, Michael E. Ranneberger.

The Masai elders, some sitting in monkey skin jackets, beamed.

“We did what we knew best,” said an elder, Mzee ole Yiamboi. “The handkerchief we give to people to wipe their tears with is a cow.”

The cows were each branded with a symbol resembling the twin towers on their ears. According to the book 14 Cows for America, the “American cows” multiplied and numbered 35 at the time of its publication in 2009.

Here’s a video report about the Masai Tribe’s gift after 9/11:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS2hIyv0dGI

 

Accounts and photographs of human beings purportedly swallowed whole by large snakes have long been a popular feature of rumor and folklore, and in March 2017 another instance was reported from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, where a missing 25-year-old man named Akbar was reportedly found dead inside the belly of a 23-foot-long python.

 

Many Indonesian and English-language news outlets provided similar accounts of the reported grisly discovery, such as the following:

An Indonesian man has been found dead inside the belly of a seven-meter-long python, a local media reports.

Akbar Salubiro had not been seen since setting off to harvest palm oil in a remote village on the island of Sulawesi. The 25-year-old man was missing since March 26.

A search found the giant python sprawled out next to his garden with the 25-year-old’s boots clearly visible in its stomach, according to tribunsulbar.com.

Villagers then used a large knife to cut open the snake’s belly slowly revealing the father-of-two’s body.

The horrifying footage shows the corpse being slowly removed from the killer reptile as the leathery skin is peeled away.

Akbar’s neighbor Satriawan said: “He was found in the location of the garden.

“Initially Akbar set out from his home to go to harvest palm. After not returning to his home, people looked for him.”

Akbar’s wife, Munu, was away at the time and only found out when pictures and video emerged in the news, Tribun Timur said.

Village secretary Salubiro Junaidi said: “People had heard cries from the palm grove the night before Akbar was found in the snake’s stomach.

“When the snake was captured, the boots Akbar was wearing were clearly visible in the stomach of the snake.

“Resident cut open the belly of the snake and Akbar was lifeless.”

Although accounts of reticulated pythons killing and eating humans pop up from time to time, they are usually based on reports from remote villages lacking in documentation. We’ve investigated a few “python eats man” rumors over the years and found that they were either based on unrelated photographs, doctored images, or urban legends.

Indeed, animal experts have long been skeptical about whether the feat of a python’s ingesting a whole adult is even possible due to the width of human shoulder blades. The reticulated python is the longest snake in the world, but they typically prey on smaller mammals that are much easier for them to wrap their jaws around:

Reticulated pythons of this size — it was reported to be 7m (23ft)-long — are very powerful. They wrap themselves around their prey and crush it, killing it by suffocation or cardiac arrest.

Eating it is another matter.

Pythons do not chew their food, they have to swallow it whole, but their jaws are connected by very flexible ligaments so they can stretch around large prey. Even so, there are limits.

“The restricting factor is human shoulder blades because they are not collapsible,” Mary-Ruth Low, Singapore Zoo’s conservation & research officer and a reticulated python expert, told the BBC.

So while reticulated pythons — the longest snakes in the world — have attacked humans very occasionally in the past, experts have long questioned whether they could ingest an adult man.

Like most such accounts, wider news reporting of this story was initially based solely on local sources from a remote area. However, in this case the report was seemingly bolstered by multiple photographs and a six-minute long video captured with cell phones:

In a widely shared nearly six-minute video published online by the Tribun Timur, bystanders yelp and point flashlights at the ever-widening snake carcass.

At last, the macabre revelation: Akbar, a 25-year-old man who had gone missing from Salubiro village, apparently had been swallowed whole by the python, according to the Associated Press and local media reports.

“It seems he was attacked from behind because we found a wound on his back,” Junaedi, the secretary of Salubiro village in West Sulawesi province, told the AP.

Junaedi added that the villagers had begun searching for Akbar on Monday night, after the man never returned from a Sunday palm-oil harvest.

The search party discovered “scattered palm oil fruit, a picking tool and a boot” — and not far away, a 23-foot-long reticulated python, the AP reported.

A search party chased the python, killed it and cut it open.

Multiple videos and images that have emerged from the scene, taken from different angles, show the lifeless body of the man covered in what appeared to be the snake’s digestive juices.

Those images and video (not for the squeamish) are shown below:

 

 

 

 

A Washington Post report also noted the difficulty of a even a very large snake’s trying to swallow an adult male human:

The reticulated python is the world’s longest snake and among its heaviest, growing up to 30 feet, according to Emily Taylor, a professor of biological sciences at California Polytechnic State University and an officer in the nonprofit Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles.

The size of the reticulated snake in the video indicates it was almost certainly a female, and without a doubt stronger than a person, she said.

It would be very difficult — though not impossible — for even a large python to swallow an adult human male; a human’s broad shoulders can present an obstacle for the snake’s jaws, Taylor said. Python attacks on humans are extremely rare, and the chances of being eaten by a giant snake are ”lower than the chances of being struck by lightning at the exact same time as winning Mega Millions,” she once wrote.

Despite that, stories about giant snakes attacking and eating humans crop up from time to time.

Many end up being fake, accompanied by images that have telltale signs of a staged death, such as the lack of digestive juices covering the “corpse,” Taylor said.

“Honestly, people try to fake things a lot when it comes to big snakes,” she said.

As for the video from Indonesia, Taylor said she couldn’t determine its authenticity. But the fact that the outcome was recorded on video, rather than documented only in still images, is noteworthy, she said.

“The video doesn’t have any strong indicators that it is fake,” she said. “If it’s real, it’s really disappointing that someone lost their life.”

Given the history of fabricated or misidentified images often being used with reports of this nature, we await further confirming details on the incident.

Claim:

Symbols embossed on the exterior surfaces of Oreo cookies link the product to the alleged conspiratorial activities of the Knights Templar and Freemasons.

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We do not know who first paused to ponder the ornate design of an Oreo cookie before eating it, but the decorative embossed pattern is considered integral to the Oreo experience and has inspired praise from such highfalutin sources as American architectural critic Paul Goldberger, who enthused on the occasion of its 75th birthday that the cookie’s form “leaps across stylistic boundaries” to epitomize modernism:

The way in which the two chocolate wafers appear to float, held together only by a recessed inner layer of cream filling, seems to epitomize the modernist esthetic, while the richly decorated chocolate wafers are a celebration of the role of ornament. So, like a building that mixes sleek glass and gargoyles, this cookie does nothing less than transcend the gulf separating modernism and traditionalism.

The ornamental pattern of the wafer itself, however, is the Oreo’s visual signature. Stamped out by brass rollers passing over sheets of chocolate dough, the pattern consists of a series of four-leaf clovers around the word ”OREO,” which is set within the traditional trademark of Nabisco, its manufacturer — that trademark being a horizontal oval with what looks like a television antenna extending up from it. Around the clovers, a broken line forms a broken circle. Beyond that, the outer edge of the cookie is slightly ridged, serving both as a visual frame for the ornamental center and as a means of grasping the cookie with comparative ease.

While the cookie-in-itself may not be difficult to grasp, some find that the meaning of its elaborate embossed design nonetheless remains elusive. There is no official explanation of what the ring of four-leaf flowers, the segmented line with intermittent dots encircling it, the television antenna-like structure atop the name “OREO,” or the 90 evenly-spaced pillars adorning its outer rim are supposed to stand for (if anything). And despite there being no good reason to assume the pattern is anything other than decorative, there are those for whom the Oreo cookie’s design represents a deep, dark mystery to be plumbed. Do the symbols communicate a hidden message?

‘Think it’s just a coincidence?’

An interesting theory summarized in a 2014 Reddit post links the “symbology” of the Oreo to the medieval Knights Templar and the fraternal order of Freemasonry, two organizations often implicated in grand-scale conspiracy theories:

The symbol around the word Oreo on the center of the cookie was designed from the Knights Templar Cross of Lorraine, which is a symbol of quality. The “flowers” on the Oreo were rendered using the Knights Templar Cross Pattée. The dots, flowers and dashes represent the 3 degrees of Ancient Craft Freemasonry. The arranging of the dots around the cookie were strategically placed to form the 5 Pointed Star; the symbol of the Order of the Eastern Star. All of these symbols are still used throughout the Masonic bodies, including the Eastern Star, Knights Templar and the Scottish Rite.

Think it’s just a coincidence?

The inventor, who rapidly climbed from the mail room to design executive and was responsible for today’s look of the Oreo, was a Freemason.

There’s a lot to unpack there, but we’ll forego the factual claims for a moment to address the burning question on the lips of anyone unaccustomed to swimming in the murky waters of conspiracism: So what?

If, in fact, the Oreo’s designer was a Freemason, so what? If, in fact, there are esoteric symbols on the cookies, so what? If the presence of those symbols isn’t coincidental, what are we supposed to make of that? What’s the point of putting them on a cookie?

To be frank, there are probably no rational answers to those questions, nor is it likely that all conspiracy theorists would offer up the same ones. These are folks who claim to find similar symbolism everywhere, including in classical art, popular media, religious texts, corporate logos, and on ordinary currency. They regard such symbols as emblems of a secretive, all-powerful organization — call it Freemasonry, the Order of Solomon’s Temple (aka the Knights Templar), the Illuminati, or the New World Order — that has conspired behind the scenes to rule every nation on the planet, like puppet-masters, for centuries. Beyond absolute world domination, it’s unclear what the secret society’s underlying raison d’être is supposed to be. Some say it’s religious (a Jewish or Catholic conspiracy), others say it’s occult or Satanic (e.g., a conspiracy to install the Antichrist), others say it’s political (e.g., Communism), and still others promote the notion that an evil race of humanoid reptiles is behind it all.

So, why, if it’s such a super-secret conspiracy, are graphic symbols of this organization to be found everywhere, including on cookies? The various reasons ventured by conspiracy theorists include the following:

• They’re a means of covert communication between members of the Illuminati.
• They’re a means of asserting ownership over everything and everyone (essentially a tool of “branding”).
• They’re a tool of psychic programming or mind control.
• They’re a means of luring the unknowing masses into Satanic or occult worship.
• In the case of the cookies specifically, they’re a means of tricking untold millions of people to participate in a holy or unholy communion against their will every time they ingest an Oreo.

As you ponder the above, also consider this: Oreos are the largest-selling packaged cookie in the entire world, with $2.9 billion in sales annually in more than 100 different countries. Mondelez International, the parent company of Nabisco, which manufactures Oreos, reports that more than 40 billion of the cookies are baked and consumed every year. Whether it’s for the purpose of mind control, covert communication, or mass Satanic conversion, their consumer reach is beyond compare. Indeed, if world domination is one’s goal, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Oreos are, in fact, indispensable for that purpose.

Unless, of course, the “symbolism” with which they’re embossed is, and always has been, nothing more than a decorative pattern. It’s time to take a closer look.

Docked and embossed

The practice of molding or stamping decorative imagery on cookies (or biscuits, as they are also called) is quite old. In its simplest form, a method called “docking,” the dough is perforated with small holes to prevent it from puffing during baking. At its most complex, the technique entails “embossing” the surfaces of baked goods with intricate designs for aesthetic or ceremonial purposes. Innovations brought about during the industrial revolution ensured a future in which cookies would be mass-produced by the billions:

The turn of the 19th century saw the birth of the industrial biscuit, and, with it, the marriage of these two morphologies — docking and decorating — into an automated production line. In the late 1890s, two cousins, both called Thomas Vicars, designed the first embossing and cutting machine, capable of punching holes, stamping decorations, and cutting out up to 80 biscuits per minute from a moving sheet of dough. The dies were necessarily hand carved until engraving machines were introduced in the early 1900s. … But the true golden age of biscuit engineering did not dawn until the invention of the rotary molder in the late 1920s.

This technology, albeit updated with variable speed controls, advanced non-stick coatings, and quality sensors, is still used to make Oreos and most other thick embossed biscuits today. The cookie dough is forced into negative molds, which imprint patterns, brand names, and docker holes. A scraping knife (“D” in the diagram above) scrapes off any excess dough to give a flat bottom, and the formed biscuits peel away onto a conveyor belt to be baked.

In 1908, one of the new industrial-scale baked goods companies created to profit from these rapidly improving production capabilities, Sunshine Biscuits, introduced a product called Hydrox, a creme-filled chocolate sandwich cookie with an embossed design on the top and bottom. It was a sensation, and four years later inspired Sunshine’s biggest competitor, the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco), to launch a knock-off: the Oreo (many assume that the Oreo came first and Hydrox was a copycat, but the reverse was true).

Oreo truths

The first thing to know about the Oreo’s design, then, is that it was modeled after that of another product, Hydrox, which also had an embossed pattern on its face.

The second thing to know is that the design evolved over time. The pattern we’re familiar with today was implemented in 1952, and is a more complex version of the two designs that came before. “Interestingly, when the Oreo was first introduced by Nabisco in 1912,” writes Nicola Twilley in The Atlantic, “it used a much more organic wreath for its emboss, later augmented with two pairs of turtledoves in a 1924 redesign.”

The third thing to know is that we’ve established the identity of the person who came up with the current design, a longtime Nabisco engineer named William A. Turnier, and although no one ever had a chance to interview him and inquire as to the meaning of the various elements in the pattern, his son has been quite forthcoming about his father’s thinking. Remember the rumor quoted above about the Oreo’s designer being a Freemason? Not so, says Bill Turnier of his father, who he claims scoffed when people asked serious questions about the design:

“I read something on the Internet about some speculation about Masonic designs, et cetera,” Bill Turnier told me. “But my father was not a Mason. His father was, but he had no big enthusiasm for it. Some of this Masonic stuff, I can’t imagine the people who get into that and the numerological significance.”

Nonetheless, cookie enthusiasts and numerologists often called his father. “Someone wanted to know the significance of there being 90 notches around the edge,” Bill Turnier says. “I think there’s 90, and my dad’s like, ‘I don’t know, is that how many there are? I bet I put my compass down and kicked every fourth degree.’”

Bill Turnier recalls that his father also fielded complaints about the four-leafed flower. “Somebody called him up when he was 65 and said there were no flowers with four petals on them. My dad couldn’t care.” (There are, for the record, plenty of flowers, including the Western Wallflower and varieties of primroses, which bear four petals.)

Turnier’s ring of four-petaled flowers was a stylized update of the “more organic” floral patterns used on earlier versions of the cookie. Claiming the shape is actually a version of the “Knights Templar Cross Pattée” does not make it so. Nor does a similarity between the “antenna” shape over the name “OREO” and the traditional Cross of Lorraine (which has also been identified with the Knights Templar in historical imagery) force one to conclude that it had a conspiratorial origin. The oval and cross in the center of the pattern is actually a variant of the Nabisco logo, which, according to the web site of the Bernhardt Fudyma Design Group, has been in use since 1900:

At the end of the 19th century, the newly formed National Biscuit Company took its first step toward the creation of what would become one of the world’s most recognized logos. Adolphus Green, the baking giant’s first chairman, took charge of developing an entirely new brand-name cracker to be sold in a package specially designed to preserve its crispness. A symbol for this product, and the company itself, was needed for use on the package and in advertising.

Mr. Green found a simple design – an oval crowned by a double-barreled cross – while looking through his collection of rare books. During the 15th century this design was used as a pressmark by the society of Printers in Venice. Prior to that, in the early Christian era, the mark symbolized the triumph of the spiritual over the worldly.

Framed in the octagonal shape of the new ‘Uneeda Buiscuit’ and filled with the word ‘In-er Seal’ (the name given to the unique wax-paper-lined package), it became the company’s first official trademark in 1900. During the next five decades, the oval enclosed various combinations of the company’s initials, the Uneeda brand name and, finally, the current acronym ‘Nabisco’.

While the notion that the world’s top-selling cookie is somehow a vehicle for powerful secret entities to exercise world domination makes for an exciting story, such evidence as there is suggests that, like so many other staples of modern life, the only real motive behind its invention was the desire to manufacture a good product and sell it at a profit. Sometimes (as Sigmund Freud ought to have said, but didn’t), a cookie is just a cookie.

Claim:

Mark Twain said that it’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.

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A quote frequently attributed to Mark Twain gained greater prominence in 2016 as media publications debated the effect of “fake news” on the internet:

It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.

The quote shown here has been attributed to Mark Twain (or Samuel Clemens, if you prefer) by dozens of web sites, books, and memes, and was even available on a T-shirt sold by Amazon. However, none of these sources provided any information about where or when Twain allegedly said this. Was it written or spoken? Did it appear in a book or a newspaper article?

A lack of source information for this particular quote is especially noteworthy, because Mark Twain’s writing was very well-documented. Several volumes of quotes from the author of Huckleberry Finn have been compiled, yet we were unable to find this quote in any of them.

Barbara Schmidt, who operates TwainQuotes.com, told us that she also had no evidence that Twain wrote or uttered this phrase. However, Schmidt directed us to a passage from the Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2, in which he expressed a similar opinion about the power of a lie::

The general idea of that quote (although not that wording) is one Mark Twain expressed in regard to lying — in that is it hard to convince people they have been a victim of a lie.

He did state:

“The glory which is built upon a lie soon becomes a most unpleasant incumbrance. …  How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!” – Autobiographical dictation, 2 December 1906. Published in Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2 (University of California Press, 2013)

The full quote, which can be viewed via The Mark Twain Project, reads as follows (emphasis ours):

The truth is, I did not have to wait long to get tired of my triumphs. Not thirty days, I think. The glory which is built upon [a] lie soon becomes a most unpleasant incumbrance. No doubt for a while I enjoyed having my exploits told and retold and told again [in my presence] and wondered over and exclaimed about, but I quite distinctly remember that there presently came a time [when] the subject was wearisome [and odious] to me and I could not endure the disgusting discomfort of [it.] I am well aware that the world-glorified doer of a deed of great and real splendor has just my experience; I know that he deliciously enjoys hearing about it for three or four weeks, and that pretty soon after that he begins to dread the mention of it, and by and by wishes he had been with the damned before he ever thought of doing that deed; I remember how [General Sherman used to rage and swear [over] “When we were marching through Georgia,”] which was played at him and sung at him everywhere he went; still, I think I suffered a shade more than the legitimate hero does, he being privileged to soften his misery with the reflection that his glory was at any rate golden and reproachless in its origin, whereas I had no such privilege, there being no possible way to make mine respectable.

How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and [how] hard it is to undo that work again! [Thirty-five years after those evil exploits of mine I visited my old mother, whom I had not seen for ten years]; and being moved by what seemed to me a rather noble and perhaps [page 303] heroic impulse, I thought I would humble myself and confess my ancient fault. It cost me a great effort to make up my mind; I dreaded the sorrow that would rise in her face, and the shame that would look out of her eyes; but after long and troubled reflection, the sacrifice seemed due and right, and I gathered my resolution together and made the confession.

It is possible that someone else paraphrased Twain’s words, and others conflated both the actual phrase and the paraphrase over time.  However, we have been unable to find evidence that Twain spoke or wrote this exact phrase.