According to a statement issued by the couple's attorney, Richard will plead to attempting to influence a public servant—a felony—and Mayumi will plead to a misdemeanor charge of filing a false police report. Prosecutors, the statement said, have agreed to recommend a sentence of probation, meaning no jail time. According to CNN, prosecutors couldn't be reached to confirm the deal.

The deal was precipitated, the Heene's attorney said, by prosecutors' threat to deport Mayumi, who is a Japanese national. From the statement:

It is supremely ironic that law enforcement has expressed such grave concern over the welfare of the children, but it was ultimately the threat of taking the children's mother from the family and deporting her to Japan which fueled this deal.

It's even more supremely ironic that the attorney for a woman who deliberately threw her child into the middle of a self-generated media shitstorm and commanded him to lie and watched him throw up on TV so she could be on TV more is calling prosecutors' legitimate concern for that child's welfare under her care "ironic."

We can only hope that the district attorney bars any reality TV deals as a condition of probation.

An obscure blogger published a terribly written "report" on how "famed Time reporter Joe Klein" got a look at Barack Obama's undergraduate thesis on the "so-called founding fathers." This obvious satire was even tagged "satire," which is what Denton is always trying to get me to do when I guest at Deadspin. (It ruins the joke, Nick!)

Michael Ledeen, of course, immediately picked it up and even wrote this hilarious line:

Maybe instead of fuming about words that Rush Limbaugh never uttered, the paladins of the free press might ask the president about words that he did write.

Yes, maybe! Maybe they might ask him that! Hah!

Rush Limbaugh got so excited about this! He called imaginary college student Obama a "little boy" and read from his imaginary thesis. And then Rush was like oh this might be fake.

And Rush said "I have had this happen to me," referring to the time everyone mistakenly repeated one quote about black people that Rush Limbaugh did not actually say. And when it was pointed out to the media that Rush Limbaugh did not say this thing, Rush claims "the media" said "it doesn't matter because we know he thinks it." You can go ahead and watch Rick Sanchez apologize to Rush and decide if Rush has a point or not. (Hint: he doesn't.)

It's not like anyone's behavior here is unexpected or even all that terrible, it's mostly just hilarious. Once again: if you make something up and put it on the internet Michele Bachmann and Rush Limbaugh will believe it.

It was The Yes Men, of course, the liberal group behind the Fake New York Post and the Fake New York Times and plenty of other, similar stunts in which they pose as representatives of some evil corporate entity and pretend that said corporate entity has acquired a conscience, thereby embarrassing said corporate entity when it turns out, no, it was a hoax, Dow Chemical really isn't giving shit to Bhopal survivors, or whatever.

Today's stunt sounded especially good, though, because a guy from the real Chamber of Commerce burst in and caused a scene! The Washington Post was there:

"This guy is a fake! He's lying! This is a stunt that I've never seen before," said Eric Wohlschlegel, an official at the actual Chamber of Commerce, who said he'd heard about the hoax event from a reporter who'd mistakenly shown up at the chamber's headquarters...

Afterward, he said the chamber's position had actually not changed: they have called for "strong" legislation on climate change, but they do not support the bill passed by the U.S. House this summer.
"It is a very sad day," Wohlschlegel said.

Haha! Very sad day for you, dude! The Yes Men's fake newspapers are always too earnest to be funny but these things are, in fact, funny. We haven't found any video of this one yet, but enjoy their Dow Chemical hoax, below. [Pic via]

UPDATE: Here's a screenshot of the Reuters story that briefly went out on the wires falling for the hoax. And below is a clip of Fox Business reporting the Chamber's new position as breaking news, via Enviroknow (which has a clip of CNBC falling for it as well).

Who knows how this thing's going to play out. A verdict, a penalty, there's really no telling at this point how Richard Heene's going to handle the charges against him or the social and emotional tax on the Heene family. But what we do know is that the story of the boy in the balloon, filled as it was with real feelings of terror and relief, is a painful illustration of the sorry state of a reality TV-addled culture.

Blame the Heenes, of course, but who else? Just them? We could blame the rest of us glued to 40" hi-def images, waiting for the latest fix of manufactured conflict and emotion to get us through to the next blog post. Yes, Gawker is as bad as everyone else. We were part of the assembly line. But we also know that the page view counts on our reality show recaps dwarf anything we put up on, say, the death spiral of the publishing industry.

The only thing I've really home taken from this sad story, besides the fact that reality television is bad for people—literally, people, children: from the Gosselins to the Heenes—is that the harder you try to set the truth adrfit, the more obfuscation you bury it under, and the more piles of bullshit you throw on top of it, the more gravity is strippped from it, so that, like that goddamn balloon, it rises up, up, up and out of plain view, for everyone to see, completely out of reach of the person from which it had to come from.

The first bit of truth that will be lost, no doubt, is that some of us were complicit in this thing's makings. If we and you hadn't tuned in on Thursday afternoon (or clicked through on Saturday), if we weren't conditioned to lap up whatever reality freak show Richard Heene wanted to give us — or the one he delivered on — would this have happened? Not sure.

But fame — and what passes for genuine drama — is a hell of a drug. So this sad story (that I'd rather someone had have written before it happened, mostly, because kids were involved, and they shouldn't have been) is about the image of a balloon that might've had a kid in it and was terrifyingly captivating. If you watched, you felt terror, and you felt like shit for watching it. Between Wife Swap and the video of Falcon Heene may or maybe not being on the balloon, there's no question that America's got strong, strong voyeuristic impulses. How do you think we turn a dime around here?

As quickly and as easily as this website purchased the proof that Heene's story was a load of shit, you're left with no good angle to go at this from. We've entered the vindictive phase of the story as we wait to see just how dearly Richard Heene will pay for wasting the time of the Fort Collins sherriffs, the FAA, the media and — perhaps most importantly — all of us who bothered to watch his hoax unfold this past Thursday.

It seems all too easy to paint Heene as the crazed villain; then again, it's perfectly sensible. But truth: it's stranger than fiction. In this case, it's the story of a guy with a dream that's become too common: quickfire fame, notoriety, a reality television show. Heene had tasted that nasty once-forbidden fruit of easy notoriety on Wife Swap. Twice. And the Heene family didn't look great then, either: Heene was a father with a short temper who couldn't discipline his kids. He was eccentric and a guy of questionable stability, but when you score it with music, sound effects, and frame it between commercials, it looks a lot less harmless than it actually is. We want to think all reality television is edited down to make some of these people look like more exaggerated characters than they are. In some cases, that's absolutely the case. In the case of shows like Wife Swap, it isn't.

Last night, at a bar — where all good points are made — someone put it out there: If this guy loved his wife, would he have swapped her on TV? Nobody can speak for Richard Heene, but you know: this thing goes deep into murky waters, to say the least. Here's a guy who wanted fame so badly, he'd make America think his kid was on a balloon. He was okay with the perception — even if it was just for a moment — that he'd somehow neglected to keep his kid from floating away. I don't have kids, just parents. And if I thought they felt that way for a second, I'd probably hate them for a very, very long time.

If what Robert Thomas says is true, it's also the story of guy who is, on some level, ill. The desire and availability of fame fed into that. Which goes without saying: Robert Thomas got in on it, too. For a price.

And again, the kids are now the victim. Heene shouldn't have put his family on TV in interviews. He shouldn't have kept making them provide cover for him. When Falcon Heene said "You said we did it for the show," it was that moment of truth: the innocent one can't lie. You can't teach a kid how to be that deceptive, you can't instill that kind of strength. It doesn't work. Under enough pressure, it breaks. And Heene didn't even bother to work hard enough to get it right, or instill enough paternal love to the point where Falcon couldn't do anything but tell the truth: they did it for the show.

As for us, how culpable are we for the damage Falcon Heene's gonna experience? My bosses beat someone else to the punch and got a good story that turned out to be true. If it wasn't us, at that point, it would've been someone else. And from what I understand, there were others in line. Not a shocker. We're about as culpable as Wolf Blitzer, Nancy Grace, Shep Smith, the wires, the papers, magazines, and whoever else covered this. Media blackouts on breaking, exploitative news are rare (which is what makes cases like David Rohde's so interesting). The starter pistol was fired, we just got there first. It happens.

Felony charges will be brought up against the Heene family, it seems. Warrants will be brought up against them. They don't know when the Heene's are going to be arrested. They're going to be going through Heene's computer and seeking out co-conspirators. "On the bizarre meter, this rates a 10," noted Alderden. They didn't search for drugs. They didn't do a thorough search of the house, and should've looked at the attic. They didn't.

They don't think they're overreacting. "Contributing to the delinquency of a minor, attempting to influence a public official" are among the charges, which add up to a Class 4 Felony. The only federal agency that's been brought into this is the FAA. It's "seriously doubted" that the children will be facing any serious charges. The ACLU might represent the Heene family in the case. Child protection has been notified. They've pulled a case number and will be conducting an investigation.

The sheriff's office believes this had been planned for two weeks. The idea was as we'd suspected-to launch this thing, create controversy by making people think the kid was "onboard," all with the intent of getting The Grand American Prize: a reality television show. Heene has no education after high school, and he's not a scientist. They are still being presented with the story that he was in the attic. On a first time felony offense, Richard Heene is seemingly unlikely to go to jail.

As for our tipster, Robert Thomas, they are aware of him, their efforts to locate him have been have been unsuccessful, and they have also been unsuccessful in their attempts to contact him.

Thomas spent several months earlier this year working on developing a reality science TV show to pitch to networks — the "show," Thomas says, that Falcon was referring to when he told CNN "We did it for the show." Among the ideas that Heene, Thomas and two others came up with for their reality TV proposal — and one that he says most intrigued Heene — involved a weather balloon modified to look like a UFO which they would launch in an attempt to drum up media interest in both the Heene family and the series he was desperate to get on the air. Still, Thomas never imagined that Heene would involve his six-year-old son in what he is certain was a "global media hoax" to further Richard Heene's own celebrity. Thomas' story of his time with Heene, based on an interview with Ryan Tate, follows below. It's a fascinating account and after he publicly offered to sell his story, we paid him for it.

I came to Fort Collins for school — Colorado State University. I was a Web entrepreneur, starting a few small companies that evolved into a larger scale project called Extropedia.org, an open source online encyclopedia for advancing humanity through technology and science.

Doing research for the project on Google and YouTube, I stumbled upon Richard Heene and his video series Psyience Detectives. I was surprised to find this potential collaborator in the small city of Fort Collins. Since a very young age, I've been fascinated with electromagnetics, applied physics and how technologies developed out of those concepts could that change the world. Richard was studying basically the same thing. He asserted, for example, that tornadoes and hurricanes are not a result of changes in pressure but of magnetic polarity changes within the Earth.

I sent him an email in March, talking about Extropedia, a web site I founed and hope to re-launch soon. (Click here to read some of Thomas' email exchanges with the Heene family). Things progressed. Soon I was dropping in unannounced, having dinner. I'd bring various patents from the 50s and 60s that showcased technologies far more advanced than what we use today, and we discussed why they weren't being used. That was when Richard first started telling me about his conspiracy theories — which would eventually reveal themselves to be both extreme and paranoid.

Hunger for Stardom

There was something else at work, though. Oddly enough, Richard's sampling of stardom from being on Wife Swap — twice — gave him a sense of seniority in our scientific conversations. They became less and less about what I had to contribute and more and more about what Richard wanted.

And he wanted  nothing more than to get another reality TV series. Richard had an ongoing dialog with someone at ABC who helped  produce Wife Swap. Richard was pitching something along the lines of "MythBusters-meets-mad scientist." There would be these esoteric abstract experiments attempting to prove or disprove various theories. My job was to help him prepare a formal proposal. For each of 52 weekly episodes, to explain specifically what the subject would be, and why. (See the full proposal here.)

As the days progressed I became basically a stenographer. Richard was very hyperactive, and I would type out his ideas as quickly as I could. It was five hours of us brainstorming, or really Richard pouring his ideas out, then an additional ten hours of me taking his thoughts, cleaning them up, and making them linear and easier to understand. I would hyperlink the various scientific theories he mentioned for the people at ABC. I was to be paid $15 per hour, per a verbal agreement. More crucially, if and when and the reality series and was picked up by ABC, I would be one of his lead research assistants on the show.

I was very receptive to the idea of filtering esoteric science for the general population. A show would allow us to take the TV network's money and use it to fund real experimentation, to buy equipment unavailable to me as a student and an entrepreneur. We could experiment with electromagetics, crystal formation and new types of materials.

Richard, on the other hand, was often driven by ego and fame. He was all about controversy, hoping to whip up something significant enough to eliminate our reality TV competitors. He wanted episodes that would shock people and maximize his exposure. And he'd been trying for months. On several occasions, he sat down and told me he'd do whatever it took to make it happen — to win. He eventually resorted to extreme measures.

The UFO Idea (And the End of the World As We Know It in 2012)

One night, when Richard and I were sitting and talking, he brought up Wife Swap, and specifically a confrontation he had with a woman on the show who claimed to be a psychic. They very much disliked one other. Richard said, "Well, think about it. We were the 100th episode of Wife Swap. And why are we the most recognized Wife Swap family and episode? It's because of the controversy. I don't care what people say about me as a person, but the fact of the matter is that they know who I am."

And then we delved into the area of UFOs. I was reading a book on witness reports of Roswell at the time, just out of curiousity — I've never concluded whether it really took place or was an elaborate hoax. And Richard said, "how much do you want to bet we could facilitate some sort of a media stunt that would be equally profound as Roswell, and we could do so with nothing more than a weather balloon and some controversy?" (See item 16 here.)

Can we attract UFO's with a homemade flying saucer? We will modify a weather balloon, so that it resembles a UFO and will electrically charge the skin of the craft (Biefield-Brown Effect). We will capture the footage on film, and will utilize the media as a means with which to make our presence known to the masses. This will not only provide us with incredible footage, but will also generate a tremendous amount of controversy among the public, as well as publicity within the mainstream media. This will be the most significant UFO-related news event to take place since the Roswell Crash of 1947, and the result will be a dramatic increase in local and national awareness about The Heene Family, our Reality Series, as well as the UFO Phenomenon in general.

I clearly remember Richard telling me that, if we accomplish this, it would be the most controversial and widespread UFO news story since Roswell in 1947. (See audio at top of post.)

 
But he was motivated by theories I thought were far-fetched. Like Reptilians — the idea there are alien beings that walk among us and are shape shifters, able to resemble human beings and running the upper echelon of our government. Somehow a secret government has covered all this up since the U.S. was established, and the only way to get the truth out there was to use the mainstream media to raise Richard to a status of celebrity, so he could communicate with the masses.

As the weeks progressed, his theories got more and more extreme and paranoid. A lot of it surrounded 2012, and the possibility of there being an apocalyptic moment. Richard likes to talk a lot about the possibility of the Sun erupting in a large-scale solar flare that wipes out the Earth. It got to the point where he was really pressing me, saying we're running out of time, we're running out of time, the end of the world is coming. And we have to take necessary precautions to make sure that we're not among the majority that's going to be killed.

It got to the point where I was just nodding my head and going along with what he said, because it was easier than trying to debate with him. (See audio at bottom of post.)

Falcon's Fishy Flight Incident

When my friends called me about the whole balloon episode I was working. I had just moved to a new place and didn't have my television set up. I probably would never even have heard about this, except that a good friend of mine remembered me telling him about Richard several months ago. He told me, "Rob, you need to turn on the tv immediately! That Richard guy you worked with just pulled a massive publicity stunt!"

Richard's story doesn't add up. He is saying he thought Falcon was in the balloon, and that Falcon ran and hid as a result of Richard yelling at him. I've spent a lot of time with them, and Falcon is, first of all, not afraid of his father. I've never once seen Richard's children afraid of him — and I've definitely never seen Falcon go hide. He was one of the most social of the three children.

Secondly, Falcon supposedly hid in that attic in the garage. I've spent a lot of time in his garage, which has a drill press and various welding tools. It's unorganized and chaotic. There's really not so much an attic as some support beams connected with plywood. Being an adult of average height, I couldn't get up into the attic if I'd wanted to, so I don't know how a six-year-old child could have gotten up there. There's not an easy way to access that overhang. Maybe if I'd lifted that child up into the attic, he might have been able to rest up there, but not comfortably.

My doubts and concerns about that story were verified when Falcon's parents asked him on CNN, "why didn't you come out?" And Falcon said, "you guys said we did this for the show." Lights went off in my head. Bells were ringing; whistles were whistling. I said, "Wow, Richard is using his children as pawns to facilitate a global media hoax that's going to give him enough publicity to temporarily attract A-list celebrity status and hopefully attract a network."

The Price of Desperation

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and I think in this case the desperation was too much for Richard to bear. Richard's construction business wasn't doing too well. It's hard to find people interested in spending money on the aesthetics of their home when they're worried about their mortgage.

A lot of the work I did with the Heene family related to passing out fliers, putting them on people's front doors. The fliers advertised a roofing business and a general handyman business. As the months progressed, Richard's paranoia increased exponentially and my paycheck decreased exponentially.  The work I put in for the ABC proposal was never compensated. Richard implied he didn't have the money to pay me. But he would always reassure me, "It's all going to pay off in the end."

But, in "the end," Richard didn't think about the implications of his behavior. He certainly didn't consider the people that were praying for his child, and the hundreds, maybe thousands of people that were inconvenienced in pursuit of this balloon. The thousands of dollars of taxpayer money spent on things that weren't necessary.

Bluntly, I think Richard's ego blinds him to his brilliance. The only thing inhibiting him from progressing is a steadfast determination to become famous and live a Hollywood lifestyle. Someone needs to slap him in the face and say, "Wake up! This is not what's important." He has an amazing family that has already been subject to a tremendous amount of criticism. I especially feel bad for Falcon. He's going to be known as Balloon Boy the rest of his life. That's not something you want to tell a girl on the first date.

For me, it's been quite the experience. I don't regret any of it. I learned a lot from Richard. Not necessarily what I should do but rather what I should not do, in my career path and in my goals. It allowed me to question, "What do I find of value in the world?" And I was led to the conclusion that the only thing that matters to me is my friends and family and loved ones. Everything else is details. If the world were going to end tomorrow, like a lot of Richard's theories on 2012, who would you go to? Would you go to a bunch of investors for some company or a reality show? Or would you go to your family and friends?

Here are two audio clips from Ryan's interview with Thomas:

(Richard and Falcon Heene pic via AP, reptilian humanoid pic via; 2012 apocalypse image via)

Larimer County Sheriff James Alderden just gave a press conference discussing his department's ongoing investigation into the circumstances under which the Balloon Boy story took flight yesterday, and he clearly forecasted his conclusion that he didn't think it was a hoax.

The family just didn't seem to be faking it, he said—their behavior and reactions to yesterday's events, including their horror at finding that Falcon wasn't in the balloon when it landed, just seemed genuine. And after Falcon was found safe and sound, they let sheriffs interview him—alone—without objection.

It was a strange press conference. One question began, "you may be one of the few people on this planet that doesn't think this was a hoax at this point." Alderden said he believed that Falcon had previously tried to crawl into the balloon: "Our understanding is that the boy had been trying to climb in there and was yelled at by the parents. He thought that he was responsible for this balloon taking off when it wasn't intended to."

Alderden also confirmed that Heene's first call after the balloon's release was to a local television station. "His first call was to 9 News, second call was to FAA, and they called 911 some time after that," he said. But he defended the decision, saying that Heene knew that a news helicopter was needed immediately.

"I would say this is not a typical American family," he said.

According to Broadcasting and Cable, it looks like the Heenes called a local television station at the same time they were calling 911 and the FAA to report that their 6-year-old son was airborne in an uncontrollable helium craft over the skies of Denver. Maybe Heene realized that a local TV news chopper could be invaluable in keeping tabs on the balloon, and acted quickly. Or maybe he is a crazy manipulative media hound who plotted the whole thing to—what? Get attention for his electrically controlled helium-balloon invention?

The thing wasn't launched accidentally. A Denver ABC affiliate obtained home video of the Heene family deliberately setting it aloft yesterday morning—they apparently had hoped to leave it hovering, tethered, above their backyard only to see it float away free. In the video, presumably released or sold by the Heenes themselves, Richard Heene is seen yelling at his wife and kids after the balloon heads skyward. Here's a clip that MSNBC played:

In the Denver station's analysis, the video compounds the doubts raised by Falcon Heene's statement on CNN last night that he didn't answer his parents' calls for him because "you guys said we did it for the show":

However, the video raises questions as to when the family knew when Falcon was on the aircraft. In the video, Richard Heene is shown clearly looking at the bottom of the balloon — "the basket" where the boy was supposedly hiding.

Why didn't the parent lunge at the balloon and at the tether when it took off?

This morning on the Today Show, Falcon barfed while his dad was trying to deflect accusations that he staged the whole thing for publicity—a possible sign that the boy may not holding up well under the strain of being forced by his father to lie to the media, and an incontrovertible sign that, hoax or no, his parents are self-obsessed monsters for forcing him to sit in front of cameras and hot lights and barely batting an eye as he threw up into the tupperware container his mother was patiently holding in front of him while on live television.

The family's 911 call, obtained by TMZ, could go either way. Mayumi's frantic wails and random lapses into what sounds like her native language sound genuine enough to us. The rapid succession of losing the balloon, then looking around and not seeing Falcon, then maybe your other kid tells you as a joke or because he was raised by crazy parents that Falcon was in the balloon, and you panic and cover all your bases and call 911 before even looking around the house. But Richard Heene, who is heard in the background talking to either the FAA or the local television station, eventually comes on the phone and is just weird, talking about the balloon's electrical system and taking a cell phone call with the exasperation—"Ugh, who's calling me?"—of a busy man rather than a father who may have just sent his son flying through the Colorado skies.

If it was a deliberate, planned hoax, then the video of the launch could be part of it, intended to serve as the origin scenario for how the kid could have accidentally been on the balloon: Family tries to hove crazy balloon, balloon flies off, family realizes kid was inside. Or they could have come up with the story on the fly after they lost the balloon—hey, let's capitalize on this and detract attention away from the fact that we negligently released a 20-foot-wide balloon near an airport! Or the whole thing could have been a genuine snafu that got out of control—two parents so terrorized at the prospect of Falcon being on the balloon, and wrapped up in media coverage and law enforcement efforts to get the thing down and overall panic, that they neglected to adequately search their own home for him. Sometimes actual emergencies do befall self-obsessed fameballs. We suspect we'll find out soon enough, as this all seems to be unraveling at internet speed.

It became clear one microsecond after our post went up that this was probably a hoax, since none of the people or places featured in the "interview" appeared to have any Google history, which, in the US of A, means you are a fucking fraud. (Note our rapid post-post disclaimer!). Which, on a personal note, was very disappointing, because just imagine the video we could have made when we traveled to this Rape Tunnel, and sent an armed intern through it. Internet gold.

Anyhow, the more interesting(?) question was, "Hey, what was the artistic 'motivation' of the nuts who made up this imaginary thing, eh?" Now Artlurker tells us, via the Miami New Times:

When the author of The Rape Tunnel pitched the idea to us we loved it. Of course it's an extremely sensitive subject, but our motivation for publishing the piece was to comment on contemporary art, not rape.

We cannot say what the intentions of the author were, but ours were simple: to generate conversation on the state of contemporary art based on the fact that an event like this is no so unrealistic today.

Okay, good! Now can someone get to work on building this Rape Tunnel?
[Pic: Artlurker]

Wired's Threat Report has the story: Everyone in Germany thought that a non-existent town called Bluewater, Calif., was struck by an attempted suicide-bombing yesterday after a group of German filmmakers staged an elaborate hoax, involving fake web sites and Skype numbers, that fooled the German equivalent of the AP.

The filmmakers, who were trying to drum up publicity for a movie called Short Cut to Hollywood, set up a fake web site for a town called Bluewater (it's a real place in rural California, but there's no actual town there) as well as a web site and wikipedia page (since taken down) for a fake TV station there. Then they called the German wire service DPA claiming to be a reporter from the fake TV station and reporting that a rap group called the "Berlin Boys" had attempted to blow up a restaurant. The fake reporter directed the real reporter to the fake web sites, which had fake video of the aftermath of the attempted attack and Skype phone numbers that led to the pranksters. So when German reporters called local officials in California to confirm, sure enough they got (German-accented?) confirmation.

Reporting from Frankfurt, Threat Level's Moises Mendoza writes:

The hoax has transfixed this country. It prompted a 1,000-word tome on the website of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany's most respected newspaper, and even a press conference denouncing the incident by the DPA – the German wire service responsible for first disseminating the news about the "attack."

The hoax's effect was felt thousands of miles away, as a flood of concerned phone calls from Germany jammed the switchboards at the San Bernardino County Sheriff's office, which has jurisdiction over the supposed bombing site in California.

The story was recalled thirty minutes after it went over the DPA's wire. Bizarrely, in the weird and annoying meta twist, the fake video about the fake suicide bombing on the fake web site is revealed itself to be a hoax, within the narrative of the hoax. In other words, these German idiots ended their prank by making a fake video showing a fake reporter saying, "The suicide bombing was a hoax!"

Did we mention today is the eighth anniversary of a rather large suicide attack?

It sure was an awesome story (written up last week by the NY Daily News, but it had been floating around long before that—Roxanne tells it herself on the Beef video series, for example): Warner Music put a throwaway clause in her record contract when she was still a teenager saying they'd pay for her education for life; she took advantage of it to go all the way through grad school on their dime.

But! Slate says the story has the following problems: Roxanne doesn't actually have a Ph.D. from Cornell; she didn't even graduate from Marymount Manhattan as an undergrad; she's not licensed to practice psychology; and all her record labels deny ever paying for her education. Caveat:

In a subsequent e-mail, Shanté wrote, "I also attended College under an alias, because of a Domestic Violence situation" and speculated that she "made a mistake on an application and put my old name so maybe that's the reason for the computer error?" But she was unable to substantiate such claims.

God damn it Slate. We are going to ignore these enormous red flags and cling to our hopes of some bit of good in the world. Everything was fine until you journalists started poking around.
[Pic via]

The Great Moon Hoax was the fourth greatest scientific fraud of all time, according to one internet listicle! The six stories were quite the sensation at the time and successfully sold some extra papers, although it's not clear whether everyone believed the stories or not. We would have! Listen to this sample scientific-sounding report:

The next animal perceived would be classed on earth as
a monster. It was of a bluish lead color, about the size of
a goat, with a head and beard like him, and a single horn,
slightly inclined forward from the perpendicular. The
female was destitute of horn and beard, but had a much
longer tail. It was gregarious, and chiefly abounded on the
acclivitous glades of the woods. In elegance of symmetry it
rivalled the antelope, and like him it seemed an agile
sprightly creature, running with great speed, and springing
from the green turf with all the unaccountable antics of a
young lamb or kitten. This beautiful creature afforded us
the most exquisite amusement. The mimicry of its movements
upon our white painted canvass was as faithful and luminous
as that of animals within a few yards of the camera obscrua,
when seen pictures upon its tympan. Frequently when
attempting to put our fingers upon its beard, it would
suddenly bound away into oblivion, as if conscious of our
earthly impertinence; but then others would appear, whom we
could not prevent from nibbling the herbage, say or do what
we would to them.

Telescopes were amazing back then.

One hundred and seventy four years later, the New York Sun is dead, but the sprightly moon creatures are doing fine.

To get an idea of how all this came to be, here's what the New Yorker's Andrew Essex wrote about the friendship between Pynchon and Lotion in the 1996 TOTT piece:

The writer and the rockers first met in Cincinnati... After the show, the older guy, who was wearing a Godzilla shirt and ill-fitting pants, swung by to offer his compliments. He introduced himself as Tom. Jim Ferguson was reading "Slow Learner", Pynchon's collection of short stories. He'd left his copy backstage in a New York rock club, where Pynchon had been invited to watch the show. Pynchon saw it and asked, "Who's reading my book?" "I said, 'No, that's my book,'" Jim recalls. "It didn't register until 1 got onstage... After that, Tom began showing up at Lotion performances all over the country. An unlikely friendship was born. A year later, the members of Lotion are still a bit stunned by their guardian angel.

Recently Essex contacted the magazine to say that he and the New Yorker's vaunted fact-checkers had been tricked by the band all those years ago.

When asked about the article last week, Lotion's lead singer, Tony Zajkowski, now a graphic designer at Wired, blurted out, "Oh, God, you got the big bullshit story!" Shortly afterward, the bassist Bill Ferguson, who now works on the Times Magazine copy desk, admitted that they had fed reporters at various outlets an account designed to be "as Pynchonesque as possible." The bandmates had repeated their story to a New Yorker fact checker, who did his best to confirm details. Pynchon, then as now, was unreachable, and when the story came out he raised no public objections.

The band says that Pynchon did attend some of their London shows and actually wrote some liner notes for an album after they met him through his accountant, who happened to be the mother of the band's drummer, but he was nothing even close to being a groupie who attended rock shows in Godzilla T-shirts and ill-fitting pants. They did the whole hilarious thing for shits and giggles, a hoax that stood for 13 years, and for that the former members of the Lotion deserve a tip of the proverbial cap.

As show in the attached screenshot, the website billed the airport plan as crucial New York news. Combine HuffPo's hunger for traffic with its ugly habit of lifting content from other websites, and this is the amusing result; apparently the sarcasm in the original Curbed item was too subtle for the website's editors.

If the concept doesn't seem an obvious satire on its face, there's always the over-the-top website, which calls Central Park a "blighted urban space" that needs to be "reclaim[ed]" and assures that Tavern on the Green will "be given the option of applying for a franchisee lease in the concourse food court."

Then there's the fact that the Manhattan Airport Foundation's website supposedly dates to 2006 but did not register its domain name until April; that its Wikipedia page was created on July 16 of this year; and that it is located on the 58th floor of a building with 57 stories (hat tip to our own John Cook for digging up the last two).

We're sure Arianna Huffington, a notorious micromanager of her website's front page, will be thrilled.

Well, a couple people noticed. Anyone who actually read the review should've noticed, because if you're reading Modernism/Modernity you really ought to recognize the visiting lecturer on Living Icons from White Noise. Especially once the review stopped addressing the Wallace book and detoured into DeLillo pastiche.

It is at this point that I must confess to missing something in Wallace, namely the presence of women nearer the center of the narration (setting aside Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, Jr., the protagonist in Wallace's first novel, The Broom of the System). I admit that I've always been partial to them, i.e. women. I fall apart at the sight of long legs, striding, briskly, as a breeze carries up from the river, on a weekday, in the play of morning light. And what fun it is to talk to an intelligent woman wearing nylon stockings as she crosses her legs. Wallace, I suspect, shares these predilections and could write wonderfully complicated women.

And, you know, there are footnotes citing Jack Gladney. But still, you don't expect a puckish little pomo joke like that from the staid folks at Modernism/Modernity. Which is why, maybe, actual real-life graduate students are citing the review as a serious piece of scholarly work. Which, guys, White Noise is only a cornerstone of postmodern American literature that you should be intimately familiar with by the time you're registering for classes for the second semester of your freshman year! We're just saying!

But, yes, Modernism/Modernity has acknowledged that this was just a little gag and not an Alan Sokal-style hoax intended to deceive. And But it took five years! (We were maybe all too preoccupied with death?)

Onion CEO Steve was not a fan of our early reporting on the Onion's closure of its San Francisco and Los Angeles editions; we don't expect he particularly appreciated our reprinting of a memo in which he told staff they needed to kowtow to advertisers.

Now the paper seems to have tricked us into running not one but two items about rumors it was going to sell. Who knows if their new owner, the Yu Wan Mei Amalgamated Salvage Fisheries and Polymer Injection Corp., made a better offer than Comedy Central, but we did laugh at this line: "Experts all agreed that there can be no question of this claim, as this claim is the truth."

Here's what he said:

...our Kenyan-Muslim president who's destroying this country, you know, seriously, you can polish a turd, you can polish a turd, it's still a turd...

The Chicago Tribune's Eric Zorn has the audio. Nice work, Keith.

Last month we reported that Muller's publicist, Linda Shafran, sent an e-mail to a friend before Muller's waterboarding stunt last month clearly stating that the affair would be a "hoax" and would "only look real" with Mancow "acting like he is drowning." We also got in touch with the guy who "waterboarded" Mancow, who said he literally had no idea what he was doing.

And then Keith Olbermann got very angry at us and had Muller on Countdown for a second time to rebut out reporting where he said, before he started talking about the Book of Revelations, that he had to pretend that his fake waterboarding would be a hoax because the "the Chicago cops came and said, 'You can't waterboard.'"

That's not true.

See, he only pretended that it would be fake, the story goes, but was planning on actually getting waterboarded all along. Since Shafran had been told—falsely—that the whole thing would be a hoax, it would make sense that she wrote that it would be a hoax.

The notion that the Chicago Police Department actually contacted Muller to tell him that he couldn't voluntarily undergo a waterboarding is preposterous, but Mancow's former producer Midge Ripoli (who went on the air by the rather unfortunate name "DJ Luv Cheez" and was fired by Muller after spending 17 years on the show) says he knows what Muller was talking about: Muller had originally asked a close friend of his who is on the Chicago SWAT team to conduct the waterboarding, but he backed out. Which, Ripoli says, Muller translated into "the Chicago cops came and said, 'You can't waterboard."

In one of the e-mails obtained and published by Gawker, Shafran wrote, "The swat guy he had to do the waterboarding now can't do it."

"When he said he was going to have a SWAT guy do it, but he backed out the last minute," Ripoli told Gawker, "I knew right away what this was. He has a really good friend on the Chicago SWAT team. I'm sure that when he thought about this, he said, 'I don't want to be involved.'" That withdrawal from the project by his SWAT-team friend, Ripoli says, is probably what Muller meant by "the cops told me I can't do it."

"We called it the 'Mancow factor,'" Ripoli says of his former boss' penchant for spinning innocuous details into elaborate stories. "He used to call me, back in the '90s, and say there were black helicopters flying outside his house—he said he actually saw them. For him to try to be a serious pundit now is crazy."

We'll never know for sure what Muller meant, because when we called to ask him, he said "goodbye" and hung up. And the Chicago Police Department, despite repeated requests, said they didn't have enough information to conduct an inquiry into whether or not a representative of the department spoke to Muller prior to the "waterboarding."

Still, we called Lock E. Bowman, the legal director of the Roderick MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University—which deals in police misconduct cases in Illinois, including torture cases—to ask him whether any Illinois or Chicago laws would prohibit a voluntary waterboarding. He said that Illinois' laws on assault and bodily harm all depend on the victim not granting his or her consent.

"I think that's not correct," he said. "If he consents—and you'd have to set up a clear process where he agrees to it and signs off—then there's no crime. There might be a civil issue if he was accidentally injured in the course of this, but as far as assault, or battery, or any criminal liability is concerned, his consent would be a complete defense."

So either an actual Chicago police officer contacted Muller out of the blue to tell him—falsely—that he couldn't undergo a voluntary waterboarding, thereby causing Muller to say—falsely—that it would only be for pretend, thereby causing his publicist to tell a friend—falsely—that it would be a "hoax," thereby causing us to report—falsely—that it was a hoax. Or Muller's friend who was a cop backed out of the fake waterboarding and, after he was caught in his hoax, Muller spun this fact into an excuse for his publicist's e-mail. We'll take No. 2.