Well in is Monday morning here in NZ and I have two more of those wild stories complete with photographic 'evidence'. This seem to have started a few years back with the National Geographic top 10 photos, the one that stick in my mind was the shark jumping at the guy hanging out of a helicopter, these have all been proven as fakes.
A few weeks ago I got a tasteless story about a mid air collision complete with images recovered from a digicams memory card, the images show the tail section missing from the aircraft. My suspicion alarm always goes off when I get this stuff, why is it in my Inbox not on the news or in the newspaper? Anyway this one turned out to be roughly based on fact (there was a mid air collision in that region on the dates specified), but the images were frame cuts from the opening episode of Lost! Guess what, people fall for them and they get distributed.
This morning I have two. The first a supposed Guinness World record for a huge Mastiff dog called Hercules. Complete with photographic 'evidence'. This one turns out again to have some fact (the owner named does own the worlds largest Mastiff) but the photo is an obvious fake. It is in my Inbox in a "send to all" so people are buying it.
The second is a grainy image of a meteor taken in an aircraft cockpit, the text claims it is from a cell phone camera taken in a Chile to NZ flight a few weeks back where there was a near miss with some space junk. This incident did indeed happen however it was confirmed that it was a meteor not a derelict Russian satellite. This image is defiantly a fake, the above mentioned aircraft was a A340, in the photo you can just see the flight yoke, and it is a traditional one, not the stick found in A340's Duh!
So in order to get these images distributed there seems to be three ingredients, 1. Photoshop 2. A story based on fact 3. Gullible people to send it too.
