Tiffany Necklace Rumor Detectives True Story or O

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Quiz: Could you Spot a Hoax?
A number of years back, a woman and her husband have been coming house from the ski trip in British Columbia when they spotted a disabled auto around the aspect from the road. It was raining and also the driver looked distressed, so that they stopped and served him resolve his flat tire. The guy was extremely grateful but didn’t have any cash to reward them, so he took down their personal information. A week later, the couple got a call from their bank saying their mortgage had been paid and $10,000 had been deposited into their account by an appreciative Bill Gates.
“Ah, the grateful millionaire,” Barbara Mikkelson says with a satisfied grin. “It started with Henry Ford. Then it had been Nat King Cole. Then Donald Trump. We even have a version Oscar Wilde wrote back in the 1890s.”
With her bemused tone and a habit of peering over her spectacles, Mikkelson has the air of a night-shift detective who has seen it all-and in a way, she has. Barbara, 49, and her husband, David, 48, run Snopes.com, the Internet’s preeminent resource for verifying and debunking rumors, ridiculous claims, and those e-mail chain letters your sister-in-law can’t stop forwarding. Whether it’s an urban legend like the Gates story, an overblown warning about the latest computer virus, or that bizarre photo circulating of “Hercules, the world’s biggest dog,” chances are Snopes.com has checked it out and rated it as “true,” “false,” or “undetermined.” What began in 1995 as a hobby for a pair of amateur folklorists has grown into one with the Internet’s most trusted authorities—and a full-time profession for the Mikkelsons. Each month, 6.2 million people visit Snopes, according to Quantcast, which tracks Internet traffic. The New York Times recently put Snopes on its short list of essentials that every computer user must know about. President Barack Obama’s campaign launched a copycat version last fall to battle rumors of its own (for the record, Michelle Obama didn’t gorge on room-service caviar and lobster at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel). And even the word Snopes, a name David borrowed from the family in a William Faulkner novel, has gone viral—as in, “Why didn’t you Snopes that junk before forwarding it to your entire e-mail list?” Richard Roeper, the movie critic who sidelines as an author of myth-busting books like Debunked!, says, “Snopes is like having your own army of fact-checkers sniffing out a million wacko leads.”
An army of two, that is. Snopes’s world headquarters is actually just Barbara and David sitting around their modest double-wide on a shady hillside outside Los Angeles. Their two residence offices are stacked to the ceiling with their trusty research tools: dictionaries, almanacs, VHS tapes, Disneyana, encyclopedias, atlases, and hundreds of books like UFO’s: A Scientific Debate and Organ Theft Legends. Oh, and there are cats: Buster, Sterling, Irene, Ashes, and Memphis. “David and I work at opposite ends of the house,” Barbara says, flinging a cat’s crinkle toy. “I once attempted to send him a note by sticking a Post-it on the aspect of one of the cats.”
Cat couriers? Sounds like a case for Snopes. Strange rumors about animals are among the website’s most popular cases. That widely circulated photograph of Hercules, a 282-pound mastiff with “paws the size of softballs,” is one example.
“About a year ago, people started sending us photos from the Internet of a freakishly large dog walking alongside two people and a horse, and it made me go, ‘Wait a minute,’” David says. A self-proclaimed computer nerd with a mop of brown hair, David was undoubtedly the kid whose notes everyone copied. “We investigated, and the picture turned out to be a digital manipulation-what we call fauxtography.”
Another Snopesism is glurge, a “true story” so sugary sweet, it could make a baby unicorn cringe. One such tale making the rounds online is about Stevie, a young gentleman with Down syndrome who receives donations from compassionate truckers at the restaurant where he works. (Snopes, which cites its sources in detailed footnotes at the bottom of each entry, uncovered the magazine where it had been first published-as fiction.) Then there’s the sad, cautionary poem reputedly penned in jail by a teenage meth addict shortly before her death by overdose. It is forwarded in an e-mail thousands of times every day. Again Snopes tracked down the original author: an Oklahoma mom with a seventh-grade daughter, neither of whom ever used methamphetamines.
“Most of what we deal with exists outside traditional media,” David says, staring at an inbox with 21,144 unopened e-mails. Among the subject headings: “Video of one-winged airplane landing. For real?” and “Fisher-Price talking doll says ‘Islam Is the Light!’” David glances at his muted TV set, where Law & Order is playing with closed-captioning. “These stories and half-truths are handy forms of expressing fears or concerns or ways of looking at life,” he says. “But it’s not easy to find out if these things are true or not, so people turn to us.”
A passion for nosing around is what brought the Mikkelsons together, and it’s still their prime motivation. The couple met in 1994 on an Internet newsgroup devoted to urban legends like the one about Walt Disney’s body being cryogenically frozen after his death. Faster than you could say, “Mikey died of Pop Rocks,” Barbara was flying from her hometown outside Ottawa to Los Angeles to meet David, then a computer programmer for an HMO. “Our first date was me taking Barbara to the library at UCLA to go through old magazines,” David says, laughing. The couple now earn a “very healthy” income, David says, from advertising on the site.
Though the Mikkelsons are established figures about the Web, they still prefer old-fashioned research—scouring vintage catalogs,Tiffany Necklace, thumbing through four newspapers a day—over finding quick answers online. “I might use Google or Wikipedia as a starting point,” David says. “But that’s not research.” For fun, the Mikkelsons go to places like the Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta along with the Library of Congress.
Barbara, who is the more outgoing from the two, signs her name to her entries and tends to favor subjects like business, politics, and anything to do with horror or crime. David, the resident expert on Coca-Cola, the Beatles, Disney, and sports, occasionally tries to make up a rumor, like the one he attempted to spread that Mr. Ed was actually a zebra. “You’d be surprised how hard it is to get traction with one of these,” he says. “The things that take off have to hit a nerve we’re all thinking about.”
The Mikkelsons’ work is now more than just a labor of love. Some say Snopes is changing the nature of folklore. Jan Brunvand, professor emeritus of English at the University of Utah, is one of the world’s leading experts on urban legends. He says Snopes and websites like it have served eradicate myths that in many cases have endured for generations, whether it’s alligators crawling in the sewers or the old chestnut about gang members killing drivers over flashing their headlights. “Because they have been publicized so much,” Brunvand writes, “people no longer believe most with the classic urban legends.”
Which doesn’t mean Snopes’s work is done. With cats by her facet and underfoot, Barbara peers over her glasses as fresh queries land in her inbox. Was the St. Pauli girl on beer labels really a lady with the evening? Did the bottled water company actually name itself Evian because it’s naive spelled backward? Did Neil Armstrong tell a dirty joke about the moon? Is it true that the elevator close-door button is completely useless?
“You can’t make this stuff up,” Barbara says,Running shoes may cause damage to knees, hips and ankles, new study suggests, and then quickly catches herself. “Well, I guess you could. But if you do, I’m sure we’ll get to the bottom of it.”