- Joined
- Jan 6, 2009
- Messages
- 8
A few years back i perpetrated a series of hoax photographs of a UFO. you can see my work here:
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread558451/pg1
I did it by photoshoping in a large light from an airport into a photograph of the view from my then apartment window.
the reason for doing this was as an experiment to see how much the images would be shared around various sights, (10,100,000 according to google) and how long it would take people to discover the smoking gun hidden in the deep exif data. I was pleased to discover that not many were convinced by the fraud, and that the smoking gun was eventually detected by ATS.
But what I found very fascinating was the number of people that claimed to see hoax in a way that there was none at all. meaning they dismissed it as hoax because they 'could see wires holding it up' etc. there were no wires to see, as it was held in the sky by photoshop alone lol.
That's when a thought struck me (or re-occured) that people seem to not critically assess claims that something strange is a hoax as rigorously as they check the claims themselves. This seems to me to expose a massive bias towards the dull or uninteresting.
So my idea is this; in a similar way to James Randi's “Carlos” hoax, (whether or not it actually occurred as he claimed) could expose the willingness to believe in 'woo' without critical assessment, wouldn't it be possible to create a hoax hoax to demonstrate how people are willing to dismiss the Fortean as a hoax without critically assessing the claim?
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread558451/pg1
I did it by photoshoping in a large light from an airport into a photograph of the view from my then apartment window.
the reason for doing this was as an experiment to see how much the images would be shared around various sights, (10,100,000 according to google) and how long it would take people to discover the smoking gun hidden in the deep exif data. I was pleased to discover that not many were convinced by the fraud, and that the smoking gun was eventually detected by ATS.
But what I found very fascinating was the number of people that claimed to see hoax in a way that there was none at all. meaning they dismissed it as hoax because they 'could see wires holding it up' etc. there were no wires to see, as it was held in the sky by photoshop alone lol.
That's when a thought struck me (or re-occured) that people seem to not critically assess claims that something strange is a hoax as rigorously as they check the claims themselves. This seems to me to expose a massive bias towards the dull or uninteresting.
So my idea is this; in a similar way to James Randi's “Carlos” hoax, (whether or not it actually occurred as he claimed) could expose the willingness to believe in 'woo' without critical assessment, wouldn't it be possible to create a hoax hoax to demonstrate how people are willing to dismiss the Fortean as a hoax without critically assessing the claim?