Mom-And-Pop Site Busts The Web's Biggest Myths
David and Barbara Mikkelson. Guy Raz/NPR - David and Barbara Mikkelson are the husband-and-wife duo behind the myth-busting Web site Snopes.com. (Guy Raz / NPR)
Did you hear about how criminals use drug-soaked business cards to incapacitate their victims? Turns out, that's not true.
How about the claim that Jesus will be portrayed as gay in an upcoming film? Also false.
Or that Oliver North warned Congress about Osama bin Laden years ago? Wrong again.
You'd think it would take an army to truth-squad the rapid-fire rumors of the World Wide Web. But at Snopes.com, that task falls to husband-and-wife myth debunkers David and Barbara Mikkelson.
Snopes.com is the go-to Web site for debunking the hottest rumors, hoaxes and urban legends, attracting roughly 5 million viewers a month. NPR's Guy Raz visited the Mikkelsons at their world headquarters — a modest, pre-fab home next to a creek in Agoura Hills, Calif.
The Mikkelsons may be Internet pioneers, but David and Barbara use plenty of old-fashioned tools in their work — like books. Lots of them. Books on word etymologies, history and urban legends, stacked two-deep in the couple's library.
"Our contractor thought I was a little bit odd when I said, 'I want these shelves built so sturdy that you could lay a dead body on each of them,' " Barbara says.
In the living room, a cat and computer are close at hand. A trio of live rats plays in a cage nearby (they lost their roaming privileges after chewing too many wires). In the back is David's "office," which he says "is actually a bedroom for cats — in which they have graciously consented to sublet space."
The Mikkelsons estimate they have several thousand articles on their site right now. Their list of the "25 Hottest Urban Legends" is regularly updated with new myths and some "dopplegangers" — stories that have been around forever in one form or another.
"They're kind of like the equivalent of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon on the Billboard chart," says David. "They're just there for years, and they never go away."
It's hard not to notice trends if you're a rumor reporter. Stories that stick around for years often involve computer viruses or missing children. Rumors involving immigration or terrorism tend to recirculate with the times.
David even made up an urban legend of his own once — that the famous Mr. Ed was actually a zebra. Zebras are more docile, he argues, than horses.
And sometimes, it turns out that the urban legends the Mikkelsons try to debunk are actually true.
"Several years ago, there was this narrative going around," David tells Guy Raz. "It was about some group of FBI agents who had supposedly taken over a psychiatric hospital."
"It was this wonderfully funny narrative about an agent trying to convince a pizza delivery place to send a dozen pizzas to a psychiatric hospital full of FBI agents, none of whom had any cash on them, so by the way, will you take a check?"
David tracked down an agent involved in the case, who corroborated the story. It was a debunker's lesson in suspending disbelief.
"What we've learned over time is there's pretty much nothing that you can immediately dismiss as too absurd to be true," David says.
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Gangs Lure Women With Bloody Car Seats
This hoax sprang up in December 2009. Gangs are placing bloody infant car seats by the sides of roads to entice female motorists to stop and investigate, thereby luring their desired victims out of their vehicles and into their clutches as part of a "National Gang Week" activity.
Lady Gaga Is A Hermaphrodite
One of 2009's hottest rumors.
Onions: The Disease Magnet
Fast-food lovers should supposedly swear off cut onions for their hot dogs and hamburgers because bacteria love the condiment. Another version of this myth is the belief that leaving out slices of exposed onion draws the flu virus and other nasties from the air, thus safeguarding a home's inhabitants.
Help, Someone You Love Has Been Robbed
This scam was very active in 2009 and is still going strong in 2010. To get money wired to him, a scam artist pretends to be a family member who has been robbed during a spur-of-the-moment trip to London or some other city. Or perhaps he's been thrown in jail. This con spreads by e-mail, text message and social networking sites like Facebook.
Two-For-One Robberies
This rumor warns about thieves who commit one theft to set up another. In one instance, they first steal your purse off the hook on the restroom door and then lure you away from your house on the pretext of having "found" it. While you're gone, they burgle your home. In another version, they break into your car, which you left parked at a public event, steal your GPS unit, then use it to locate your home and burgle it while you're still at the event.
GUY RAZ, host:
There's a good chance, as an NPR listener, you've come across a forwarded email from a friend describing a recent report about how NPR's funding is about to be cut off. Usually, it describes Nina Totenberg, our legal affairs correspondent, as the one breaking the bad news.
Well, that email or a version of it has been circulating on the internet since 1995 and, no, it's not true. But don't let that stop you from making a contribution to your local public radio station, please.
Anyway, you may have also come across this story that a woman named Barbara Mikkelson tells.
Ms. BARBARA MIKKELSON (Snopes.com): Well, I can remember feeling absolutely aghast when a friend had told me how the daughter of another friend had come back from Mexico after meeting some wonderful guy down there. And after spending two weeks of wild romance down there, she unwrapped this gift from him on the plane. It was a coffee cup and looked at it and it said: Welcome to the world of AIDS.
RAZ: Barbara Mikkelson used to believe that story. It shocked her. That is, until she started hearing many, many different versions of it, sometimes it was a coffee mug, sometimes a ceramic coffin, sometimes it was a note scrawled in lipstick on a hotel mirror. She eventually discovered the story was a lie, an urban legend. And that moment changed her life.
Barbara Mikkelson and her husband David are the myth busters behind the website Snopes.com. All day long, they scour the internet and sometimes even the bookshelves at real, brick and mortar libraries and they look for information, information to bust myths and rumors that circulate online, like...
Mr. DAVID MIKKELSON (Snopes.com): Asparagus, the idea that asparagus wards off cancer...
RAZ: ...or...
Mr. MIKKELSON: ...an upcoming film that will supposedly portray Jesus as gay...
RAZ: ...or...
Mr. MIKKELSON: ...a plea to find missing girl named Ashley Flores. That's another favorite. She was never missing.
RAZ: And every month, about five million people visit Snopes.com to find out, for example, whether it's true that Oliver North once warned Al Gore about Osama bin Laden in 1987. It's not. Or if there really was a basketball court inside the peak of the Matterhorn at Disneyland.
Ms. MIKKELSON: There isn't now, but there was a half court way up there that was just sort of used for employee fun time.
RAZ: All that myth busting comes out of the Mikkelsons' two-bedroom, pre-fab home perched above a stream deep in the hills outside Los Angeles, a home they share with five cats and three rats.
Mr. MIKKELSON: We can see what we sort of hubristically refer to as my office, although its actually a bedroom for cats in which they have graciously consented to sublet space.
RAZ: The Mikkelsons used to allow their rats to roam free, but they started to chew up the internet cables and phone lines strewn along the floors.
Mr. MIKKELSON: They had to stay in cages after that.
RAZ: And they seem perfectly fine with that. Aside from the rat cage, the house is packed with cat toys, cables, old magazines and books, hundreds of books.
Ms. MIKKELSON: This whole area up here is all of word etymologies and phrases, ideas of where various words came from, when they entered the language, how they've changed...
RAZ: Every rumor or legend the Mikkelsons debunk or confirm is backed by carefully footnoted research. Often, they add links to original documents, official transcripts or video.
The story of how Snopes.com got started begins in the early 1990s when Barbara was living in Ottawa, Canada, and David was here in Agoura Hills, California.
Mr. MIKKELSON: Barbara and I actually met online back in the pre-Web days. We met on a text-based online discussion group about urban legends. So we, you know, emailed back and forth for a while and I went and visited her in Ottawa and afterwards she came out here to live with me.
RAZ: And by 1995, Snopes was up and running.
Mr. MIKKELSON: We never had any intent of running what our site has become now. It was intended to be sort of like an encyclopedic reference of urban legends. But we ended up going where the audience led us, which was writing about all kinds of political screeds, scams, hoaxes, missing child alerts, you know, household warnings and everything else that circulates on the internet.
RAZ: And it turns out in many, many cases, the legends they debunk are modern versions of very old stories.
Ms. MIKKELSON: We tell now of a story about a woman who was at a shopping mall and comes back and finds that her car is disabled. It has a flat tire or perhaps just won't start and there's a helpful stranger that seems a little creepy who offers to help her and...
RAZ: The man then tries to get in the car with her. She drives off and later discovers a bag he left in her trunk. Inside is duct tape, an ax and a rope.
Ms. MIKKELSON: There was a precursor to that from the - prior to the American Civil War in which a suspicious passenger in a stagecoach was basically tricked and gotten out of the stagecoach by the driver, so that they could ride off without her, because it was dressed as a woman. And only afterwards, they find the carpetbag of the supposed lady and, of course, it contains a great, big revolver.
RAZ: At Snopes.com, the Mikkelsons keep a tally of the "25 Hottest Urban Legends" circulating around the internet at any given time.
Mr. MIKKELSON: Some things are literally around for years and never go away.
RAZ: Even after you've debunked them.
Mr. MIKKELSON: Yes. They've been in our top 25 lists almost constantly for years.
RAZ: What...
Mr. MIKKELSON: They're kind of like the equivalent of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" on the Billboard chart. They're just there for years, and they never go away.
RAZ: Things like warnings about computer viruses or the email that says if you forward it, Microsoft will send you a free laptop or free cash.
Now, while a lot of the rumors the Mikkelsons deal with might seem silly or harmless, many, they say, are not, like the persistent emails that suggest President Obama is a foreign agent bent on undermining America. Or a recent photograph circulating on the net in which Michelle Obama poses behind an apple that seems to reflect the image of Karl Marx. Many people actually believe this stuff.
Ms. MIKKELSON: I will confess, there are mornings when I go to David and I say, why are we doing this website again? Why are - why is everyone so crazy? But I also look at my inbox and see all of the emails that come in from perfectly normal people, from folks who are - who write to say thanks. I was about to get taken by this scam.
RAZ: Oh, and more thing. You know how despite it all, Mussolini still managed to keep the trains running on time? Well, that's a myth too. You can read about it at snopes.com. And you can see a photograph of the Mikkelsons at our website, npr.org. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.
