A Job for Hoaxbusters!

NEW YORK — A Princeton, N.J.-based consulting firm known as Hoaxbusters Inc. has just been listed as one of Lucre Magazine’s Golden 5,000 businesses for 1997. Quite a coup for this ivory-tower assemblage of scholars, etymologists and cryptographers--”But then,” says a Hoaxbusters spokesperson, “it’s been a monster year in the hoax game.”

For example, Hoaxbusters recently outbid Oxford University’s Smell-A-Rat Ltd. subsidiary and a host of other rivals for the lucrative “Jacob’s Chinese Journal” contract. An English scholar had presented what he claimed was his translation of a 13th-century European trader’s journal of his visit to China, four years before Marco Polo. Hoaxbusters swung into action and five days later had exposed the “journal” as a ruse.

“Amateur work,” sniffed the team leader. “Jacob the trader writes that he’s homesick. “ ‘O for my wife’s tender kiss do I pine,’ he pens, ‘and some deli take-out and a Dodgers doubleheader on a sunny

Sabbath.’ Poppycock! The Dodgers have never played a doubleheader on the Jewish Sabbath--only Sundays!”

The alleged surfacing of correspondence between President John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, which would have fetched millions if its authenticity were confirmed, had put Hoaxbusters in the spotlight only a few days before.

“It’s always the little things the fakers overlook,” confides one grizzled fraud sleuth. “We were almost fooled--until somebody noticed one suspicious detail. In a P.S. to one of the letters ostensibly written by Kennedy to Monroe, he writes, ‘Remember your my best gal. Got to run, the Cuban Missile Crisis has all Iceland in an uproar.’ That was the clue that unraveled the forgery.

“Remember: Jack Kennedy was Harvard-educated, He’d never have spelled ‘you’re’ as ‘your.’ Suddenly, the whole thing rang false. Marilyn asking JFK if his Jackie was related to Jackie Robinson; JFK promising to introduce Marilyn to Vice President Harry S. Truman; Marilyn saying how sorry she was that she’d committed suicide. The whole thing a clever tissue of lies--but not quite clever enough to fool Hoaxbusters!”

It was in 1996, meanwhile, that Hoaxbusters cracked the age-old mystery of the Adm. Robert E. Peary diaries. Did he or didn’t he doctor his diaries to cover up the fact that he had never come anywhere near the North Pole? “Afraid so,” nods a Hoaxbusters ace. “And it was so obvious. On page 243 of his diary, Peary writes, ‘9:32 a.m., just flew over the North Pole. It’s about 20 feet high and made of aluminum but no flag on it. Now I’ll take a picture--oh darn, camera’s out of film!’ This was a boldfaced lie. The cargo manifest of Peary’s flight lists 100 rolls of film, and a careful count of pictures taken up until the supposed flyover amounts to fewer than 93 rolls!”

But no time for self-congratulation, not for the Hoaxbusters. Now it’s on to the next caper--the purported “lost Elvis autobiography,” a 655-page handwritten manuscript just discovered in an Egyptian pyramid by a Hungarian used-car salesman, who reports that the King has gone back to driving a truck, in Atlantis. “This much we know is authentic,” a Hoax buster confides. “The manuscript is written in Atlantian. Shirley MacLaine has already confirmed it.”*