An urban legend is a genre of folklore comprising fallacious claims or stories circulated as true, especially as having happened to a "friend of a friend" or a family member, often with horrifying, humorous, or cautionary elements. These legends can be entertaining but often concern mysterious peril or troubling events, such as disappearances and strange objects or entities. Urban legends may confirm moral standards, reflect prejudices, or be a way to make sense of societal anxieties. In the past, urban legends were most often circulated orally; however, they can also be spread by any media. This includes newspapers, mobile news apps, e-mail, and most often, social media. Some urban legends have passed through the years/decades with only minor changes, in where the time period takes place. Generic urban legends are often altered to suit regional variations, but the lesson or moral remains majorly the same.
A hoax is a widely publicized falsehood so fashioned as to invite reflexive, unthinking acceptance by the greatest number of people of the most varied social identities and of the highest possible social pretensions to gull its victims into putting up the highest possible social currency in support of the hoax.
The Philadelphia Experiment was an alleged event claimed to have been witnessed by an ex-merchant mariner named Carl M. Allen at the United States Navy's Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, sometime around October 28, 1943. Allen described an experiment where the U.S. Navy attempted to make a destroyer escort class ship, the USS Eldridge, disappear and the bizarre results that followed.
Collier's was an American general interest magazine founded in 1888 by Peter Fenelon Collier. It was launched as Collier's Once a Week, then renamed in 1895 as Collier's Weekly: An Illustrated Journal, shortened in 1905 to Collier's: The National Weekly and eventually to simply Collier's. The magazine ceased publication with the issue dated the week ending January 4, 1957, although a brief, failed attempt was made to revive the Collier's name with a new magazine in 2012.
Walter Braden "Jack" Finney was an American writer. His best-known works are science fiction and thrillers, including The Body Snatchers and Time and Again. The former was the basis for the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers and its remakes.
The Angels of Mons is one of several stories of the reputed appearance of a variety of supernatural entities which protected the British Army from defeat by the invading forces of the German Empire at the beginning of World War I during the Battle of Mons in Belgium on 23 August 1914.
David Michael Rorvik is an American journalist and novelist who was the author of the 1978 book In his Image: The Cloning of a Man in which he claimed to have been part of a successful endeavor to create a clone of a human being. The book is widely considered to be a hoax.
The "Well to Hell" is an urban legend regarding a putative borehole in Russia which was purportedly drilled so deep that it broke through into Hell. It is first attested in English as a 1989 broadcast by a U.S. domestic religion-based TV broadcaster, Trinity Broadcasting Network.
Little green men is the stereotypical portrayal of extraterrestrials as little humanoid creatures with green skin and sometimes with antennae on their heads. The term is also sometimes used to describe gremlins, mythical creatures known for causing problems in airplanes and mechanical devices. Today, these creatures are more commonly associated with an alleged alien species called greys, whose skin color is described as not green, but grey.
Tomorrow, the Stars is an anthology of speculative fiction short stories, presented as edited by American author Robert A. Heinlein and published in 1952.
Thomas Francis Monteleone is an American science fiction author and horror fiction author.
Barsa-Kelmes is a former island, the largest in the Aral Sea. Its area was 133 km2 in the 1980s, but as the sea became more shallow it steadily grew, until in the 1990s it ceased to be an island. Its highest altitude is 113 m.
Bid Time Return is a 1975 science fiction novel by Richard Matheson. It concerns a man from the 1970s who travels back in time to court a 19th-century stage actress whose photograph has captivated him. In 1980, it was made into the classic sci-fi film Somewhere in Time, the title of which was used for subsequent editions of the book.
Hippo Eats Dwarf is the title of a hoax news article which claims that a dwarf was accidentally eaten by a hippopotamus. The urban legend has been circulating via the internet since the mid-1990s. Many print newspapers have been fooled into publishing the story as fact.
Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the presumed pseudonymous person or persons who developed bitcoin, authored the bitcoin white paper, and created and deployed bitcoin's original reference implementation. As part of the implementation, Nakamoto also devised the first blockchain database. Nakamoto was active in the development of bitcoin up until December 2010.
There have been various accounts of persons who allegedly travelled through time reported by the press or circulated on the Internet. These reports have turned out either to be hoaxes or to be based on incorrect assumptions, incomplete information, or interpretation of fiction as fact, many being now recognized as urban legends.
This Man is a person who has allegedly appeared in thousands of people's dreams since 2006, but was never identified in the real world. He was the main focus of a website called Ever Dream This Man?, created by Italian sociologist and marketer Andrea Natella in 2008. The website claimed that the first person who reported dreaming about This Man was a patient of a psychiatrist in New York City in 2006, and that four other patients of the same had also recognized the same face. The website also claimed that more than 3,000 people had contacted the site to share their stories and drawings of This Man. The website offered various possible explanations for the phenomenon, ranging from the mundane or supernatural. None of these theories were supported by any evidence or investigation.
