The Urban Legends Reference Pages, also known as snopes.com, is a website dedicated to determining the truth about many urban legends, Internet rumors, email forwards, and other such stories of uncertain or questionable origin. Snopes is run by Barbara and David Mikkelson, a couple from California who married after meeting on the newsgroup alt.folklore.urban. The couple also founded the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society, who were credited as the owners of the site until 2005. The site is organized according to topic and includes a messageboard where questionable stories and pictures may be posted.
Snopes aims to debunk or confirm widely spread urban legends. The site is referenced by numerous other sites, directing people to more information about various hoaxes, especially in regard to chain e-mails. Although they research their topics heavily and provide references when possible, not all of their sources (especially those which are personal interviews, phone calls, or e-mails) are fully verifiable. Where appropriate, pages are generally marked "undetermined" or "unverifiable" if the Mikkelsons feel there is not enough evidence to either support or disprove a given claim.
The site is sometimes confused with The AFU and Urban Legends Archive [2], a similar site run by the denizens of alt.folklore.urban, which houses that newsgroup"s FAQ.
The Mikkelsons have stressed the reference portion of the name Urban Legends Reference Pages, indicating that their intention is not merely to dismiss or confirm misconceptions and rumors but to provide evidence for such debunkings and confirmations as well.[1] In an attempt to demonstrate the perils of over-reliance on authority, the Mikkelsons created a series of made-up urban folklore tales which they termed The Repository of Lost Legends. (The name was chosen for its acronym, T.R.O.L.L.) One fictional legend averred that the children"s nursery rhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpence" was really a coded reference used by pirates to recruit members. (This paro***d a real false legend surrounding "Ring Around the Rosie""s link to the bubonic plague.) Although the creators were sure that no one could believe a tale so ridiculous – and had added a link at the bottom of the page to another page explaining the hoax, and a message with the ratings saying "Note: Any relationship between these ratings and reality is purely coincidental." – eventually the legend was featured as true on an urban legends board-game and TV show. Whether this meant their plan backfired or succeeded is in the eye of the beholder.
The name snopes comes from the name of a family in the works of writer William Faulkner.
Q: Is everything on this site about "urban legends"?
A: In a strict folkloric sense, no. Urban legends are a specific type of folklore, and many of the items discussed on this site do not fall under the
folkloric definition of "urban legend." We are following the more expansive popular (if inaccurate) use of "urban legend" as a term that embraces not only urban legends but also common fallacies, misinformation, old wives" tales, ***e news stories, rumors, celebrity gossip, and similar items.
Q: Why do you have some true stories listed as "urban legends"?
A: An "urban legend" is not the same thing as a "fictional tale" or an "apocryphal anecdote," although many people mistakenly use the term in that sense (e.g., "That"s not true; it"s just an urban legend!"). A tale is considered to be an urban legend if it circulates widely, is told and re-told with differing details (or exists in multiple versions), and is said to be true. Whether or not the events described in the tale ever actually occurred is completely irrelevant to its cl***ification as an urban legend.
For example, the tale about a student who mistakes a math problem thought to be unsolvable for a homework ***ignment and solves it is an urban legend, even though something very similar did once happen in real life. The tale is still an urban legend, however, because over the years many of its details (i.e., when it happened, where it happened, the identity of the student, the reaction of the student"s instructor) have changed as it has spread.
Q: I know an urban legend that really happened, but your site doesn"t list it as true (or vice-versa). Why not?
There are several reasons why this might be so:
We rate an urban legend as "true" when there is sufficient evidence to indicate that the legend began with a real-life event. If the actions described in an urban legend play out in real life after the legend has begun circulating, that is not an example of what we consider a "true" urban legend — it is a phenomenon known as "ostension" (and when someone deliberately enacts the events described by an urban legend, that is known as "pseudo-ostension").
Many urban legends describe events so general and plausible that they might very well have happened to somebody, somewhere, sometime. But since seldom can a legend"s origins be traced to a specific, identifiable occurrence, we rarely categorize them as "true."
Many of the texts we discuss contain a mixture of truth, falsity, and exaggeration which cannot be accurately described by a single "True" or "False" rating. Therefore, an item"s status is generally based upon the single most important aspect of the text under discussion, which is summarized in the statement made after the "Claim:" heading at the top of the page. It is important to make note of the wording of that claim, since that is the statement to which the status applies.
Many legends present events that may have taken place in real life only a few times (or once, or even never) as if they were frequent, everyday occurrences, and we make a distinction between "This once happened" and "This is a common, on-going occurrence." For example, many people have read warnings about the dangers posed by kidnappers who allegedly abduct children at malls or amusement parks by taking their victims into bathrooms, drugging them, cutting and dyeing their hair, changing their clothing, and smuggling them out exits disguised as the opposite ***. This legend is cl***ified as false because we have found no credible evidence that a kidnapping has ever been pulled off using this scheme. Even if we did uncover evidence that such a kidnapping once took place, however, we would still cl***ify the legend as false, because an essential feature of the legend is a warning that this type of kidnapping is a regular occurrence, and one real-life instance does not constitute a regular occurrence.
Q: Some of these stories are pretty racy. How about creating a sanitized version of the site for the kids?
A: That would be difficult to do because urban legends are expressions of *** fears and concerns and, as such, often convey those messages via stories that are unsuitable for children. We also cannot decide for other people what their children should or should not read.
Q: How come you sometimes ***yze the content of political pieces, but other times you only verify who wrote them?
A: In general, when a political piece is primarily an editorial or other expression of opinion and is attributed to a well-known public figure (or someone deemed to have particular expertise in the subject covered), we place it in our "Soapbox" section and attempt to verify whether the attribution is correct (since opinions are not falsifiable, and thus the attribution is the only aspect of the piece that may be objectively determined as true or false). When a political piece purports to offer facts, we place it in a relevant category and ***yze the factual claims made within for veracity.
Q: Who creates the material for this site?
A: With a few exceptions, all of the material on this site is prepared by the same people who operate this site, Barbara and David Mikkelson.
Q: Who pays you to maintain this site?
A: We have no sponsors, and no one pays us to operate this site. We pay all the costs of maintaining this web site out of our own pockets, using advertising revenues and public donations to defray the operating expenses. We have no direct contact with the companies whose advertisements appear on our site, and their interests do not influence the content of this site in any way.
Q: Why do you display ads for the same things you"re writing about? Are you being paid to write those articles?
A: Some of the advertising carried on our site is supplied by Google"s AdSense program, a system that scans the text of web pages and automatically displays ads for related products and services. We have no way of controlling which advertisers Google selects to display on our site, and the appearance of any particular advertiser on our site does not constitute an endorsement on our part.
Q: Can I make a donation to help you with your efforts?
Please see our donations page for additional information.
Q: How do I know the information you"ve presented is accurate?
A: We don"t expect anyone to accept us as the ultimate authority on any topic, which is why our site"s name indicates that it contains reference pages. Unlike the plethora of anonymous individuals who create and send the unsigned, unsourced e-mail messages that are forwarded all over the Internet, we show our work. The research materials we"ve used in the preparation of any particular page are listed in the bibliography displayed at the bottom of that page so that readers who wish to verify the validity of our information may check those sources for themselves.
Q: I spotted a typo on your site. Should I report it?
A: Corrections are always welcome, but keep in mind that text appearing inside a bordered box with a colored background is either an example of collected folklore or a quotation from another source, not our own writing. Because these items are pieces of folklore, we reproduce them exactly as we find them and do not edit them to correct orthographical errors.
Q: I want to put a link to your site on my own site. Is that okay?
A: Certainly!
Q: May I reproduce your material on my web site?
A: No. You may link to any of our pages from your site, but you may not reproduce the content of our pages on your own site (this includes posting the content of our pages to web-based message boards or to mailing lists that are archived on the web).
Q: May I reproduce your material on my web site if I operate a non-commercial site, and I give you credit?
A: No. Using our material without our permission is copyright infringement, even if your site is non-commercial, and even if you give us credit. A minimum $300 reprint fee will be ***essed for all unauthorized reproductions of material from this site.
Q: Why are you so hung up about copyrights?
A: Because we work hard to keep our information accurate and up-to-date. When you put our material on your site we no longer have any control over it, and our reputation and credibility are jeopardized because we cannot update your site as new information becomes available.
Contact Information
Q: I"d like to have someone from your site contact me for an interview. How do I arrange this?
A: Simply send us a message through one of the "Contact Us" links on our site and select the "Interview Request" option. We read all our mail, and we"ll get back to you within a day or so.
Technical Questions
Q: Why do I see Mr. Yuk instead of graphics when I view your pages?
A: Because we"ve had so many problems with other sites hotlinking to our graphics (thereby using up a large portion of our bandwidth), we"ve implemented an anti-hotlinking configuration. If any site other than our own attempts to display one of our images, the attempt will fail and a picture of Mr. Yuk (a frowning green face) will be displayed instead.
If you are visiting our site but are seeing pictures of Mr. Yuk in place of our graphics, the most likely causes are that you are going through a proxy server, or you are using a firewall or browser configured in such a way that it does not present valid referrer information to our web server.
Q: Some of the ads on your site are really annoying. Why don"t you get rid of them?
A: Unfortunately, this site is expensive to maintain, and we pay all the operating costs out of our own pockets. If we didn"t carry advertisements to help defray those costs, we couldn"t afford to provide this service as a free resource for everyone.
We do our best to ensure the advertisements we carry on our site are as inoffensive as possible, and we try to filter out ads that flash bright colors, play sounds, spawn multiple windows, automatically trigger downloads, misleadingly claim readers have won contests, or contain partisan political content. Unfortunately, we don"t have the chance to preview every advertisement served to our site, so sometimes we"re not aware we"re carrying an objectionable ad until a reader points it out to us. (Some advertisers deliberately change their names from month to month in order to fool webmasters who have previously excluded their ads.)
If you find an advertisement on our site that violates any of the guidelines mentioned above, please send us details (i.e., name of the advertiser, description of the ad, the URL of the window in which it appeared, preferable a screen capture of the ad) in a mail message, and we"ll investigate removing it from our site.
Q: Why does every page on your site trigger a pop-up ad?
A: We do not accept pop-up ads for our site (outside of our message board), only pop-under ads, and we try to minimize their intrusiveness by ensuring that no reader sees more than one pop-under advertisement per visit to our site. This limitation is accomplished through the setting of a cookie by the agency that delivers ads to our site. If you are seeing more than one pop-under ad per visit, the most likely cause is that the security configuration of your browser or firewall is blocking the setting of this cookie.
Q: Why does my firewall trigger an alarm when I visit some pages of your site?
A: Many Internet advertisers employ Atlas" Avenue A, a system that uses anonymous cookies to determine which ads are most likely to appeal to viewers. Some firewalls and virus protection software flag Avenue A as "spyware" and mistakenly report its cookie placement as an attempt to download software to the user"s PC.
See Atlas" web site for more information about exactly what Avenue A does and why it triggers spyware alerts. Atlas also provides a mechanism for web users to permanently opt out of the Avenue A cookie
Q: Why do some links open up in new browser windows?
A: Whenever we include a link that jumps you to a different section of our web site (or off our site entirely), we display it in a separate window to maintain continuity and ensure that you don"t lose your place.
Q: The colored bullets identifying whether entries are true or false are useless to me because I"m (red-green) color blind. Why don"t you change them?
A: We chose our red-yellow-green coding system because its "traffic light" pattern can be understood by most of our readers with little or no explanation. While we understand that about 8% of our readership experiences some form of color blindness and therefore cannot distinguish the different colors of bullets, we prefer to stick with a system that works very well for the other 92% of our readers. Alternative coding methods have been provided to accommodate color blind readers:
P***ing the mouse pointer over the colored bullets will produce pop-up text identifying their colors.
Colored bullets appear only on index (table of content) pages. The explanatory pages reached by c***ing through the hyperlinks on those index pages feature text-based "Status:" lines at their heads.
Miscellany
Q: What are "snopes"?
A: Snopes is the name of a family of characters who appear throughout the works of American writer William Faulkner. See the Faulkner on the Web glossary entry for Snopes for more information.
Q: Where can I find the meanings to a number of unusual words and terms used on this site?
A: Our site has a handy glossary that we hope will help you better enjoy your visit here.
Lost Legends
The Mississippi state legislature removed fractions and decimal points from the mathematics curriculum of public secondary schools.
Television"s Mister Ed was a horse.
Mobile homes are so named because they can be moved from place to place.
The design of the California state flag was the result of a mistake.
The Kentucky Fried Chicken chain changed its name to KFC in order to eliminate the word "fried" from its title.
The nursery rhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpence" originated as a coded message used for recruiting pirates.
The derisive title of one of George Bernard Shaw"s plays was changed after it wreaked havoc on theater attendance.
When the Titanic hit an iceberg in the north Atlantic, the silent version of the film The Poseidon Adventure was being screened aboard ship.
The town of Tarzana, CA was named after the famous ape man.
Claim: Urban
legends TV show falls for joke about Blackbeard"s using a nursery rhyme to recruit fellow pirates.
Status: True.
Origins: The last few years have seen several television programs dedicated to the examination and "debunking" of urban legends and similar types of stories. One entry in this genre was a show entitled Mostly True Stories: Urban Legends Revealed, which aired on cable station The Learning Channel (TLC) in the U.S.
One of the features of this program was its use of quizzes as bridges across commercial breaks — just before each commercial break it presented the au***nce with an urban legend-related tidbit and challenged viewers to guess whether it was true or not; after the commercial break the (supposedly) correct answer was revealed. We noted with some amusement that most of these quizzes dealt with fairly obscure items covered on our web site; we were even more amused when the 18 March 2003 episode posed the question of whether the nursery rhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpence" was used as a coded message for recruiting pirates. Of course, that was nothing compared to the hilarity which ensued in our house when "Mostly True Stories" revealed this item to be TRUE: "The notorious pirate Blackbeard used this code to recruit hands, whom he paid sixpence a day," they disclosed.
What"s so funny? The notion that the nursery rhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpence" was used as a recuiting song for pirates was invented by us as an example of a story so incredibly silly that no one could possibly believe it to be true. We created the Lost Legends section of our web site as a humorous repository for completely absurd "true" stories based on premises too ridiculous to be believable as our way of demonstrating the potential pitfalls of taking any one source"s unvarnished word for anything, and for one of the entries in this section we came up with a wild tale about the nursery rhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpence" having originated as a coded message used to recruit crew members for pirate ships, complete with a line-by-line explication of how it was sung in taverns by confederates of the notorious pirate Blackbeard to ***emble crews for his prize-hunting expeditions. The whole idea was supposed to be far too outrageous to be taken seriously (picture in your mind"s eye grim-faced pirates intent upon supplementing their crews roaming from pub to pub, belting out a children"s rhyme), and in case any readers somehow missed the obvious humor, the page (like all entries in the Lost Legends section) included a link to supplemental page explaining that it was all just a gag perpetrated for the purpose of teaching folks not to ignore their common sense even in the face of a presumed authority.
That a television program devoted to testing the veracity of urban legends could take this bit of nonsense at face value is an irony we never contemplated.
We have to agree with the conclusion of the Courier Mail journalist who noted (albeit for the wrong reason) that:
In the modern world, people are confronted with a barrage of information. Trying to come to grips with such a sensory ***ault can be a problem. Information is one thing, but processing info until it is useful can be quite another. Hence the common distinction between information and trivia. Trivia can be interesting but is generally not particularly useful. Knowing that the rhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpence" was originally used to recruit pirates for Blackbeard"s ship is not often going to help anyone perform their job better, write a better ***ignment or make a breakthrough contribution to society.
Subsequent airings of the TLC episode featured a revised version of this "fact":
|