Cosmic Log - hoax

May

2011

3:30pm, EDT

'Coal Cares'? Hoax targets industry

Coal Cares

The Coal Cares campaign claims to offer free "Bieber inhalers" to anyone who lives within 200 miles of a coal plant. The campaign, however, is a hoax.

By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

Who says coal companies are full of hard-hearted folks only interested in the bottom line? At least one titan of the industry, Peabody Energy, cares about youngsters with asthma. It appeared to launch a website Tuesday offering free "Puff Puff" inhalers to anybody living within 200 miles of a coal plant.

In addition to the re-branded inhalers, which promise to make asthmatic kids "show others who's cool at school," the company will kick in $10 towards medication as a part of its Coal Cares campaign.

The website, coinciding with Asthma Awareness Month, also contains printable activities for the kids. While visiting, you can read up on why investing in coal is a better bet than alternatives such as solar and wind.

"Investing in coal will always be a smart move, especially with well-supported, long-term government subsidies driving down costs, and a near-complete absence of subsidies for so-called 'alternative' energies," the site notes.

This is all, of course, a hoax.

Peabody, which bills itself as the world's largest private-sector coal company, issued a statement today saying that the "spoof" website makes "inaccurate claims about the company and coal." It then points to studies that "demonstrate the correlation between electricity fueled by low-cost coal and improvement in health, longevity and quality of life."

What's more, Peabody notes, coal use has more than tripled in the U.S. over the past few decades and regulated emissions have declined 84 percent. As for those unregulated emissions such as carbon dioxide, the company says that it is a "global leader in clean coal solutions."

Update for 3:58 p.m. ET: Fast Company's Morgan Clendaniel reports that the project was the work of a newly formed group called Coal Is Killing Kids, which worked with the Yes Lab for the last month and a half to develop the site. On a blog called "Climate Change: The Next Generation," Tenney Naumer quotes from a CKK news release:

"Sure, it's kind of tasteless to say that 'Bieber' inhalers are a solution to childhood asthma," said Janet Bellamy, a spokesperson for CKK. "But it's a great deal more tasteless to cause that asthma in the first place, as coal-fired power plants have been proven to do." ...

More stories on coal:

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

Dec

2010

8:25pm, EST

Alien invaders vs. the truth squad

DSS via Sky-Map.org

Imagery from the Digitized Sky Survey shows a blue splotch (nicknamed the "cosmic wiener") that was wrongly identified as an alien spaceship.

By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

If you repeat UFO fiction often enough, does it eventually get reported as fact? Yes ... especially if you add in a 2012 doomsday angle and some dodgy astronomical imagery. Fortunately, an Internet truth squad finally knocked down this alien invasion.

Claims that we're about to be visited by alien spaceships are generally a dime a dozen (or a quatloo a dozen?), but for some reason one particular urban legend about "Giant Spaceships Heading Towards Earth" kept itself alive for more than a year, mostly by metastasizing on UFO forums. From the very beginning, the reports pointed to three eerie blue-green shapes on Sky-Map.org's archived imagery from the Digitized Sky Survey. "Trust me you will be very amazed. I WAS FOR SURE!!!!" one commenter wrote in February.

As the story was passed along, another forum commenter (who claimed to be a SETI investigator writing "at great threat to myself") said the spaceships were on a trajectory that would bring them to an area near Washington, D.C., on Dec. 21, 2012 — just in time for the Maya apocalypse. Later versions of the story incorporated the 2012 doomsday angle as well as the attribution to a SETI astrophysicist. Some even gave the researcher a name: Craig Kasnov.

Those are all the elements of a good UFO tale: a supposed insider, sharing seemingly legit evidence about an impending alien invasion with a well-known doomsday deadline. It's clear that thousands of folks wrote about the tale, based on an Internet search of key terms in the text. Sky-Map.org said it recorded nearly 100,000 Web visits on Dec. 2, when the tale was picking up speed on the Internet.

The truth squad finally caught up with the story around Dec. 9, when level-headed forum participants noted that the blue-green shapes were clearly flaws in the photographic plates that were digitized for the sky survey. In each of the three cases, emulsion problems showed up in one of the color-coded plates but not the others — which explained the bluish color. Craig Kasnoff (with a double-f) also weighed in: He wrote that he was indeed involved in the genesis of the SETI @ Home alien-searching project — but he denied that he was an astrophysicist, and denied making any comments about approaching alien spaceships.

"This post may, or may not have, made any contribution to the discussions of 'objects flying towards Earth,'" he wrote. "But I hope it clears up any question regarding my involvement [in] this announcement."

To recap: The weird shapes on the astronomical pictures were nothing more than photographic flaws. The UFO claims had no authority behind them. And the 2012 date merely capitalized on the Maya apocalypse hype.

Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait provides a detailed smackdown of the UFO tale. Discovery News' Ian O'Neill, a charter member of the 2012 truth squad, weighs in as well. O'Neill also provides a handy B.S. detector for the seemingly scientific claims you might come across in the social media mix.

Meanwhile, the UFO beat goes on: The same YouTube user who posted a "Giant Spaceships" video last December has plenty more where that came from.

Bottom line? Watch the skies if you like ... but also watch what you believe.

More UFO tales:

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