76 Viral Images From 2015 That Were Totally Fake
We debunked dozens of fake photos this year, covering everything from Charles Manson’s baby photos to John Lennon’s skateboarding skills, and everything in between. It was another busy year for anyone spreading fake images on the internet.
Below, we have 76 photos that you may have seen floating around the internet in 2015. Some are deliberate photoshops created by people who want to deceive. Others are just images that got mixed up in this big, weird game of Telephone we call the internet.
If you get to the bottom of the list and you’re hungry for even more fakes, check out last year’s round-up.
1) Is this Charles Manson as a baby?
Despite what historical picture accounts on Twitter might insist, this isn’t Charles Manson as a baby. I contacted Jeff Guin, author of the definitive biography, Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson. He said that it’s almost certainly not him.
From Guinn:
While I was researching my book, Manson’s sister and first cousin shared family photo albums with me. That photo was not present in either instance, and in no way matches the verified photos I have of Manson as a baby. (The facial features above all.) I have never seen this picture before. Anything’s possible, but I very much doubt that this is a photo of Baby Charlie.
My guess? This one likely started as a joke on Facebook or Reddit and spread quickly as a real photo after losing context from the original poster.
Fake image via HistoryInPics and Imgur
2) Is this a behind the scenes photo from National Geographic?
It’s an amusing photo. But that image of National Geographic photographers running from a bear has definitely been photoshopped.
As commenters on Reddit point out, there are actually a few clues that this is a fake. But the most damning bit of evidence? The bear appears to be from astock photo.
Below, a side-by-side of the image with the stock photo. Notice the shape of the bear’s head and the green piece of grass in front of the bear’s right arm.
Update: The redhead in the photo, Tim Sparks, has confirmed via Twitter that it’s a fake that they made back in 2011 during a film location scout in Colorado. He says it was posted to Facebook and it went viral from there. I spoke with him for a follow-up.
Fake image via HistoricalPics
3) Is this an old magic trick gone wrong?
With a caption like “magic trick gone wrong,” it’s easy to imagine the photos above as depicting a magician nearly escaping from drowning. We’re left to think a scantily clad performer heroically grabbed an ax and freed a grateful woman. The problem? That’s not what these pictures show at all. And in fact, the real story is far more interesting.
The woman with the ax, Kitty West (also known as Evangeline the Oyster Girl), smashed the glass box in rage. West was a burlesque performer on Bourbon Street in New Orleans during the late 1940s. Her act included emerging from an enormous oyster shell, thus the name Oyster Girl. One night in 1949 a rival performer from out of town, Divena the Aqua Tease, got top billing over West, which seemed to really upset her. Divena’s act involved an underwater strip tease in a giant glass case filled with water. So you can see where this is going.
“I just wanted to break the tank in a million pieces,” West would later recall.Life magazine reported that 400 gallons of water poured onto the stage, causing many in the audience to flee. Once the water had drained, West attacked Divena by pulling her hair. West was promptly arrested, and the whole thing (complete with photos of West at the police station) was published in Life.
Inaccurate photo description via OldPicsArchive
4) Is this Princess Diana giving the finger?
No, that’s not Princess Di flipping the bird. It’s another photo by Alison Jackson, a British photographer known for her staged images of celebrity lookalikes.
Historical photo accounts on Twitter are constantly posting Jackson’s images. Twitter is littered with countless Marilyn Monroe and JFK images that are actually Jackson’s handiwork using lookalikes. Throw this one on the pile.
Fake image via OldPicsArchive
5) Is this a photo from NASA of India during Diwali?
As the space debunker FakeAstroPix points out, this “NASA photo” of India during the Hindu festival of Diwali is fake. It’s actually quite an old fake as well, dating to at least 2012. But that doesn’t stop so many OMGSPACE and OMGSCIENCE Twitter accounts from sharing it here in 2015.
What does it really show? It’s a composite of satellite images from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2003 that has been shaded different colors. The different colors are supposed to show population growth over time. Cool image? Sure. But not what so many people say it is.
Fake photo via AmazingPicX
6) Is this an anti-weed ad?
No, this isn’t an anti-drug ad. it’s actually a photo by Martin Ferko of Anna Guimm, a designer whose method of creating ceramic dolls involves putting them in an oven. Someone has photoshopped anti-weed messaging onto the image.
Normally, this kind of thing would be done in a kiln, but Guimm’s DIY oven method seems to work perfectly fine for her. Even if it makes for a terrifying image when taken out of context.
And before you rush down to the comments to let me know that nobody thought this was a real ad, allow me to assure you that there is always someonewho thinks it’s a real ad.
Inaccurate photo via Reddit
7) Is this a 1950s car show?
The photo above does come from a car show that took place at a Thrifty Drug store parking lot in Los Angeles on May 15, 1954. But it’s not exactly as it would’ve appeared to people who were actually there.
The photo was colorized by Rik Hoving back in 2006, though the HistoryInPics version crops out mention of his name. Colorized photos aren’t necessarily “fake.” But as I’ve said before, we have to ask ourselves what happens to history when a colorized photo supplants the original in web searches.
HistoryInPics often tweets colorized photos without identifying them as such. To be honest, this seems like a rather minor sin compared with all the other misinformation they spread. But it’s something that we need to keep in mind with all these historical photo accounts.
Who decides that the green car is actually green and not blue or black or even purple? Photo colorizers are often dedicated people who painstakingly research possibilities before altering historical documents. But when their work is shared without any mention that the photo has been colorized, the people of the future are left with a rather skewed impression of history.
Colorized photo via HistoryInPics
8) Is this a shooting star and its reflection?
As the always excellent Twitter photo sleuth PicPedant points out, the picture above isn’t a shooting star. It’s actually a 2-minute long exposure of a space shuttle launch in 2010. By leaving the camera’s shutter open for 2 minutes, the launch appears to be a long fiery trail. But it’s most definitely not a shooting star.
Inaccurate photo description via TheMindBlowing
9) Is this a kitchen chair floating in space, referred to as “Escape Vehicle No. 6” by astronauts?
Could there really be a kitchen chair in orbit? No. This image comes from a 2009 ad campaign by Toshiba for LCD TVs. Sadly, there is no chair currently circling the globe.
The title “Escape Vehicle No. 6” comes from a 2004 art piece by Simon Faithfull that was similar in concept. Faithful says that Toshiba’s ad agency approached him about a collaboration but he didn’t work on the ad.
Fake image via HistoricalPics and SciencePorn
10) Is this an “incredibly rare” black lion?
No, there are no black lions. As the Museum of Hoaxes points out, this is a pure photoshop job. The original photo shows that the lion is actually white.
Fake image via TheMindBlowing
11) Is this an 1880s female street gang from London called the Clockwork Oranges?
Those are some dapper looking women who might rough you up if you met them in a dark alley. But whoever they were, they weren’t an 1880s female street gang called the Clockwork Oranges.
There were indeed female street gangs in 19th century London. But the term Clockwork Orange wasn’t used in reference to a street gang until Anthony Burgess’s 1962 book. According to Burgess, the book gets its title from an old cockney slang phrase “as queer as a clockwork orange.”
As the caption to the obviously cropped photograph reads: “group of women having a smoke, gelatin silver print c. 1896.”
Fake image via OldPicsArchive and the Victorian Academy of Magick
12) Is this really Einstein riding a bicycle near a nuclear test?
This photo may seem like one of those that’s so absurd, no one could ever believe itdeals. But people do. And they keep sharing it far and wide across social media. Like a cockroach scurrying around during Nuclear Winter, the image just won’t die. But yes, it’s a fake.
Fake photo via OldPicsArchive
13) Is this scientist Marie Curie?
No, that’s not the world renowned scientist Marie Curie. As Joe Hanson from PBS points out, the photo on the left actually shows Susan Marie Frontczak, a stage performer who plays Marie Curie in a production called Manya. The real photo of Curie circa 1913 appears on the right.
Embarrassingly it’s not just spammy Twitter accounts that have mistaken the actor for the real Curie. The country of Togo even based a postage stamp on the photo of Frontczak. Yikes.
Fake image via OldPicsArchive
14) Is this Vladimir Putin in 1988 posing as a tourist to spy on Ronald Reagan?
Everybody knows that Vladimir Putin was is a former KGB agent. But is that actually Putin in 1988 posing as a tourist behind the boy that’s about to shake Ronald Reagan’s hand? Nope.
This fake has been around for a few years now. And to be honest, the guy doesn’t even look like Putin if you ask me. Now it’s entirely possible that the guy is an undercover KGB agent. The photographer who took this shot seems to think so. But Putin was stationed in Dresden when this photo was snapped in Moscow. It’s almost certainly not Putin.
Inaccurate description via Reddit
15) Is this Heath Ledger as The Joker kick-flipping over Batman?
Notoriously awful Twitter account HistoryInPics posts a lot of fake content. And sadly they don’t even tell the truth when their “history” is a recent as 2008.
No, that’s not Heath Ledger on the set of The Dark Knight kick-flipping over Christian Bale. The funny part? Ledger was actually known for skating around on location while shooting in Chicago. But the photo above is totally fake.
Fake image via HistoryInPics
16) Is this a group of prohibitionist women?
Ever wonder why everyone in this “prohibitionist photo” has such a cartoonish expression? Because they were actors. This image actually comes from an old Thomas Edison film made sometime between 1893 and 1901.
Edison’s early films often parodied suffragists and women of the temperance movement during the late 19th century. This pro-temperance message wouldn’t have been out of place in some circles at the turn of the 20th century. But it’s an image that was meant to lampoon the anti-alcohol movement. And it appears that it’s still working over a century later.
Fake image via OldPicsArchive
17) Is this Salvador Dali drawing a penis on a woman’s forehead?
Salvador Dali never painted a cartoon penis on a woman’s forehead, signing it Picasso. Or at least if he did, it was never photographed. The woman in the photo is Dali’s wife Gala and the painting he’s doing is known as Medusa’s sleep.
Fake image via OldPicsArchive
18) Is this a rare photo of an Onna-bugeisha, one of the female warriors of Japan?
No, this photo doesn’t show a female warrior from 1870s Japan. As the debunker website Hoax of Fame explains, the image actually shows a kabuki actor. This photo went up for auction back in 2012.
Inaccurate photo description via ThatsHistory
19) Is this a hockey goalie in 1966 before masks became standard equipment?
As the always brilliant PicPedant points out, this photo indeed appeared in the pages of Life magazine in 1966. But the scars and wounds of this hockey goalie were applied by a make-up artist. They were intended to represent all the injuries this hockey player received during his career.
As Life explained in 1966:
This face belongs to Terry Sawchuk [wrote LIFE], a 36-year-old goalie for the Toronto Maple Leafs. Re-created here, by a professional make-up artist and a doctor, are some of the more than 400 stitches he has earned during 16 years in the National Hockey League. Sawchuk has sustained other injuries not shown here: a slashed eyeball requiring three stitches, a 70% loss of function in his right arm because 60 bone chips were removed from his elbow, and a permanent “sway-back” caused by continual bent-over posture.
So yeah, it’s kinda real. But the photo tells a misleading story when you strip out the context from the magazine and add your own caption about safety equipment.
Fake image via Historyepics
20) Is this an Earthrise from the perspective of the moon on December 24, 1968?
On December 24, 1968 the astronauts of Apollo 8 took a gorgeous shot of the “earth rise” as came from the dark side of the moon. It was the first photo of our planet from the perspective of another planetary body. In 2013 NASA produced a computer-generated re-creation of what those astronauts saw, in full color. But ever since, people have been passing the re-creation around as an authentic photo. The original is the black and white photo on the right.
Fake image via HistoricalPics
21) Is this the bodies of two people in Nevada thought to be buried alive in 1993?
These aren’t the bodies of two people horrifically buried alive in the 1990s. They’re actually the bones of two people found outside Mantua, Italy back in 2007. And the bones date back as much as 6,000 years.
The two people are thought to have been no more than 20 years old and were deemed the Lovers of Valdaro because they were found locked in an embrace. We don’t know how they met their end exactly. But the one thing we know for sure is that they weren’t buried alive in the Nevada desert during the Clinton administration.
Fake image via NotExplained
22) Is this a real screenshot from Wheel of Fortune?
You may have seen this Wheel of Fortune screenshot gag going viral recently. Is the answer really “Luck Be In the Air Tonight”? Nope. It’s just a photoshop job from start to finish.
The big clue that this one is fake? If the answer is really supposed to be “Luck Be In The Air Tonight,” then why is the letter I missing from the word “air”? The only logical explanation? The answer must be the lewd one everybody was thinking.
Fake image via jmoneytooreal
23) Are these real penguins with donated sweaters?
You may have recently seen the heartwarming story of Australia’s oldest man (109 years young!) who knits sweaters for penguins. The story is currently making the rounds with an adorable photo purporting to show the grateful penguins of Australia’s Phillip Island. The only problem? Those penguins in that particular photo are totally fake.
The photo comes from the Penguin Foundation’s Facebook page. As they explained in the comments to the photo when questioned about the fake-looking birds:
We had a little help from some toy penguins, Jenny. Our photographer tells us they’re the best models he’s ever worked with - no demands for water that’s been purified by unicorns in Peru and minimal make-up required because they’re all naturally good looking. Plus, we’re all about positive body image and welcome toy penguin models of all shapes and sizes!
So there you have it. The other thing that the aggregated and regurgitatedstories scraping the original (and true!) story from Nine News don’t mention? The penguins don’t really need sweaters anymore. Sweaters were originally used on penguins after a 2000 oil spill. They kept the birds from preening themselves and potentially ingesting oil before they could be properly cleaned. Many people jumped at the chance to help, but pretty soon, the clean-up organizations had more penguin-sized sweaters than they would ever need.
There was another call for penguin sweaters in 2014 by the Penguin Foundation to stockpile in case another oil spill ever happened. But, again, they were quickly inundated with more sweaters than they could handle.
As the Penguin Foundation noted after the outpouring of sweaters (known as “jumpers” in Australia), they don’t need any more:
** Please note that we have plenty of penguin jumpers at this time donated by generous knitters across the globe for rehabilitation in the event of an oil spill, fundraising and education programs and do not need any further donations at this time. Thank you kindly for your interest in knitting to support the little penguins of Phliip Island! Further information on the program and how penguin jumpers benefit little penguin conservation can be found below. Thank you! **
To be clear, the story of Australia’s oldest man and his earlier efforts to make knit sweaters is totally real. But that photo and the impression that this is an ongoing need is simply not true.
24) Are these school lunches from around the world?
They look pretty delicious, but those “typical” school lunches from around the world aren’t so typical. They’re actually misleading promotional photos from an advertising campaign for a health food store called SweetGreen.
As Mother Jones points out, the photo purporting to show a typical school lunch in Greece should have been a big red flag. Sadly, given the country’s financial woes, Greece doesn’t have the resources to provide the kind of meal pictured. They point to an article in the New York Times that explains schools in Greece, “do not offer subsidized cafeteria lunches. Students bring their own food or buy items from a canteen.”
This isn’t to say that American public schools aren’t woefully lacking in nutrition compared with much of the industrialized world. But these staged photos are far from an honest depiction. SweetGreen updated their post to admit nearly as much, even if they hedged in the process: “These images are not intended to be exact representations of school lunches, but instead, are meant to portray different types of foods found in cafeterias around the world.”
Fake images via Tumblr
25) Is this a whale swimming through Venice?
No, that’s not a whale making its way through the canals of Venice. It’s actually a composite image by artist Robert Jahns, who’s responsible for another famous viral fake involving Venice freezing over. It’s a cool picture, but not a true one.
Fake photo via SundayFundayz
26) Are these the tallest mountains on earth as seen from space?
As Twitter user Janne Ahlberg mentions, the image is actually completely computer generated. It was created by Christoph Hormann back in 2006. And to be honest, the more I look at it the more I want to play Myst.
Fake image via BEAUTIFULPlCS
27) Is this a whisky vending machine in a 1960s office?
Yes, that’s a whisky dispenser. But it’s not from an office in the 1950s or 60s, as it’s so often captioned. According to Getty, it’s from a vending machine exhibition in London in 1960. We don’t have any evidence that this machine was used in an office, no matter how badly we want to believe that’s the case.
Thanks to shows like Mad Men, people here in the 21st century have a tendency to think that everybody in the offices of the 1960s were constantly hammered. And while drinking on the job was more socially acceptable than it is today (at least for white collar workers at the highest ranks of companies), the people of the 1960s weren’t constantly drinking.
Inaccurate description via Imgur
28) Is this a creepy passageway in an abandoned church?
Nope. As one Reddit user explains, the image actually comes from a house called the Black Moon Manor in Indiana. The Travel Channel show Ghost Adventures “investigated” the house back in 2011. The image above only gets a passing glance on screen, probably because if you think too hard about how over the top the image is, you’ll conclude it’s all bullshit. (Which it is.)
The funny part? Even within the paranormal investigation community, Black Moon Manor was known to be a fraud. The man in the episode who claims to be the owner of the house was actually just leasing it to run a haunted house. The backstory they tell in the show (of a shady doctor from the early 20th century who conducted experiments on measles patients) is total bullshit.
The writing on the wall around the hole was clearly done by regular old contemporary humans looking to get a rise out of people. The Black Moon Manor house was destroyed in 2012, the year after the episode aired.
On an unrelated (but hilarious) note, my favorite thing about the episode is when the host of the show steps into a local library and says, “I really don’t think I’ve been in a library since grade school.”
Fake image via NotExplained
29) Is this a rare color photo of the attack on Pearl Harbor?
PicPedant sets the record straight, explaining that the photo actually comes from a publicity still from the 2001 movie Pearl Harbor. That’s right. The one with Ben Affleck.
Fake photo via KnowFactsDaily
30) Is this an Alaskan Tree Frog?
As Hoax of Fame points out, there’s actually no such thing as an Alaskan Tree Frog. The image is quite clearly a cartoonish frog on top of what I’m guessing is a stone heart. Frustratingly, I can’t seem to find an example online. But I’m almost certain I’ve seen this one (in its non-frozen form) before. If you know where this frog comes from please let us know in the comments.
Fake photo via FascinatingPics
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