The conspiracy that is August

Something’s just not right here. The Dog Days of Summer officially ended last week but I’m still worried that I’ll start sweating through my tongue. It’s the friggin’ third week of friggin’ August, and I feel like I’ve spent the entire summer running up the electric bill hugging my window air conditioner while binging on shows and movies on the Roku.

If complaining about the heat isn’t enough for the last couple of months, we’ve been seeing people say so-and-so is lying, or another so-and-so is lying, or something or other is a hoax… and my head spins.

Is this new? I was wondering if so many people being taken in by rumors and hoaxes was a symptom of the current sociological landscape. Perhaps we mere humans have probably displayed gullibility for a long time—hundreds of years and probably thousands. I mean, can you imagine some troglodyte telling his neighbor in the next cave that he thought all the talk about fire was just a hoax? “All I know is what’s painted in a cave,” he was heard grunting.

Who can say?

To me, the best hoax ever was the woman in England who made news in 1726 by claiming she gave birth to rabbits. In case there are children present, I won’t go into detail on how easily she tricked the doctors. Or, how about the one about the now 82-year-old Paul McCartney dying in a car crash in 1966 and being replaced by a lookalike, who “surprisingly” wrote great songs and played and sang like the real Beatle.

Then there was the autopsy film purporting to be that of an alien who crashed on a sheep ranch in 1947 near Corona and brought back to Roswell. It was faked, and yes, I watched it on Fox, too.

Closer to home, there’s the 1964 police report by Sgt. Lonnie Zamora of something unidentified in the arroyo off Raychester Road, which is thought by many to be an otherworldly alien spacecraft. It remains undetermined, but opinions are split between a hoax perpetrated by Tech mischief makers, an experimental lunar lander from White Sands that got off course, or something … other.

Up at Alamo, the weird glow from a purported UFO landing on a hilltop caused quite a stir--until they discovered it was car headlights. Ever since then, that area on the rez has been known as “UFO.”

If I may, other ones people actually fell for:

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays, or …

Sir Francis Bacon wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays.

A photo of the Loch Ness monster that turned out to be a toy submarine purchased from Woolworths with a wooden head attached.

The 1957 BBC documentary shows women harvesting pasta from “spaghetti” trees in Italy.

Published reports in 1835 of beavers and unicorns spotted on the Moon by a seriously deluded astronomer.

The two guys in Britain who created crop circles with wood planks and rope.

Bill Gates in 1995 acquiring ownership of the Catholic Church in return for Microsoft stock.

Of course, some aren’t so humorous - like the 2020 “hoax” disease which ended up claiming the lives of an estimated 14 million worldwide.

Nowadays, scams, hoaxes and general fakery run rampant through social media and email. Some may fall under the practical joke category, but then there are a ton that range from plain old spam to miscreants who want to separate you from your money.

What about the imaginary Nigerian prince who needed you to send him money and in return, will split with you his fortune of millions - a variation on the centuries-old Spanish prisoner swindle, the advance-fee scam that emerged after the French Revolution. After decades of emails, he still couldn’t access his millions, so now has gone incognito using ChatGPT.

Moving on, I ran across an article last week on the web about the top states in which Americans no longer want to live. It was based on figures from United Van Lines and other moving companies, and you can guess which states were high on the list - California, New Jersey, New York, and a host of northeastern and midwestern states. I had to do a lot of clicking to get to New Mexico, and it turns out that the moving-to and fleeing-from ratio is pretty flat. Honestly though, you’ve got to have an extremely compelling reason to leave the Land of Enchantment.

But I digress.

Speaking of binging on movies all summer, Tuesday last week was the birthdate of movie director Alfred Hitchcock, who was born on August 13, 1899. Hitchcock once declared, “The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.”

In any case, I toast the guy who invented the “pause” button.