It's the 50th anniversary of an internet legend: the story of Oregon's infamous exploding whale.
Fact-checking website Snopes has been marking the occasion. The story first appeared online in 1995 (25 years after the event), and was a bit of a "rite of passage" for Snopes, who had been created only the previous year to investigate online urban legends and hoaxes. The passing around of the story on the internet/fledgling web - often in altered forms and without accurate timestamps (so many assumed it was a recent story) - set a precedent for pretty-much all future viral "news". Like most who were encountering it for the first time, Snopes initially assumed the story was false, and their investigation of it proved a milestone for the site: in truth, they didn't have to do much, but the point was that they investigated it at all - many reputable news outlets were just running it without any fact-checking.
Background info here: Thar she blows!