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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!

Eugene's Lair
Last edited by Eugene's Lair

Interesting true story of that ilk . . . My friend has a numpty lay-about for a brother and his friends were bored one day so they decided to go and look at a beached whale in the North somewhere about 10yrs ago and see if they could get a tooth as a memento to say they'd seen the whale.

Of course locals got wind and the Police questioned them - a local rag apparently ran a story of people travelling from afar to "steal the whale". A story from nothing more than vague idle curiosity - my friend was laughing cos she knew her brother was too clueless to ever carry out anything so daring. Numpties

Saint

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