Thread: Things that really don't exist, but some believe do.

Originally Posted by honedright

What a clever child you were -

Amazon.com: Rare Italian Tree Tomato 15 Seeds - Grows 25 Feet Tall!: Patio, Lawn & Garden

HA! I WIN! I'M NEVER WRONG!

Originally Posted by MistressNomad

HA! I WIN! I'M NEVER WRONG!

And I thought you were anything but a typical woman....huh, who knew?


I think I'll put on my flame retardant suit now.

Originally Posted by ChrisL

I must admit, as a child I was certain that Jackalopes were real. I swear I saw them listed in an Encyclopedia at the time and even got in a heated argument with my best friend and his parents when they told me they didn't exist.

Chris L

Hey, wait a minute, they sell them around these parts.

Ok I'm gonna be laughed off the forum for this lol, when I was ickle I thought baked beans were some form of artificial skinned packed with mashed potato. Not quite in keeping but still funny.

Geek

Well, after I laugh Thegeek off the forum, har-har....

Remember those Alligators in the N.Y.C Sewer System. Everyone thinks they are there but they really aren't.... The huge roaches ate em.

A girl I knew was convinced that "catcoons" existed-the vicious offspring of a cat and a raccoon. Her boyfriend and their friends had convinced her for fun, I think. She was surprised when she was told that cats and raccoons can't reproduce--"are you sure about that?" "yeah, different species of animals usually can't reproduce". Actually "girl" isnt accurate, I think she was in her late 20s/early 30's.

The spaghetti tree hoax is a famous 3-minute hoax report broadcast on April Fools' Day 1957 by the BBC current affairs programme Panorama. It told a tale of a family in sourthern Switzerland harvesting spaghetti from the fictitious spaghetti tree, broadcast at a time when this Italian dish was not widely eaten in the UK and some Britons were unaware spaghetti is a pasta made from wheat flour and water. Hundreds of viewers phoned into the BBC, either to say the story was not true, or wondering about it, with some even asking how to grow their own spaghetti trees. Decades later CNN called this broadcast "the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled.

Spaghetti tree hoax - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Originally Posted by fccexpert

The recent thread on Neroli oil and its source under preshaves etc. got me interested in other things that some might believe exist but are in fact either fictional or a misunderstanding of the root of a name. To start this off, here are two more from my list.

Canola plants (as in the source of canola oil)
Naugas (the source of Naugahyde).

Add you own. To qualify we must be talking about a nonexistant physical object (plant, animal, mineral) whose existance is hypothesized due to some false identification by humans. Not a mythical or spiritual being whose existance can neither be confirmed or denied (basically I do not want this to deginerate into a discussion on theism, atheism and/or agnosticism). Let's keep it real, or at least in the realm of this world.

Honest politicians and Sasquatch.

UFO's! (I know you stated about keeping it in our world, but I just had to say it, lol).

I remembered this Garfield comic strip from when I was a kid. I laughed for a good 10 minutes and had to join the thread!

Originally Posted by matt321

Decades later CNN called this broadcast "the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled.

When I was a young kid my Mom used to talk about this hoax that Orson Welles was responsible for. Pretty big hoax that was.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War..._Worlds_(radio)

Unbiased media reporting.