Dallas,
You recently asked why I or anyone would accept Snopes as an authority on
urban legends and various web nonsense.. Good question.
Unless from some well known or authoritative source, --and that source being
verifiable, --I don't take anything on the web at face value.
All I can tell you about Snopes is that for all of the ahh.....garbage I have
seen passed to me on the web, -every time I have gone to snopes about an issue
in which I am an authority, and either knew the matter to be true, or false,
---Snopes agreed, and for the same reasons and conclusions I had come to.
--For instance, the supposed 800 lb "alligator" found in New Orleans after the
hurricane ---It was clearly a crocodilian, -none of which appear in north
America, --and Snopes pegged it as such and had the photo traced back to the
1980s in Africa.
Further, many urban legends are biotech, pharmaceutical and biological in
nature. --That is my area of expertise, ...and I have yet to see Snopes
handling of rumors in these arena's to be wrong. Another encouraging sign is
that they don't pretend to "know it all" --many of the issues they address are
described as neither true nor false, but undetermined. -They then provide what
they were able to find out. In other cases, they show the original photos from
which a composite "amazing" photo had been made.
Could Snopes still be full of "it"? -Sure. However, whenever I am curious
about the veracity of some of the goop that floats up in my e-mail box, --I
have found that they are a pretty good and as far as I can tell, pretty
reliable place to start asking questions.
-Just an opinion.
Dave J.
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