Whenever there is a new "it really happened to a friend of a friend of mine" story floating around, one of the first places I check is Snopes.com but I never knew who was behind it, only that their research seemed to be first rate and they published links to the data to back up their assessments. Readers Digest did a nice story on Barbara and David Mikkelson who started Snopes back in 1995 and who run it today:
Rumor Detectives: True Story or Online Hoax?
A few years ago, a woman and her husband were coming home from a ski trip in British Columbia when they spotted a disabled car on the side of the road. It was raining and the driver looked distressed, so they stopped and helped him fix his flat tire. The man was extremely grateful but didn't have any cash to reward them, so he took down their personal information. A week later, the couple got a call from their bank saying their mortgage had been paid and $10,000 had been deposited into their account by an appreciative Bill Gates.
"Ah, the grateful millionaire," Barbara Mikkelson says with a satisfied grin. "It started with Henry Ford. Then it was Nat King Cole. Then Donald Trump. We even have a version Oscar Wilde wrote back in the 1890s."
With her bemused tone and a habit of peering over her spectacles, Mikkelson has the air of a night-shift detective who has seen it all-and in a way, she has. Barbara, 49, and her husband, David, 48, run Snopes.com, the Internet's preeminent resource for verifying and debunking rumors, ridiculous claims, and those e-mail chain letters your sister-in-law can't stop forwarding. Whether it's an urban legend like the Gates story, an overblown warning about the latest computer virus, or that bizarre photo circulating of "Hercules, the world's biggest dog," chances are Snopes.com has checked it out and rated it as "true," "false," or "undetermined."
A great story about an awesome site. And the name Snopes comes from a family in a William Faulkner novel.
