And we wonder why 22% of Americans think Saddam used WMD during the war....

This one just about killed me.

In order to promote a festival occuring next spring, the mayor of Cedar City, UT, decided to create an entertaining backstory about why the festival was occuring. The story he came up with was preposterous - a Viking-settled island broke free from it's moorings and was carried by a tsunami to America, where it landed in the middle of Utah, where the people living on the island were tricked into handing the land over to the United States. He then suggested that recently a treasure had been found, and that to avoid having to pay the decendents of the Vikings a lot of money for the land and treasure, the government was instead going to give them ownership of the town for 10 days each year, so they could celebrate their kingdom.

I don't even want to start to try and count all the implausibilities in that story (and if you go to the article and read the full thing, you'll find even more) - but, you guessed it, some people actually fell for it. Worse, they claimed to be decendents of the original Vikings and should thus be entitled to a share of the fortune that was "found".

How did they react when they were told the whole thing was a joke - a publicity stunt to get some attention for the upcoming festival? Well, they're Americans - how you YOU think they'd react? Yep, yep... they claimed it was a cover-up. Near as I can tell so far, they haven't gone so far as to actually file a suit in the matter, but if they don't correct the collective rectal-cranial inversion they seem to be suffering from, I'll be rather surprised if they don't.