The Top Outrageously 5 FAKE Facts submitted to OMG Facts.

Here at OMG Facts we get thousands of submissions every month, ranging from incredibly interesting, to not so much. It's no surprise that some of them are absolutely fake. The following 5 facts are the ones that we have the... joy of reading on a very regular basis. These are the top 5 fakes (not) OMG Facts:

#5: 12 newborns are given to the wrong parents daily.

The baby switcheroo is one of the biggest fears any parent feels when their kid is born. One of the few things my mom was able to yell out to my dad as she was being wheeled off after her C-section was "Stick with the baby! Don't let them switch him on you!" It's not surprising that this "fact" gets submitted a lot, because of the chaos surrounding childbirth.

So what's the deal? This piece of information was never actually reported by a reputable source. The earliest reference to this fake fact is from an chain email (remember those?) titled "If 99.9% is good enough, then..." The list includes other calculations like "315 entries in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language will turn out to be misspelled" and "811,000 faulty rolls of 35mm film will be loaded this year." (Yes the list is that old!). You can read the whole list here (Source)

#4: Donald Duck was banned in Finland because he doesn't wear pants.

Poor Donald Duck was labeled as a pervert because of lazy and sensationalist news reporting. Turns out this "fact" is half true. Donald Duck disappeared from the libraries of youth centers in Finland in 1977. The reason for his disappearance was not because Donald lets it all hang out; it was just a cost saving measure!

The fake story started getting reported a few years later, when the board member who took this decision was running for a seat in the Finnish parliament and he was attacked as "the man who banned Donal Duck." In the end, the tabloids took hold of the story and didn't bother to double check the facts. ( Source )

#3: A duck's quack doesn't echo and no one knows why.

Apparently ducks are more than just cartoon pervs. According to this "fact," ducks have also evolved the evolutionarily pointless ability to make sounds that defy the laws of sounds.

In reality, the echo is just so similar to the original quack that many people believe it doesn't echo. Nevertheless, it was proven on the television show Mythbusters, that the duck's quack echoes. Check out the video of the Mythbuster boys proving it in our original article on this "fact" ( Original OMG Facts post )

#2: Pigs can't look up at the sky.

Poor pigs. Not only do they get the blame for massive flu outbreaks and get a bad rep for personal hygiene, but apparently they're not able to look up at the stars and dream like the rest of us. That is, if this fact were true.

I could disprove it with scientific research, but I think I'll just point you to the friggin' pig looking up on the left. However, this fact has a certain air of truth to it. Pigs don't have very long necks, which means that it's very difficult for them to bend it back more than a few degrees. In that sense, they couldn't look straight up at the sky like humans do, however, that doesn't mean that poor Babe would not be able to gaze at the stars.

1#: Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae.

This one has stuck around for a while because the text itself is so convincing. However, there is no proof that such a study was ever conducted. The "fact" got so much attention that a Cambridge researcher took it upon himself to investigate it and has kept a record of all his findings here: (Link).

However, the truth of the matter is that the jumbling only works in some circumstances, where the letters of the words haven't been scrambled all that much. For example, try to make sense of this phrase: "Hilpapy aoutrhs sitll issnit on fwinollog dullfready oslotebe snellpig." Not so easy now is it?