The History Channel has form with misrepresenting photographic evidence.

This time last year I was in Argentina helping to film what turned out to be a couple of episodes of the History Channel show 'Hunting Hitler'.  More complete details (including my reasons for agreeing to participate in the first place) are available in last year's Fall SHA Newsletter, but one point is particularly relevant here...

The first episode of the second season begins with someone melodramatically throwing a photograph of an elderly man down on the table and declaring that 'this is a photograph of Hitler in Misiones [province, Argentina]'.

Unfortunately, that photograph turned out to be an elderly Moe Howard from the Three Stooges, apparently sourced from this website:  http://web2.airmail.net/~/z1528052/  (scroll down the page and look for the photograph directly under the headline 'MY PAL MOE by Bob Bernet' when the main story begins).  Once a few observant people on the blogosphere pointed this out, the photograph mysteriously disappeared from most later episodes, with a subsequent 'scientific test' obscuring Moe's face, and reaching the conclusion (unsurprisingly) that Moe wasn't Hitler (or vice versa) after all.

I stress that I had absolutely nothing to do with that rather awkward segment, but it does rather help to display the level of academic rigour being used in these programmes - even the ones that don't involve aliens.

And no, they didn't find Hitler either, oddly enough.

Alasdair Brooks