We check the popular story about the psychologist James Rogers, whose methodology was banned, and he himself was sentenced to death.

In May 2013, a story about the American psychologist Dr. James Rogers and his Massachusetts experiment began to go in Runet. It began like this: “Dr. James Rogers is captured in the photo. In 1965, he was sentenced to execution in an electric chair for the so-called "Massachusetts experiment", but two days before the execution, being in the cell, he committed suicide, poisoned by the cyanide of potassium, the ampoule of which one of his patients brought him. "

Further in the text, the details of the methodology of Dr. Rogers were given. Allegedly, he strengthened the paranoia of patients so much that its new round corrected the previous one. “In other words, if a person believed that beetles crawl around him everywhere, Dr. Rogers told him that it was so. The whole world is covered with beetles. Some particularly sensitive people see them, the rest are so accustomed to this that they simply do not notice them. The state knows everything, but keeps it secret in order to prevent panic. The man went completely confident that everything was in order with him, humbled himself and tried not to notice Zhukov. After some time, he most often stopped seeing them. ”

But American colleagues did not appreciate the innovative approach. The experiment was allegedly considered inhuman, Dr. Rogers - Charlatan. And they sentenced the poor man to the highest extent. He abandoned the last word, handed the judge a letter, after which he committed suicide. The story was completed by a touching paragraph from the mentioned letter: “Living in harmony with your faith - you are completely healthy, but you should start protecting your point of view - how faith in God will make you kill, faith in the UFO - be afraid of the abduction, faith in the coffee in the morning - will become the center of your universe and destroy your life. The physicist will begin to give you the arguments that the sky is not blue, and the biologist will prove that the grass is not green. In the end, you will be left alone with an empty, cold and completely unknown world that our world is most likely. So it does not matter what ghosts you inhabit your world. While you believe in them - they exist until you fight with them - they are not dangerous ”(in all quotes the spelling of the original is preserved).

An elementary check immediately shows that the whole story is invented from beginning to end. There was neither such a doctor, nor such an experiment. In addition, there are no traces of this story on the English Internet. And the photo shows a journalist and writer Hunter Thompson. The first refutations on the network date back to the same 2013. However, they did not prevent the story from being viral, gaining tens of thousands of reposts and becoming one of the most popular fakes in the history of Runet. It can be found even in one book This Doctor of Law.

It is interesting that dozens, if not hundreds of users of social networks and blogs, published a story without links to the source, on their own behalf, actually stealing someone else's text. And over and over again they received a hot response of the audience and called a new wave of reposts. And it was not difficult to find the author. The original text appeared on May 21, 2013 in Facebook by Muscovite Alexander Shamarin. This is how the author himself a week later Explained Its creation:

Another interesting point is connected with this text. The fact is that when I tried to find the same starting post on Facebook by Shamarin, I was not failing - it was not there. As a result, I decided to contact the author and directly ask him the question. It turned out that Alexander himself did not know that there was no more original post. He proposed a completely plausible explanation for this. Probably, many complaints came to the post, and the Facebook administration deleted it. And numerous clones still live, because, apparently, there were no complaints about them or there were not enough.