Urban legends and the propagation of rumors

So now I am reading this and I am thinking there must be some urban legend to it. First, there is no real date, there is no author and I find somewhat too weird for a researcher to wait for 20 years to make a finding of some sort. It has all the making of some type of urban legend. In order to find out if it is, I generally use google and type some of the words in the story, if the first three links have hoaxes in it, it most certainly is one. Three sites show up generally: snopes, Hoaxbusters and hoaxbuster, a french resource on hoaxes. I tried the words "1245 of them" and the first one that comes up is this. So I went for the book on amazon and read the customer reviews. By this time, I am pretty much convinced this is a hoax. This is not so bad because in this case, everybody really wants to believe in this story, except that sometimes the propagation of rumors has a direct negative impact on someone, countries or companies. I found a lot of good reference to the propagation of rumors here. What I find fascinating when I read the book of Kapferer is the ability of these stories to change while remaining as potent as the initial rumor.