and then again appears. The assistant vanishes, and appears from some other place. The assistant vanishes, and reappears from a place which had remained in full view of the audience. The boy vanishes, and does not return. Accounts collected by Wiseman did not have any single account describing severing of the limbs of the magician's assistant. Perhaps more importantly, he found the more spectacular accounts were only given when the incident lay decades in the past. It is conceivable that in the witnesses' memory the rope trick merged with the basket trick. Citing their work, historian Mike Dash wrote in 2000: In 2008, a neuroscience paper suggested that the Indian rope trick may have "partially resulted from the misinformation effect." Explanation Hoax In his book on the topic, Peter Lamont claimed the story of the trick resulted from a hoax created by John Elbert Wilkie while working at the Chicago Tribune. Under the name "Fred S. Ellmore" ("Fred Sell More") Wilkie wrote of the trick in 1890, gaining the Tribune wide publicity. About four months later, the Tribune printed a retraction and proclaimed the story a hoax. The retraction received little attention, and in the following years many claimed to remember having seen the trick as far back as the 1870s. According to Lamont, none of these stories proved credible, but with every repetition the story became more widely believed despite being only a myth. Lamont also claimed that no mention appears in writing before the 1890 article. He argued that Ibn Battuta did report a magic trick with a thong, and Jahangir with a chain, not a rope, and the tricks they described are different from the "classic" Indian rope trick. He said that the descriptions of the trick in Yule's editions (1870s) of Marco Polo's book are not in the body of the work, but in a footnote by Yule, and only refer to these non-classic accounts. Lamont's popular but controversial work dismissed the accounts such as Shankara's and Melton's as irrelevant to his theme. This is because his book is not really about the trick itself, but about what he called the 20th-century legend of it being Indian, the fame of the trick, which peaked in the 1930s. It is this fame, chapter 8 of his book claimed, which originated from Wilkie's hoax. Magic techniques The magician John Nevil Maskelyne in 1912 reported a possible explanation for