A word of caution: this story catalogues an avalanche of North Korea rumors that are largely false, with the remaining being barely credible. If something is true, we'll flag it for you. Such is the reality of North Korea rumors.

This Christmas, while many of us enjoy time with our families and exchange gifts, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un will sit at the head of a long, exquisite table, eating his way through plates of Emmentaler and guzzling cobra wine. Or maybe he'll be pondering which relative he should feed to a pack of starving, bloodthirsty hounds.

Actually, we have no idea what Jong-un's holiday will look like.

North Korea is a mysterious, secretive, militarized real-life Potemkin Village with a nuclear weapons program. The lack of credible information coming out of the country creates an information vacuum that drives a thriving rumor mill. The result is news and reports about the country that are often no better than the Democratic People's Republic Of Korea's own propaganda.

Our suspicions and fears about North Korea are projected back to us in a barrage of thinly-sourced, viral media reports. Often fantastic and frequently false, North Korea rumors gain momentum as they move westward from points of origin in South Korea, Japan and China. They morph and converge as news sites and cable channels pick them up and disseminate them.

Just since October the North Korea rumor mill has churned out dubious claims that Jong-un is addicted to Swiss cheese, contracted gout, broke both ankles due to his fondness for high heels, and drinks snake wine to restore his virility. There were also reports of him being deposed in a coup, and that his ascension to power was accompanied by an edict that anyone with same name as him needed to change it. These aren't even all of the rumors of the past two and a half months.

It doesn't help that accurate stories about the country are almost stranger than fiction — such as North Korea's reaction to Sony Pictures' stoner-comedy The Interview. In June, North Korea warned that the release of the Seth Rogen/James Franco film — with its Kim Jong-un assassination plot — would be considered an "act of war." (By that standard, Team America: World Police is a genocidal war crime.)

Hackers later infiltrated Sony Pictures and released a trove of confidential and embarrassing documents. Those same hackers then warned of 9/11-style attacks during the opening of the film. When a number of theaters pulled out, Sony Pictures subsequently cancelled the theatrical release. The FBI has since named North Korea as the likely culprits. And though the country officially denies involvement, they couldn't help declaring that the hack was a "righteous deed."

Even with the FBI's statement, some information security experts are still highly skeptical that North Korea is behind the Sony hack. It again shows how any news involving the hermit kingdom is bound to be accompanied by rumors and confusion.

"With the rise of the Internet, information and misinformation have proliferated about North Korea, along with the ability to store and recall all of that information quickly," writes David Straub, a former Korean affairs director at the U.S. State Department who now works at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. "The result has been an exponential increase in the number of people throughout the world producing, circulating and consuming any information even remotely plausible about North Korea, and the established media in turn report on what those people are saying."

This abundance of people proffering rumors, and of journalists ready to publish them, has helped North Korea become the beating heart of a burgeoning rumor economy. As the Washington Post's Max Fisher puts it, "There's no other country to which we bring such a high degree of gullibility."

This year was perhaps the best ever for the North Korean rumor economy, which is to say, the worst.

Anatomy Of A Rumor Economy

Who powers all of this? The North Korea rumor economy has a dizzying array of sources: North Korean ex-pats who make a living offering information; paid sources inside the country who risk their lives to leak reports; intelligence agencies, particularly the one in South Korea, that plant stories about North Korea in the press; academics, think tanks and other self-styled experts who are sought out by media to try and read the tea leaves when something happens (or doesn't happen); politicians with an interest in isolating or agitating the secretive country; journalists who can't resist a good, crazy North Korea rumor; and, finally, us.

Yes, us.

We're the ones who will see a claim about Jong-un's Emmantaler addiction and read it with a smile or scowl, and pass it on. The eager audience for North Korea rumors helps drive their creation and propagation.

As with any economy, money is a factor driving the North Korean rumor mill. A recent report by the Associated Press quoted leaders of a North Korea defectors' groups detailing how they gather information about their former country. In most cases, they cultivate sources back home who risk torture and execution to sneak out information through late night or early morning cellphone calls.

"They definitely do it for the money," Kim Seong-Min, who runs free North Korea Radio, told the AP — noting that compensation can sometimes take the form of cash or gifts of electronics.

Kim Seong-Min was unconcerned about the onslaught of rumors, provided they paint the dictatorship in a negative light. "There are lots of stories about North Korea, and I think all of them are good as long as they don't praise that country," he said. "I think they will help people understand the North's dictatorship."

Kim Heung Kwang, a defector who runs an organization called North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity, told the AP he typically pays $50 to $100 for information, but ups it when a bonus is warranted. (He said he paid out roughly $3,000 to two informants who provided accurate information about a currency revaluation in 2009.)

These informants and other players are capitalizing on a hunger for information, not to mention heavy doses of fear and a lurid curiosity when it comes to the country.

"Because North Korea is a black box, mostly closed to outside view, almost anyone can get away with claiming that he or she is an expert," writes Straub. "There are also many governments, groups and individuals that have axes to grind. Ignorance, wishful thinking and even disinformation are all too common when reporting on North Korea."

Rumors, be they about North Korea or other things around us, are also an inseparable part of the human experience. Decades of research by psychologists and sociologists has found that rumors naturally emerge in times of uncertainly and anxiety. We invent and propagate them as part of a process of trying to make sense of situations we otherwise can't.

"I think of course uncertainty is part of the picture [of North Korea rumors] because there is so little information that comes out of North Korea," says Nick DiFonzo, a psychology professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology who researches rumors. "Because [Jong-un] is considered to be, and rightly so, the head of a rogue state and he does all these bad things people have some anxiety about him."

Uncertainty and anxiety alone don't account for the many stories that ridicule Jong-un and his country. DiFonzo says those may relate to what psychologists call "intergroup differentiation motive." We want to confirm how different we are from Jong-un and his way of life. DiFonzo says crazy North Korea rumors are often an expression us telling ourselves, "We are different from them; our way of life is better than their way of life or his way of life."

And yet, when actual, credible information is released, we don't pay attention. In February the UN released a detailed report of outrageous human rights violations in North Korea. It found ongoing crimes including "extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation."

But, hey, did you hear that Kim Jong-un declared that men in the country had to get the same haircut as him? That false rumor spread widely the month after the U.N. report.

Not Letting North Korea Go To The Dogs

In early January a false claim emerged that Jong-un, possibly in a drunken rage, had his uncle Jang Song Thaek stripped naked and fed to a starving pack of 120 dogs. No, that never happened, but it wasn't the machinations of journalism that separated fact from fiction.

The story rocketed around the web. It's still in its uncorrected original form on credible sites such as NBC News. They, like many others, attributed the report to Hong Kong tabloid Wen Wei Po, which carried a story on December 12. NBC buttressed its reporting by quoting a nameless "senior" U.S. official who said, "This is not ringing any bells here."

It did, however ring a bell for Trevor Powell, a Chicago software engineer. He tracked back the original claim to December 11. It had come from Pyongyang Choi Seongho, a famous Chinese satirist who made it up. (As The Guardian reported at the time, the background image on Seongho's profile on a Chinese social networking site "shows a cartoon Kim Jong-un standing on a balcony flanked by military aides, his arms raised and his middle fingers extended." To be clear, it's not a real photo.)

The Hong Kong tabloid published his post pretty much word-for-word, and it soon made its way into the English-language press.

This false rumor contained many of the characteristics of the typical, viral North Korea claim: it originated with a story in the Asian press that included unnamed sources; it portrayed the country and its leader in a decidedly negative light (to say the least); and it had a connection to a real event.

In this case, Jong-un had in fact purged his uncle in December. Thaek was executed, but dogs played no part in his killing. The news of his fate was confirmed by a North Korea state news agency article that lambasted Thaek as a "traitor for all ages," and went on to denounce his "intrigues and despicable methods":

The accused Jang brought together undesirable forces and formed a faction as the boss of a modern day factional group for a long time and thus committed such hideous crime as attempting to overthrow the state by all sorts of intrigues and despicable methods with a wild ambition to grab the supreme power of our party and state.

The language was reminiscent of the official statement North Korea issued when Western sanctions prevented the country from importing… ski lifts:

This is an intolerable mockery of the social system and the people of the DPRK and a serious human rights abuse that politicizes sports and discriminates against the Koreans.

North Korea's verifiable actions are often deplorable, and the fact that these actions (and reactions) are articulated using its unique brand of over-the-top communist propagandese causes many to shake their heads, or to engage in outright mockery:

When the country isn't issuing condemnations of purged elites, complaining about forbidden ski lifts, or threatening World War III, it's getting caught Photoshopping military exercises in an attempt to inflate its hovercraft arsenal. The mixture of genuine threat and laughable incompetence shapes our perceptions, and opens the door for greater lies and claims to take hold in our imaginations. It creates ideal conditions for rumors that paint the country in a negative and often mocking light.

Writing about the eaten-by-dogs rumor in the Washington Post, Fisher explains: "The fact that the Western media have so widely accepted a story they would reject if it came out of any other country tells us a lot about how North Korea is covered — and how it's misunderstood."

Take for example the relationship between Jong-un and pseudo-ambassador Dennis Rodman. Rodman is a former NBA player who is better known for appearances on reality TV, stints in rehab, and a very brief marriage to Carmen Electra.

He has made multiple visits to the country, and is treated like a combination of star and diplomat. After spending time with Jong-un, this time with a VICE camera crew in tow, Rodman told the leader he has a "friend for life." Rodman returned in January of this year to play an exhibition basketball game and then sang "Happy Birthday" to Jong-un.

It's not just their strange basketball diplomacy, every interaction North Korea has with the rest of the world is filled with absurd, over-the-top language. In August, two months after warning of grave geopolitical consequences over a buddy comedy, North Korea labeled U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry a "wolf" with a "hideous lantern jaw." In a state news agency article quoted by The South China Morning Post, a spokesman continued with the insults: "His behaviour fully revealed once again the U.S. inveterate nature as a hypocrite who has deceived and mocked mankind with all sorts of gimmicks."

The attacks on Kerry relate to another key contributor to the North Korea rumor economy: enemies. They have lots of them, and one in particular regularly plants rumors about the country and its leader.

The Information War

Technically, South Korea and North Korea are still at war. Propaganda is therefore a natural part of the confrontation. It manifests in ongoing efforts by South Korean intelligence to plant misinformation about its northern neighbor.

Fisher, the Washington Post reporter who writes frequently about North Korea, recounted a meeting last year with a South Korean Embassy official. The official had contacted him to say he had new and sensitive information about Jong-un's wife. They met and out came the goods:

It looked like something a high school student had put together. Each page had publicly available KCNA (Korean Central News Agency) photos of Ri, blurry insets zooming in on some particular piece of clothing or jewelry, and then a paragraph or two speculated on the brand and price. It was interlaced with this strange invective about how Ri claimed to be a woman of the people (does she?) but was actually living a very comfortable life.

That anecdote comes from Justin Rohrlich's report about North Korean rumors published by North Korea News, a credible source of reporting on the country. The article also quotes Bruce Cumings, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, about the role played by intelligence operations and planted stories in generating North Korea rumors.

"I would say that leaking falsely-crafted intelligence on the North Korean leadership to journalists has been standard operating procedure for the ROK [South Korean] embassies around the world and the ROK intelligence services, for as long as North Korea has existed," he told North Korea News.

Rohrlich writes, "Without any way to confirm much of what we hear about the daily machinations going on within North Korea's borders," many rumors take hold and aren't refuted.

That was never more true than when Jong-un disappeared from public view for more than a month this fall.

The Supreme Leader's Limp

On September 3rd, Jong-un attended a concert with his wife. Then he wasn't seen again in public until October 13th. As the days and weeks passed, speculation and press coverage built to a frenzy.

A key focus was the fact that a July video of Jong-un showed him walking with a limp while taking part in a ceremony marking the death of his grandfather. The state-sanctioned voiceover for the video, as translated by a South Korean newspaper, described him as "our marshal, who lights the path of leadership for the people like a flame" and noted that he "was not feeling well."

So what had caused Jong-un's disappearance in September? No one knew, and yet everyone had a theory.

Two weeks after the concert video, British tabloid the Daily Mirror kicked the crazy speculation into overdrive by reporting that Jong-un's limp and disappearance were the result of ill health brought on by on by an addiction to Emmentaler cheese:

Portly despot Kim Jong-un is absolutely crackers — about Swiss cheese.

The tubby North Korean dictator has become hooked on Emmental and has gorged on so much that he has ballooned in size and is now walking with a limp.

The next day, fellow tabloid the Daily Star delivered perhaps the most notable North Korea rumor headline of the year: "Fat dictator Kim Jong-un dying from cheese addiction."

It mocked the dictator, declared something unknown as completely true, and exaggerated the truth at the center of the rumor. (Suddenly a limp means he's dying?)

The narrative was set: Jong-un's decadent lifestyle was doing him in. In a country where people are starving, the fat dictator is gorging himself on decadent food and now he's gotten his comeuppance.

Days later, South Korea's Yonhap News Agency cited an anonymous source claiming Jong-un had gout. The dubious cheese addiction claim was folded right into stories about that rumor. Why Swiss cheese? Earlier this year it was reported that North Korea was sending experts to attend a French school to learn about the production of fine cheese, a claim the school denied. It also dovetails with another claim that Jong-un acquired a taste for Emmentaler while attending boarding school in Switzerland.

Soon, it was speculated that Jong-un had diabetes and drank too much wine. On September 26th, the state news agency acknowledged that Jong-un was ill, but gave no details. Days later, South Korean newspaper the Chosun Ilbo reported he had in fact broken both ankles and required surgery. This fit with the theories about his excessive weight gain due to decadent eating habits.

Suddenly, everything came together into one convenient rumor: Jong-un is putting on weight due to his appetite for cheese and wine, which caused additional stress on his ankles due to his fondness for height-increasing high heeled shoes. This resulted in two fractured ankles.

Voila.

Except there were also rumors that he had been deposed in a coup, that his sister had taken over the country in his absence and that, and that, no, he'd actually hurt his leg during military exercises.

Finally, on October 13th, North Korea reported his reemergence. According to the Associated Press this enabled the "country's massive propaganda apparatus to resume doing what it does best — glorify the third generation of the Kim family to rule — and will tamp down, at least for the moment, rumors of coups and serious health problems."

Things did quiet down, for at least a few weeks.

Then, returning to the well, British tabloid the Daily Star claimed that Jong-un's weight gain was hindering him in the bedroom. So now he had taken to drinking snake wine in an effort to perform better. "Kim Jong-un necks litres of rare SNAKE wine because he's too fat to please his wife," read the headline.

"The elite in the country joke that he is too big to please his wife and that's why they do not have any other children," said an anonymous "North Korea expert."

The rumor was picked up by other news outlets in the UK and India, and by a beverage industry trade publication.

"The leader is said to have recently developed a taste for French cheese and Johnnie Walker whisky, which has made him so fat he's fractured his ankles," wrote the Drinks Business.

Sure, close enough.

Correction: This article originally stated that North Korea had nuclear weapons. While the country is stockpiling weapons materials and has completed three nuclear weapons tests, it's more accurate to say that it has a nuclear weapons program. The extent to which they have functioning weapons is, like many things about the country, not completely clear.