David Mikkelson

David Mikkelson earned his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas (San Antonio) and took post-graduate classes at California State University, Northridge without a specific degree plan.

David's early career consisted of working at the News-Chronicle (newspaper), Teledyne Electronics, the U.S. Postal Service, JPL, Digital Equipment Corporation, Rocketdyne, and Health Net (HMO).

In 1994, David Mikkelson created what became Snopes.com, an urban folklore web site that grew to encompass a wide range of subjects and quickly became a resource to which Internet users began submitting pictures and stories of questionable veracity. According to David's ideology, Snopes.com antedated the search engine concept where people could go to check facts by quick searches - Snopes appeared to be a premature, rather urban legend focused, version of search results of user discussions.

In popular culture, a television pilot based on David's site, Snopes.com, called Snopes: Urban Legends, was completed with American actor Jim Davidson as host. However, it did not air on major networks.

David has spoken as an expert on the impact of fake news and investigative journalism at events such as Tech Open Air Berlin and in talks with foreign officials and journalists organized by the U.S. State Department, and he and his work have been featured in news outlets such as CNN, The New York Times, Forbes, and Fortune.

By mid-2014, Barbara Mikkelson had not written for the site "in several years," and David Mikkelson hired employees to assist him from Snopes.com's message board. The Mikkelsons divorced around the same time, and Barbara no longer has an ownership stake in Snopes.com. David writes routinely on Snopes.