Walt Disney Studios faked footage in a 1958 film that created the “lemmings-to-the-sea-myth,” which portrays lemmings as mindless creatures that solve overpopulation by diving off cliffs in mass suicides, scientists said.

The hoax led to the term “like a lemming” for people who follow the crowd into self-destructive acts, and planted one of the most stubborn myths in science.

“The Disney movie was a fake,” Dr. Heikki Henttonen said in an interview. He is a rodent population expert with the Finnish Forest Research Institute in Vantaa.

“An irritating one to zoologists,” he added, “not only because the behavior was faked, but they used a wrong species. Disgusting.”

Dr. Oliver Glig, a specialist in population biology at the University of Helsinki, agreed.

“Disney studios wanted to produce a film showing this mass suicide, but since they could not film it in the wild, they paid young Inuits from Barrow, Alaska, one dollar per animal to trap lemmings,” he said in an interview.

Dr. Glig headed a new study of lemming population booms and busts published today in the journal Science. Lemmings are mouselike rodents native to arctic regions.

It concluded that predators like arctic foxes and snowy owls - rather than overcrowding or food shortages - cause periodic crashes in lemming populations. Lemmings go through a four-year cycle in which populations explode, reaching hundreds of times original levels, and then crash.

Ecologists have spent 50 years searching for an explanation, partly because lemmings can be used as models for behavior in more complex animals.

The study makes no reference to the movie, White Wilderness, part of Disney s “True Life Adventure” series and still sold today in VHS format. But the topic arose during interviews this week with the researchers and other scientists.

White Wilderness was filmed in Alberta, Canada, which is not a native area for lemmings and has no outlet to the sea. Film makers supposedly put the purchased lemmings on a snow-covered lazy-Susan wheel, and spun it to create the illusion of frenzied behavior. Then they herded the animals off a river bank for the “lemmings-to-the-sea” scene.

“Although we have been unable to accurately determine exactly what techniques were used in producing White Wilderness in 1958, standards and techniques for film making were very different 40 years ago,” said Rena Langley, of Walt Disney World Public Affairs. “Today s Disney animal films are produced in cooperation with the American Humane Association and the highest standards of animal welfare are maintained,” she added.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. ran an expose on the film in 1983. Dr. Henttonen told the story in a 1993 science book. It s sprinkled among “urban myths” on some Internet sites. Riley Woodford, of the Alaska Department of Wildlife, authored an article on the topic in the current issue of the department s magazine.

Despite repeated efforts at debunking, the myth retains a huge following, experts said.

“I assumed the myth was true,” Mr. Woodford said in an interview. “When I read of the fake documentary, I was pretty surprised. Many, many people believe the myth. Certainly some scenes in nature documentaries are staged. But faking an entire mythical event is something else.”

Dr. Glig pointed out that some school science textbooks still present it as fact.

Like many myths, this one does have some basis in fact, Dr. Peter J. Hudson, an expert at the Pennsylvania State University, said in an interview.

In what he termed “incredible behavior,” lemmings in Norway and other regions migrate periodically, with huge masses of animals bubbling over the landscape. In the process, some are forced over cliffs or jump into rivers and lakes in order to swim across.

The migration occurs every 30 years, with another due any time, Dr. Glig noted.

First Published October 31, 2003, 12:09 p.m.