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my summary, but it is now a well known hoax.

Your summary is indeed a simplfied version of Creationisy dishonesty.

Then some college professor had the kids to do the same research, as a hands on type thing.

Creationst Urban myth appealing to "ordinary people can prove pointy head evolutionists wrong" yokel school

They found that pepper moth don't rest on tree trunks

When baking a lie, Creationists add a levnening of truth to make the lie rise.

Science is more complicated than the Creationist misrepresentation

First, Wells argues that the story is seriously flawed because "peppered moths in the wild don't even rest on tree trunks" (Wells, 2000:138). He repeats this point throughout the chapter. However, it is both false and irrelevant, and only serves as a distraction to lead the reader away from the actual story of the moths. Contrary to Wells's assertions, data given by Majerus (1998:123) indicate that the moths do indeed rest on the trunks of trees 25% of the time. The rest of the time moths rest in branches (25%) or at branch-trunk junctions (50%). The facts have been pointed out repeatedly to Wells; his response has been mostly to claim that moths don't rest on "exposed" tree trunks (Wells, 2002 web posting). But this is not what he said in the text of Icons, which remains flatly wrong. Moths are found all over trees, which is not a surprise (Clarke et al., 1994) and it is mentioned in the references that Wells cites. To clear up any confusion, no researcher doubts that the peppered moth rests in trees (Clarke et al. 1994; Majerus 1998), which means that the resting substrate is bark. Entire trees are stained by pollution -- the leaves, twigs, branches, trunks, and the surrounding ground (Kettlewell, 1973) -- and so the colors of the moths are relevant no matter where on the tree they rest -- trunks, trunk-branch junctions, branches, twigs, and even the leaves. Wells's argument implies that predatory birds can only see moths that are on exposed trunks. By making this argument, however, Wells shows an apparent ignorance of the ecology of birds and woodland ecosystems. If you walk into any forest, you can see that the birds fly from tree to tree, branch to branch, and hunt at all levels of the forest. Woodland species of birds that prey on moths and other insects live and hunt in the canopy (the leafy part of the trees). These birds are not hunting from outside, soaring above the trees like hawks, as Wells's argument would require. In the scientific literature, there is extensive discussion of the hunting behavior of birds, including those that hunt peppered moths. Ornithologists have shown the woodland ecosystem to be vertically stratified by competition between different bird species. This zonation means that there are skilled predators patrolling all levels of the forest: the trunks, trunk-branch joints, branches, and higher canopy (Colquhoun and Morley 1943; Hartley 1953). Further, birds learn to distinguish their prey against various backgrounds and preferentially hunt prey in locations where they have found it in the past and that birds selectively prey on the more visible moths (Pietrewitz and Kamil 1977, 1981). In other words, birds hunt the prey they can see and hunt it where it is, not where it isn't. Therefore, no matter where the moth rests in the tree, it is visible to predatory birds, and thus its differential camouflage is important. The purpose of Wells's distraction is to put the actual experiments into question and make it sound as if the textbook authors are either mistaken, or intentionally trying to fool students. The insinuation is that because Kettlewell released the moths during the day, they did not find "normal" resting places. Whether or not this is so, the release and capture experiments took place over a number of days, so the moths were able to take up positions of their choosing, even if the first day was not perfectly "natural" (Kettlewell, 1955, 1956, 1973). Kettlewell's experiments were not perfect -- few field experiments are -- and they may have magnified the degree of selection, but all serious researchers in the field agree that they were certainly not so flawed as to invalidate his conclusion.
The story of the peppered moth

" The very prominence of the peppered moth story in the teaching of evolution requires that it be scrupulously accurate. According to Grant and Howlett, “as Biston betularia has served as a paradigm of evolution, it demands the closest possible scrutiny” (Grant and Howlett 1988, p. 231). Yet this classical story of evolution by natural selection, as it continues to be retold in many textbooks, is seriously flawed. In particular, the illustrations which typically accompany the story (like the photographs in Figure 1) mislead students by portraying peppered moths on tree trunks where they do not normally rest. Unknown to Kettlewell, his experiments had less to do with natural selection than with unnatural selection, and the true causes of industrial melanism in peppered moths remain largely unknown. "

-Jonathan Wells, Ph.D. Department of Molecular & Cell Biology University of California, Berkeley, California, USA

I may have got the story a little screwed up, but the gist of it is that the old peppered moth story is not very accurate either. And the facts don't prove what they said they did.