Best Hoaxes in History!

Is there anyone who doesn't appreciate a good practical joke? Well, maybe there are a few tight butts out there who do not. All of us have been either the recipient or the giver of a practical joke. For example, I once "Spongebobbed" a colleague's desk (by gift wrapping everything with Spongebob SquarePants wrapping paper). I must admit, it was pretty ingenious and everyone found it hilarious - and it wasn't even April Fool's Day. A friend of mine boxed a co-worker's desk to make it look like a giant Rubik's Cube. Very clever.  Even this past April 1, a couple of students attempted prank me - to no avail. They're so young. But it did get me questioning: "What are some of the best hoaxes ever pulled?" There have been many pranks and hoaxes pulled over the years (some dating as far back as the 1st century) and quite a number of them stick out as being unbelievably brilliant, because they have fooled so many people.

Here's my top ten list of the all-time greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public in no particular order:

1. The Cardiff Giant: One of the earliest hoaxes of modern times is the Cardiff Giant. In 1869, workers digging a well near Cardiff, New York unearthed a massive 10-foot tall statue of a giant that many believed at the time was a "petrified man" and evidence that a biblical passage (Genesis 6:4) was true. This passage mentions that there were giants that once roamed the Earth. However, the "petrified man" actually turned out to be the brainchild of one George Hull, an atheist and tobacconist from New York City who was intent on besting a Christian fundamentalist with whom he had argued over the biblical passage. Hull hired a stonemason to carve the image of a man out of a massive piece of gypsum and had it buried it on the farm of his cousin, William Newell. It was "discovered" there a year later and for the next few years, served as a source of income for Newell - who charged people a quarter to see it. Hull made an incredible business deal when he sold his part-interest in the statue to a syndicate of five men for $23,000 (equivalent to $429,000 in 2014) - ten times the amount he had spent on the hoax! In the end, however, the scammers were scammed themselves when none other than the famous showman, P.T. Barnum, made his own copy of the Cardiff Giant and declared Newell's a fake. The case ended up in court, with Hull admitting to the fake and both statues being declared a hoax by the courts.

2. The Loch Ness Monster "Surgeon's Photo": It's not so difficult to accept that the most famous photo of the Loch Ness Monster ever taken turned out to the be a fake; what's hard to understand is how it took sixty years to figure that out. Supposedly taken by Robert Kenneth Wilson, a London gynecologist, the photo (left) was published in the Daily Mail on April 21, 1934. The "Surgeon's Photograph" purported to be the first photo of a "head and neck" of Nessie. In reality, it was a toy submarine bought from F.W. Woolworths with a head and neck made of plastic wood, built by Christian Spurling, the son-in-law of Marmaduke Wetherell, a big game hunter who had been publicly ridiculed in the Daily Mail, the newspaper that employed him. Spurling claimed that to get revenge, Wetherell perpetrated the hoax, with the help of Spurling (who made a deathbed confession to the hoax in 1994, thus solving the mystery), his son Ian Marmaduke, who bought the material for the fake, and Maurice Chambers (an insurance agent), who asked Dr. Wilson to offer the pictures to the Daily Mail. The admission that the photo was a hoax didn't hurt the beastie's reputation however, and she (or he?) remains as popular as ever.

3. The Alien Autopsy Film: In one of the most brazen - and relatively successful - hoaxes ever, London-based film producer Ray Santilli presented a grainy black and white film footage that purported to show a dead alien (supposedly from the Roswell crash - but that's another story) undergoing an autopsy. The 17-minute film surfaced in the 1990s, and Santilli claimed he had received it from an unidentified, former military cameraman. Though the footage was at first hailed by many in the UFO community as authentic, a number of discrepancies regarding the footage soon came to light (some of the discrepancies were pointed out by modern forensic experts who had knowledge about autopsy procedures) which, along with Santilli's hesitancy to have the film tested and other evasions, made it appear increasingly dubious.  Since then the film has been thoroughly debunked, though Santilli didn't suffer from the hoax after he made a spoof of the hoax in a 2006 British comedy.

4.  Orson Welles's 1938 War of the Worlds Broadcast: Orson Welles was a virtually unknown 23-year old radio producer working out of New York City in 1938 when he directed the radio adaptation of H.G. Wells's famous novel, War of the Worlds on Halloween Eve. Despite the fact that Orson Welles inserted two disclaimers that the broadcast was fictional, thousands missed them and believed the story of a Martian invasion was real. While reports of the extent of the ensuing panic has been traditionally overstated, what can't be overstated is that it made the young man an overnight celebrity and skyrocketed him to fame. He went on to become an acclaimed producer, director, and actor until his death in 1985, but in all that time he never repeated the broadcast again (although recordings of it have been rebroadcast for years since and the complete broadcast can be found on YouTube). What's different about this hoax compared to others is that this hoax was completely unintentional, making it the most successful inadvertent hoax of all time.

5. Cottingley Fairies:  It all began back in 1917 when two English girls, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, decided to have some fun by cutting pictures of fairies out of a popular children's book of the era and mounting them on pins, after which they took photos of them. Not surprisingly, they looked pretty flat, but they were apparently convincing enough that the photos - there were five in all - became quite a sensation in England at the time (which was probably looking for a distraction from all the depressing war news). The pictures eventually came to the attention of author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was an ardent spiritualist. He promptly proclaimed them authentic, which set off a firestorm of debate and in the end, badly tarnishing the brilliant man's post mortem reputation. The hoax was finally and utterly exposed in 1983 when in a magazine article, the women admitted to faking the photos, although strangely Frances insisted that at least one of the five photos was authentic. What's even more curious is how they managed to fool so many people for so many years, especially as the book the figures were cut from was readily available for comparison.

6. Piltdown Man: The never ending quest to locate the famous "missing link" that is supposed to conclusively tie man to the ape bit science in the butt back in 1912 when fragments of a skull and a jaw bone were discovered in a gravel pit near Piltdown, England. Claimed to be the missing link by many reputable scientists, in 1953, it was determined to be a cleverly aged human skull that had been attached to the jaw of an orangutan and imbedded with the teeth of a chimpanzee. Who actually produced the forgery (and why) remains a mystery to this day, but that they managed to keep scientists on the run for over forty years has to be considered one of the great feats of the century - and possibly the reason scientists don't talk as much about finding missing links nowadays.

7. Hitler's Diaries: This one was truly a work of art. In April 1983, the West German news magazine Stern published excerpts from what purported to be the diaries of Adolf Hitler, known as the Hitler Diaries, which were subsequently revealed to be forgeries. The magazine had paid nearly 9 million German marks (US $3.8m) for the sixty small books, plus a "special volume" about Rudolf Hess's flight to the United Kingdom, covering the period from 1932 to 1945. These books were quickly discovered to be the work of a notorious Stuttgart forger, Konrad Kujau, who was known for his ability to mimic Hitler's handwriting. What gave it away? The "diaries" were written on modern paper using modern ink, and included a number of historical inaccuracies. Kujau went on trial in 1984, was convicted and sentenced to 42 months in prison for forgery and embezzlement and I'm certain some executive at Stern lost his much anticipated Christmas bonus for this screw up.

8. Crop Circles: While there is evidence that at least a few crop circles (those mysterious little swirls of stomped wheat that appears with some regularity in English fields each summer) do exhibit some true physiological anomalies, the fact is that most of them are hoaxes. This wasn't entirely clear until 1991, when British farmers Doug Bowers and Dave Chorley - two men with way too much times on their hands - came forward to admit that they had been making the circles themselves and even demonstrated how they did it using ropes and wooden planks. Of course, there were far too many circles for too many years for them to have been responsible for more than a fraction of them, but to the science community, that was proof enough that it was all a hoax. Since then, there are even clubs that have formed dedicated to besting other crop circle clubs in producing the most sophisticated and complex circles imaginable. It's become quite the art form. But when will extraterrestrials fess up to doing some of the circles?

9. Zionist Protocols: Ever wonder where Hitler and the rest of the Nazis got their insane ideas about the Jews from? It might be in part due to a document that surfaced in Russia in 1905. Entitled The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the document outlined the "super-secret" Jewish plan for world domination. Of course, it was a complete fake - as demonstrated in 1921 by a London Times reporter who demonstrated it to have been largely plagiarized from a 1864 satirical novel - which matters very little to those who are looking for a reason to hate. In fact, it became a major fuel for anti-Semitism throughout the 20th century and was even used as a justification by Hitler for his gas chambers. To this day, it remains a popular book in much of the Middle East and can even be found on Amazon. The lesson to be learned here is that one must be careful about writing satirical literature for one never knows what morons will do with it in the future.

10. The Man Who Never Was (Operation Mincemeat): Who says hoaxing can't be useful, especially in wartime? Not the British, who, during World War II, decided to confuse the Germans by taking the body of a deceased pneumonia victim, dressing him in a Royal Marine Uniform, handcuffing him to a briefcase full of "top secret" invasion plans, and setting him adrift off the coast of Sicily. The payoff? The Italians found the body and turned the briefcase over to their German allies, who learned from it that the allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia rather than Sicily. The only problem was the allies had no such intention, making the landings in southern Italy

Dishonorable Mentions: The Beatles "Paul is Dead" Hoax (the belief that the Beatles hid secret messages regarding the death of Paul McCartney that can only be heard if certain records are played backwards); William Mumler (the first name to make a living successfully hoaxing pictures of "ghosts"); Douglas Corrigan (an American pilot who claims he got lost over New York City and "accidentally" flew to Ireland, making him the second man to make a solo crossing of the Atlantic and earning him the lifetime moniker of "Wrong Way Corrigan"); and, of course, Balloon Boy (the Colorado dad who falsely reported his son was trapped in a flying-saucer shaped helium balloon in an effort to get his own reality TV show - what a douche!). 

Well done to all the hoaxsters, except balloon boy's dad.  I applaud your efforts, except balloon boy's dad.

A full list of hoaxes and pranks can be found on the Museum of Hoaxes website. It's a great site for killing time.