On 16 January 1926, BBC Radio interrupted a broadcast of a speech from Edinburgh to give a special announcement: an angry mob of unemployed workers were running amok in London, looting and destroying everything in sight. Listeners were stunned. Anxiously they gathered around their radios to hear the frightening news. They heard that the National Gallery had been sacked and the Savoy Hotel blown up. The alarming reports continued with news that the Houses of Parliament were being attacked with trench mortars. More…

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The story of the Killer Hawk of Chicago is a classic tale of early 20th century American journalism. It involves a hawk that may or may not have terrorized the pigeon population of downtown Chicago. More…

On October 10, 1927, Dorothy Cochrane Logan entered the water at Cape Gris Nez, France. Her goal was to swim across the English Channel. Thirteen hours later she reappeared at Folkestone, England. Her time had set a new world record, for which a newspaper awarded her a prize of 1000 pounds. But a few days later Logan confessed her crossing had been a hoax. She had only spent four hours in the water. The rest of the time she had traveled on board a boat. She said that she perpetrated the hoax in order to demonstrate how simply the world could be fooled, and thus to underscore the necessity of supervising such swims. However, a member of her party, Lieutenant Commander L.S. M. Adam, later claimed she only confessed after he had demanded she do so. She was fined for perjury and returned the prize money. More…

Harry Reichenbach (1882-1931) was a publicist whose career spanned the early twentieth century. In his autobiography, he described a publicity stunt he devised early in his career that has since become a classic example of inventive (though misleading) low-budget promotion. He placed a large, transparent bowl filled with water in the window of a store and beside it placed a sign reading, "The only living Brazilian invisible fish." Soon a large crowd had gathered to see the invisible fish. More…

Joan Lowell claimed she grew up on her father's schooner, traveling the South Seas. She described her maritime adventures in The Cradle of the Deep, published in 1929. But in reality she grew up in Berkeley, California and had spent only a few months at sea. More…

A 1929 exhibition of Bruno Hat's paintings described him as a "newly discovered" artist who had recently moved from Lubeck to Clymping, Sussex, where his talent had been spotted while he was working in a general store. Exhibition guests received a pamphlet, "Approach to Hat," signed by "A.R. de T.", which declared that Hat was "the first signal of the coming world movement towards the creation of Pure Form." In reality, Hat was the creation of London socialite Brian Howard, designed as a spoof on abstract art. The London press played up the exhibition as "an amazing hoax on art experts." Though it's not clear if anyone was actually fooled. [Leicester Galleries]

Republican leaders throughout the United States received letters inviting them to a party at Cornell University in honor of the sesquicentennial birthday anniversary of Hugo Norris Frye, aka Hugo N. Frye. The letter explained that Hugo N. Frye had been one of the first organizers of the Republican party in New York State. None of the politicians could make it to the event, but almost all of them replied, expressing sincere admiration for Frye and their regret at not being able to attend. Unfortunately for the Republican leaders who responded, Hugo N. Frye did not exist. He was the satirical creation of two student editors at the Cornell Sun. Hugo N. Frye was shorthand for "You go and fry!" More…

Seagulls have learned that they can break open quahaugs (hard-shelled clams) by dropping them from great heights onto hard surfaces such as roads or rocks. This is a well-documented behavior. But in 1932, the Vineyard Gazette reported that seagulls at Martha's Vineyard had learned an even more remarkable trick. They were killing rats by deliberately dropping quahaugs on them, and then feasting on the dead rats. The Gazette claimed that the gulls would soar aloft to an unusual height with a heavy quahaug in their beaks, then would hover and shift their position, gauge the wind, and finally "drop the shellfish with a precision that almost never fails to connect with the rodent below, knocking it unconscious or killing it outright on the spot, whereupon the gulls descend and feast on fresh meat." These so-called "bomb-dropping sea gulls" gained wide coverage in the media. However, hoax-debunker Curtis MacDougall later cited the story as an example of the kind of tall tales that were frequently printed by small newspapers in the early 20th Century. The idea was to boost local tourism by getting the name of the town or region reported in papers nationwide.

In May 1932, Oscar Daubmann showed up in Germany, claiming he had spent the last sixteen years in a French prisoner-of-war camp. He told a dramatic tale of imprisonment and escape. He said he had been captured by the French in October 1916 at the Battle of the Somme and was placed in a prison camp. After killing a guard during an unsuccessful escape attempt, he was sentenced to 20 years hard labor and transferred to Algeria. There he was tortured, starved, and kept in solitary confinement. Finally, years later, he was transferred to the prison tailor shop on account of good behavior, and from there was able to make a successful escape. He walked 3000 miles along the coast and was picked up by an Italian steamer that took him to Naples. He then returned to Germany. More…

A book called Death in the Air: The War Diary and Photographs of a Flying Corps Pilot was published in 1933. It contained numerous pages of spectacular aerial photographs of World War One dogfights supposedly taken by a pilot in the Royal Air Force. Since very few photos of aerial fighting had been taken by the military, the photographs caused a great sensation. Interest in them grew even greater when they were exhibited at galleries in New York and Philadelphia. It wasn't until 1984 that the photos were discovered to be fake. More…

Theft is one of the classic and most-often-used tools in the toolbox of college pranksters. All manner of prized items are regularly spirited away at campuses throughout the world: statues, bells, trophies, road signs, etc. But precisely because theft is such an obvious form of pranksterism, it has an extra hurdle to overcome in order to achieve originality. Nevertheless, originality can be achieved in two ways — either through the ingenuity of the method of theft, or, as in the case of the Sacred Cod of Massachusetts, through the novelty of the object stolen. More…

A picture supposedly showing Adolf Hitler as a baby circulated widely throughout England and America. The child in the picture looked positively menacing. Its mouth was twisted into a sneer, and it scowled at the camera from dark, squinted eyes. A greasy mop of hair fell over its forehead. In reality, the photo did not show Baby Adolf. It was a doctored imagine of an American child who had no connection to Der Führer. More…

On November 12, 1933, Hugh Gray was walking back from church along the shore of Loch Ness when, so he later claimed, he saw an "object of considerable dimensions—making a big splash with spray on the surface" of the Loch. Luckily he had his camera with him, so he began snapping pictures. Only one of the pictures showed anything. Nessie believers hailed it as the first photographic evidence of the monster. Skeptics, however, dismissed it as a blurry mess that doesn't show anything at all. Many have suggested that it looks like a distorted image of a dog (perhaps Mr. Gray's own) carrying a stick in its mouth as it swims through water. More…

New York Times art editor Edward Alden Jewell, while judging the spring show of the National Academy of Design, singled out a work by new artist "A. Gamio" for special praise. The work, titled "Mrs. Katz of Venice, Cal," showed an old woman peering over the top of her spectacles while holding a magazine. The praise thrilled well-known artist Hugo Ballin, even though his own entry in the show had been dismissed by Jewell as "vulgar," because Ballin actually was "A. Gamio." He had submitted the work as a hoax to show that Jewell would praise any work done in the "modern" style.

Colonel Robert Wilson, a respected British surgeon, came forward with a picture that appeared to show a sea serpent rising out of the water of Loch Ness. Wilson claimed he had taken the photograph while driving along the northern shore of the Loch. For decades this photo was considered to be the best evidence of the existence of a sea monster in the Loch. But Wilson himself refused to have his name associated with it. Therefore it came to be known simply as "The Surgeon's Photo." More…

The Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung ran a photo-feature reporting the capture of the Loch Ness Monster. Hunters, it was said, had been searching for the elusive monster for months until finally lookouts on shore reported seeing Nessie make a rare visit to land. So fishing vessels moved in to prevent her from returning to the water. Then a steel net was thrown over her. The capture proved surprisingly easy. She was taken alive to an aircraft hangar in Edinburgh. Tourist revenue from her display was expected to be enormously lucrative. The report was an April Fool's Day joke. More…

A rumor swept through America alleging that a leper had been found working in the Chesterfield cigarette factory in Richmond. Sales of Chesterfield cigarettes plummeted as smokers, fearful of catching the dreaded disease, switched to other brands. The Liggett and Meyers Tobacco Company, maker of Chesterfields, repeatedly denied the rumor, but to no avail. The company even arranged for the mayor of Richmond to issue a statement assuring the public that the Chesterfield factory had been investigated and no leper found working there. Still sales continued to decline. More…

Fritz Kreisler was considered to be one of the leading violinists of his time. Much of his popularity stemmed from his discovery of many 'lost classics' by composers such as Pugnani and Vivaldi that he claimed to have found in libraries and monasteries throughout Europe. It became a signature part of his act to play these lost classics during his concerts. Over time many of these works became popular in their own right and entered the repertoire of other performers. So, it deeply shocked the music industry when Kreisler revealed that he hadn't found these works. He had composed them himself. More…

The illustrator Hugh Troy was convinced that most of the people at New York's Van Gogh exhibit were there out of lurid interest in the man who had cut off his ear, not out of a true appreciation for the art. To prove his point, he fashioned a fake ear out of a piece of dried beef and mounted it in a velvet-lined shadow box. He snuck this into the museum and stood it on a table in the Van Gogh exhibit. Beside the box he placed a sign: "This is the ear which Vincent Van Gogh cut off and sent to his mistress, a French prostitute, Dec. 24, 1888." Sure enough, it drew a large crowd. More…

June 15, 1936. A. Dean Lindsay of Ocilla, Georgia presented himself before a Pittsburgh Notary Public and More…

For several days in 1936, a work titled "Abstract Painting of Woman" hung in London's International Surrealist Exhibition. The work, signed "D.S. Windle" (i.e. D Swindle), was "a phantasmagoria of paint blobs, vari-colored beads, a piece of sponge, Christmas tinsel, a cigarette stub and pieces of hair." But it was taken down when stylistically conservative painter B. Howitt Lodge revealed it was his creation, designed as "a protest against one of the most warped and disgusting shows I have ever attended." The organizers of the exhibition said that although Howitt Lodge may have intended the work as a hoax, it was nevertheless genuine surrealist art.