This Day in the History of Hoaxes

This Day in the History of Hoaxes: August 10

August 10, 1840: The Fortsas Bibliohoax
Numerous book collectors arrived in Binche, Belgium, hoping to attend the sale of the library of the Comte de Fortsas, advertised as taking place on this day (Aug 10) in 1840. The Fortsas library only included 52 books, but each book was absolutely unique — the only copy of the title known to exist. But soon after their arrival, the collectors discovered there was no Comte de Fortsas, nor any of his books. The entire auction had been arranged by a local antiquarian, Renier Hubert Ghislain Chalon, as an elaborate practical joke. More…
Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2014.   Comments (0)

This Day in the History of Hoaxes: August 9

August 9, 1962: The Hastings Rarities Fraud
Taxidermist George Bristow had a reputation for being able to find rare birds, which he stuffed and sold at high prices to collectors. But on this day (Aug. 9) in 1962 (15 years after Bristow's death) the journal British Birds published a study arguing that it was statistically impossible for anyone to have found that many rare birds in one small area, Hastings, of southern England. It's suspected that Bristow had imported frozen birds from abroad, then he had claimed to have found them in England, where their presence was unexpected, which allowed him to sell them at high prices. [Hastings Museum]
Posted: Sat Aug 09, 2014.   Comments (1)

This Day in the History of Hoaxes: August 8

August 8, 1903: Trial of Thérèse Humbert Begins
Thérèse Humbert declared herself to be the sole heir of an American millionaire whom she had saved from food poisoning, and on the basis of this was able to obtain loans from leading French bankers for millions of francs. She kept the scam going for a quarter-century before being exposed. Both the inheritance, and the American millionaire, were fictitious. Given the magnitude of her fraud (she was referred to as the "swindler of the century" at the time) it was remarkable that she received only a 5-year sentence. [wikipedia]
Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2014.   Comments (0)

This Day in the History of Hoaxes: August 7

August 7, 1926: The Midwife Toad Fraud Exposed
Biologist Paul Kammerer had observed that when he forced "midwife toads" to mate in water (they usually mate on land) their offspring, several generations later, had developed black traction pads on their forelimbs, which made water-mating easier for them. He offered this as proof of Lamarckian inheritance. But on this day in 1926, Dr. G.K. Noble reported in the journal Nature his discovery that the black traction pads were merely injected ink. The revelation destroyed Kammerer's reputation. He committed suicide less than two months later. More…
Posted: Thu Aug 07, 2014.   Comments (0)

This Day in the History of Hoaxes: August 6

August 6, 1969: Naked Came the Stranger Revealed
The novel Naked Came the Stranger, credited to Penelope Ashe, had sold a respectable 20,000 copies. But it sold many more copies after 25 reporters from Newsday revealed, on this day in 1969, that they were all the true authors, having written it as a team in a deliberate attempt to produce a terrible novel. The satirical purpose of the hoax was to demonstrate that sex, rather than literary standards, sells books. Although, of course, the book's generous marketing budget, which included ads that ran in the New York Times for several weeks before its publication, didn't hurt either. More…
Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2014.   Comments (0)

This Day in the History of Hoaxes: August 5

August 5, 1934: The Oldest Ear of Corn Debunked
After displaying an object for 20 years that it had believed to be the "oldest ear of corn" in the world (supposedly fossilized corn several thousand years old), the Smithsonian Institution admitted on this day that the object, upon closer examination, had been revealed to be a clay rattle shaped like corn. The museum had acquired the corn from a "collector of curios" in Peru. The rattle itself was interesting, as an ancient artifact, but it had no biological significance. More…
Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2014.   Comments (0)

This Day in the History of Hoaxes: August 4

August 4, 1972: Female Wanted to Become Pregnant
An ad placed in a Philadelphia paper sought a "female to become pregnant" in return for a "$10,000 fee plus expenses." A reporter who called the number reached Leonard Goldfarb, who claimed he was representing a childless couple. But when news of the ad got picked up by the national press, prompting hundreds of women to apply, Goldfarb admitted there was no child-seeking couple. He was actually an "economic mathematician," and he had placed the ad in order to gather data about "what price pregnancy" as well as to "pinpoint a serious sociological problem."
Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2014.   Comments (0)

This Day in the History of Hoaxes: August 3

August 3, 1965: Rex Heflin Photographs a UFO
On this day in 1965, highway maintenance worker Rex Heflin stopped his truck as he was driving outside Santa Ana, CA and took a series of photos that he claimed showed a UFO hovering in the sky. The photos gained widespread publicity, and have come to be considered classic UFO photos. However, they were soon labeled a "hoax" by the Air Force's Project Blue Book, and the Air Force was almost certainly correct. Heflin apparently created them by dangling a toy train wheel on monofilament fishing line out of his truck window. [The UFO Iconoclast]
Posted: Sun Aug 03, 2014.   Comments (1)

This Day in the History of Hoaxes: August 2

August 2, 1967: Please Don't Douse Your Phone!
The British Post Office, in charge of the nation's phone system, issued an alert about a recent spate of phone calls in which a man, posing as a telephone engineer, informed people that in order to cure a fault on their line they had to drop their phone in a bucket of water. Several people had fallen for this ruse before it came to the attention of the Post Office. The alert also noted that, earlier in the year, a prankster had enjoyed "considerable success" by calling people and saying in an authoritative voice, "Get a large pair of scissors and cut the wire between your telephone and handset receiver. There is some danger."
Posted: Sat Aug 02, 2014.   Comments (0)

This Day in the History of Hoaxes: August 1

August 1, 1956: I, Libertine Revealed
In the 1950s, bestseller lists were partially based on the number of requests for a title at stores. Nighttime deejay Jean Shepherd hatched a plan to throw a wrench in this system by having his listeners descend on bookstores en masse and ask for a non-existent book titled I, Libertine. Requests for the title eventually made their way to publisher Ian Ballantine who (once he figured out what was going on), decided to publish I, Libertine as an actual book. A month before the book's release, the Wall Street Journal revealed the hoax, and the resulting publicity helped boost its sales. More…
Posted: Fri Aug 01, 2014.   Comments (2)

This Day in the History of Hoaxes: July 31

July 31, 1952: Suicide Rescue Hoax
Medal of Honor winner Maynard H. Smith was praised for his heroism when he dramatically rescued 21-year-old Ernestine Whomble on this day as she tried to commit suicide by jumping off the sixth-floor ledge of the YWCA building in Wash. DC. But praise turned to condemnation when Whomble later confessed the rescue had been staged as a way to gain publicity for Smith who hoped to run for the governorship of Virginia. Smith denied the charge but couldn't satisfactorily explain why he had been in the YWCA at that moment. He was convicted of causing a false police report to be filed and fined $50.
Posted: Thu Jul 31, 2014.   Comments (0)

This Day in the History of Hoaxes: July 30

July 30, 1999: The Blair Witch Project Opens
The Blair Witch Project opened on this day in 1999 and quickly became one of the most successful independent films of all time. It owed much of its success to a marketing scheme centering around the blairwitch.com website, where web surfers could view detailed historical information about the legend of the Blair Witch. It was all so convincing that many people were fooled into believing that the Blair Witch was a real historical figure, which she wasn't. The entire tale was fictitious. More…
Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2014.   Comments (0)

This Day in the History of Hoaxes: July 29

July 29, 1955: The MacNab Photograph
Bank manager Peter MacNab took this photo on a "hazy, warm" July afternoon in 1955. However, he didn't share it with the world until October 1958 on account of "diffidence and fear of ridicule." It quickly came to be considered a classic Loch Ness Monster photo. However, MacNab distributed two slightly different versions of what he claimed was the original negative, leading many (even Nessie believers) to suspect a hoax, because if MacNab did doctor the original image (either painting in the monster, or painting out a boat) he may created multiple "original" negatives during this process.
Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2014.   Comments (0)

This Day in the History of Hoaxes: July 28

July 28, 1932: The Latin-Chanting Ghost of Joliet
As word spread of a ghost that chanted songs in Latin at midnight in the graveyard of the Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet, crowds of hundreds of people (pictured) started gathering to hear the phantom crooner. Each night the voice was said to emanate from a different grave. But on this day in 1932, prison officials finally located the source of the singing. It was an inmate, William Chrysler, who had night-watch duty at the prison's quarry pumphouse behind the cemetery. His voice carried into the graveyard and seemed to "haunt" it. He was actually singing in Lithuanian, not Latin.
Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2014.   Comments (2)

This Day in the History of Hoaxes: July 27

July 27, 1907: The Wedding of the Ancients
On this day, a widely reported wedding to unite John B. Bundren, Sr. (101-yrs-old) and Rose McGuire (100-yrs-old) was exposed as a fake. The couple were said to have been engaged 85 years ago, but could not wed at that time due to the objection of her parents. The romantic tale was a fiction created by 44-year-old John B. Bundren, an army clerk, who had worn a wig and beard to look like a senior version of himself in the wedding announcement photo. The bride-to-be was an actress. He did it, he said, in order to gather facts about longevity for a book he planned to write on the subject.
Posted: Sun Jul 27, 2014.   Comments (0)

This Day in the History of Hoaxes: July 26

July 26, 2011: Internet Explorer Users Are Dumb
On this day, AptiQuant Psychometric Consulting Co. released a study revealing that Internet Explorer users scored lower on IQ tests than users of other web browsers and were therefore "dumb". This result was duly reported as fact by numerous news outlets. However, not only was the study fake, but also AptiQuant wasn't a real company. The graphics on its site had been copied from the site of a legitimate French firm. The hoax was the work of Tarandeep Gill, a Canadian web developer, who later said he had hoped to "create awareness about the incompatibilities of IE6." [wikipedia]
Posted: Sat Jul 26, 2014.   Comments (0)

This Day in the History of Hoaxes: July 25

July 25, 1990: Operation Blackbird Hoaxed
On this day, the high-tech Operation Blackbird, whose mission was to record the creation of a crop circle by a UFO, appeared to meet with success. The monitoring equipment recorded flashing orange lights in a field, and the next morning two large circles had formed. But the hopes of the researchers were dashed when they found a horoscope chart and wooden crucifix in the middle of the circles — evidently the calling card of a hoaxer. The flashing lights on their equipment, the researchers admitted, had probably been the heat signature of humans running around. More…
Posted: Fri Jul 25, 2014.   Comments (0)

This Day in the History of Hoaxes: July 24

July 24, 1907: The Old Librarian's Almanack
On this day, Edmund Leaster Pearson first mentioned the existence of the Old Librarian's Almanack in his column in the Boston Evening Transcript. It was, he said, a small almanac from 1773 that contained the "opinion and counsel" of a rather curmudgeonly librarian whose ideas were strikingly non-modern. For instance, the Old Librarian felt it was the duty of all librarians to "cast out and destroy" any book that was "merely frivolous." Pearson later arranged for the reprinting of this 18thC curiosity. Very few people realized that he himself had written it as a joke. [Internet Archive]
Posted: Thu Jul 24, 2014.   Comments (0)

This Day in the History of Hoaxes: July 23

July 23, 1943: The Death of Ern Malley
The unknown Australian poet Ern Malley was said to have died of Graves' disease on this day, prompting his sister to send the poems she found among his possessions to Max Harris, editor of the Angry Penguins poetry journal, who then decided to dedicate a special issue to Malley's strange poems. But upon publication, Harris discovered Malley wasn't real. He was the satirical creation of two Australian poets hostile to modern poetry. Ern Malley remains Australia's most famous literary hoax. [wikipedia]
Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2014.   Comments (0)

This Day in the History of Hoaxes: July 22

July 22, 1931: Mr. A.A. declared man with shortest name
On this day, Mr. A.A. (first name Aaron) was declared to be the man with the shortest name in the United States, following the death of H.P. Re. But within a month he was revealed to be a fraud after he was charged with forgery and a judge issued a warrant for his real name, Earl Gerske. Mr. A.A. was merely an alias, Gerske explained, adopted on account of a deal with a laundry company so that "they could advertise that the phone number of their laundry was the first one listed in the directory."
Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2014.   Comments (0)
Page 2 of 6 pages  < 1 2 3 4 >  Last ›