Hoaxes of the 1960s

Spectators filled Pasadena's Rose Bowl stadium to watch the Minnesota Golden Gophers take on the Washington Huskies in the New Year's Day game. Millions more watched around the nation, crowded in front of tv sets in living rooms, restaurants, and bars. NBC was providing live coverage of the game. At the end of the first half the Huskies led 17 to 0, and the audience settled in to watch the half-time show for which the Washington marching band had prepared an elaborate flip-card routine. What happened next is remembered as one of the greatest student pranks of all time. More…

An advertisement in the New York Herald-Tribune for the Broadway play "Subways Are For Sleeping" made it appear that the play was a critical success. The ad listed the names of seven well-known theater critics, accompanied by the rave reviews they had given the play. But, in truth, the quotations came from ordinary people who happened to have the same names as the critics. More…

In 1962 there was only one tv channel in Sweden, and it broadcast in black and white. On April 1st of that year, the station's technical expert, Kjell Stensson, appeared on the news to announce that, thanks to a new technology, viewers could convert their existing sets to display color reception. All they had to do was pull a nylon stocking over their tv screen. Stensson proceeded to demonstrate the process. Thousands of people were taken in. Regular color broadcasts only commenced in Sweden on April 1, 1970. More…

Yetta Bronstein, a 48-year-old Bronx housewife, ran for President in 1964, and again in 1968, as the candidate for the Best Party. Her slogans were "Vote for Yetta and watch things get better" and "Put a mother in the White House." Her proposals included national bingo, self-fluoridation, placing a suggestion box on the White House fence, and printing a nude picture of Jane Fonda on postage stamps "to ease the post office deficit and also give a little pleasure for six cents to those who can't afford Playboy magazine." She promised she would staff her cabinet with "people who have failed in life and learned to live with it." More…

Paintings by a previously unknown avant-garde French artist named Pierre Brassau, exhibited at an art show in Sweden, won praise from critics, one of whom described Brassau's work as having "the delicacy of a ballet dancer." What the critics didn't know was that Brassau was actually a chimpanzee named Peter from Sweden's Boras zoo. A journalist had come up with the idea of exhibiting Peter's work as a way of putting critics to the test — would they be able to tell the difference between modern art and chimpanzee art? To the great amusement of the press, the critics failed the test. More…

As the war in Vietnam was escalating and race riots were breaking out in U.S. cities, a book was published titled Report From Iron Mountain: on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace. It purported to contain the text of a secret report compiled by a U.S. government Special Study Group which had arrived at the shocking conclusion that peace was not in the best interest of a stable society. War, the group had decided, played a crucial role in the world economy. Therefore, it was necessary for America to continue in a state of war indefinitely. More…

Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin emerged from California's Six Rivers National Forest in Oct. 1967 with footage of what appeared to be a female Bigfoot. To this day, their short film remains the most famous evidence of Bigfoot's existence. But skeptics immediately suspected a hoax. Scientists noted the creature's anatomy was oddly mismatched (top half ape, bottom half human), as if it were a man in a suit. Other critics pointed out the remarkable coincidence that Patterson had been planning to make a film about Bigfoot, and then right away found a Bigfoot. There's also evidence he had bought and modified a Bigfoot suit before shooting this footage. More…

In The Teachings of Don Juan Carlos Castaneda described his encounters with Don Juan Matus, a Yaqui shaman from Mexico who supposedly trained Castaneda in ancient forms of knowledge, such as how to use drugs to communicate with animals (or even to become an animal). Castaneda's book became a bestseller and was an important influence on the New Age movement. However, although Castaneda insisted Don Juan was a real person, this is widely doubted by scholars. Castaneda never showed his field notes to anyone. And many of the experiences Castaneda describes, such as hiking for days through the Sonoran desert in the middle of the summer, border on the impossible.

Newsday columnist Mike McGrady was convinced that standards of literary taste were plummeting rapidly in the United States. Sex alone, it seemed, could make a book a bestseller. This gave him an idea for an experiment. He convinced 24 other Newsday reporters to join him in deliberately writing a terrible novel that would have a minimum of two sex scenes per chapter. They titled their work Naked Came the Stranger. In the first week after its publication, it sold a respectable 20,000 copies, which McGrady felt was enough to prove his point. So he revealed the hoax. The resulting publicity made the book a bestseller. More…

A rumor swept around the world alleging that Paul McCartney, singer and bassist for the Beatles, was dead. In fact, that he had died three years ago on November 9, 1966 in a fiery car crash while heading home from the EMI recording studios. Supposedly the surviving band members, fearful of the effect his death might have on their careers, secretly replaced him with a double named William Campbell (an orphan who had won a Paul McCartney lookalike contest in Edinburgh). However, they also planted clues in their later albums to let fans know the truth, that Paul was dead. More…