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.

In 1935, veterans of World War One lobbied Congress to pay them their war bonuses ten years early in order to ease the economic hardship they were experiencing during the Great Depression. Congress readily acquiesced and passed the Harrison Bonus Bill to do so. This pre-payment was a source of inspiration for Lewis Gorin, a senior at Princeton University. It seemed logical to him that if present-day veterans could get their war bonuses early, why shouldn't future veterans also receive their money up-front — before they had fought in a war. Thus was born the Veterans of Future Wars movement. More…

Jim Moran (1907-1999) was called, at various times, "super salesman number one," "America's No. 1 prankster," and "the last great bunco artist in the profession of publicity." He became famous during the 1930s and 40s for devising outrageous stunts on behalf of his clients. Typically his stunts were in the spirit of tongue-in-cheek performances, such as actually trying to find a needle in a haystack, but occasionally he perpetrated outright hoaxes, such as when he submitted one of his own works to the Los Angeles Art Association, telling them it was a painting by an obscure artist named Naromji. More…

When his painting Opus No. 1 was accepted into the annual exhibition of the Art League of Springfield, Mass., Henry J.P. Billings promptly announced his resignation from the League. The work, he said, had been a deliberate attempt to draw badly. He fumed that "Juries should be selected who have background enough to distinguish good from bad in modern art." But his joke backfired when it was discovered he had copied his "horrible" painting from a stained glass window design by the acclaimed French artist Georges Desvallières. A Time magazine correspondent noted that the jurors evidently "saw the good of Desvallières shining through the bad of Billings." More…

In September 1938, Boston Curtis won the post of Republican precinct committeeman for Milton, Washington, by virtue of fifty-one votes cast for him in the state primary election. Boston Curtis ran no election campaign, nor did he offer a platform. However, he also ran uncontested, so his election shouldn't have been a surprise. But when the residents of Milton realized who Boston Curtis was, they were surprised, because Boston was a long-eared brown mule. More…

On October 30, 1938, thousands of people fled in panic after hearing CBS Radio report that Martian invaders had landed in New Jersey and were marching across the country, using heat rays and poisonous gas to kill Earthlings. But as soon became clear, Martians hadn't really invaded New Jersey. What people had heard (and mistook for a real news broadcast) was a radio version of H.G. Wells's story The War of the Worlds, performed by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater. More…

A French farmer found a marble sculpture buried in his turnip field. Art experts hailed it as a great discovery and identified it as a Greco-Roman work from the 1st century BC. But when arrangements were made to transfer the statue to Paris, a little-known artist named Francesco Cremonese came forward and revealed that he had made the statue and buried it two years ago. As proof, he had the matching arm and nose, chiseled from the piece before he placed it in the ground. Cremonese explained that he had created the statue to demonstrate that his lack of recognition as an artist was undeserved, and that he was just as good as the masters of antiquity.

In 1939 a secretive cult known as the Royal Fraternity of Master Metaphysicians made headlines when its leader, James Bernard Schafer, announced their intention to conduct an unusual experiment. They were going to raise an immortal baby. More…

When an Italian nobleman produced a painting that appeared to be Leonardo Da Vinci's "Madonna with Cat" (long rumored to exist) experts hailed it as a masterpiece and made it the centerpiece of a 1939 exhibit about Da Vinci in Milan. But after the show ended, the painting mysteriously disappeared, and it only resurfaced in 1990 when Cesare Tubino, a Turin painter, died and it was found hanging in his bedroom. In his will, Tubino explained that he had painted the "Madonna with Cat" and not Da Vinci. Italy's fascist government had banned Tubino from exhibiting his own work. So this had been his way of fooling the experts and secretly displaying his work.

On June 21, 1940, Hitler accepted the surrender of the French government at a ceremony in Compiegne, France. After Hitler accepted France's surrender, he stepped backwards slightly, as if in shock. But this isn't what audiences in the Allied countries saw who watched the movie-reel of the ceremony. Instead they saw Hitler dance a bizarre little jig after signing the documents, as if he were childishly celebrating his victory by jumping up and down. The scene was played over and over in movie theaters. Allied propagandists had manufactured the clip by looping the scene of Hitler stepping backwards. More…

Italy's Popolo D'Italia newspaper reported that the Loch Ness Monster had been killed by a direct bomb hit in a German air raid. However, the Italian reporting was proven to be a hoax when Nessie sightings continued unabated. Specifically, when J. MacFarlan-Barrow and his three children saw Nessie while boating on the Loch in August 1941, the Daily Mail made a point of noting that Nessie had survived the Nazi attempt on her life.

Morris Newburger, a Wall Street stockbroker, phoned the sports desks of major New York City papers and reported a football score for a fictional New Jersey college team, the Plainfield Teachers. To his amusement, the score was faithfully recorded the next day in the papers, so he decided that Plainfield needed to complete its football season. For the next few weeks, he kept calling the papers, and scores for Plainfield kept appearing. The team was always victorious, crushing its opponents in lopsided wins. Newburger's deception was exposed within a month, but because of its gentle humor it's remembered as a classic sports hoax. More…

In August 1942, the U.S. Army issued a press release warning the public of "secret markers" that had been found on farm fields throughout the eastern United States. These markers were patterns formed by the arrangement of fertilizer sacks or the way a field had been tilled. From the ground they looked like nothing, but from the air they formed the shape of arrows, apparently created by Nazi sympathizers in order to guide enemy bombers toward military factories and airfields. The Army simultaneously released three pictures showing these markers. But a few days later it was discovered that the "secret markers" were really just random patterns of no military significance, a fact the Army had known for months. More…