When the body of British officer Major William Martin was discovered off the coast of Spain in 1943, British diplomats strongly requested that all documents found with the body be returned to them, and the Spanish government eventually complied. But upon examination, it was obvious the documents had been opened and read before their return. This was exactly what the British had hoped would happen, because Major Martin didn't exist. He was part of a military hoax, codenamed Operation Mincemeat. The British military had obtained a cadaver, chained a briefcase containing supposedly top-secret papers to its wrist, and dropped it in the sea off the coast of Spain. The plan was to fool the Germans by supplying them with misinformation. More…

The Australian poets Harold Stewart and James McAuley disliked modernist poetry and hatched a plot to see if they could get its supporters to embrace "deliberately concocted nonsense." They sent some strange, surreal poems of their own creation to Max Harris, editor of the cutting-edge Angry Penguins literary magazine, claiming they were the work of Ern Malley, an unknown poet who had recently died. Harris liked the poems so much that he devoted a special issue to them. At which point, Stewart and McAuley revealed that Malley didn't exist. Ern Malley is considered to be Australia's most famous literary hoax. More…

Tanis Chandler was a 20-year-old woman working as a teletypist in a Hollywood brokerage office, but dreaming of becoming a movie star. However, she was having trouble getting any roles, until she realized she might have better luck as a man, due to the shortage of male actors in 1943 because of the war. She put on a pair of pants, presented herself at a casting office as "Robert Archer," and soon began appearing in films. More…

When the University of Southern California held its 1944 Campus Queens beauty contest, twenty contestants vied for the title. Six winners were to be selected. The prize was that their full-length portrait would appear in the yearbook. But that year an imposter appeared among the candidates. The odd-woman-out (or rather, odd-man-out) was Sylvia Jones. She was actually a he — a male USC student who had dressed up as a woman in order to enter the contest. More…

In November 1946, the Los Angeles Art Association included a painting titled "Three Out of Five", by a previously unknown artist, Naromji, in an exhibition of abstract art. The work hung beside works by well-known modern artists and was given a price tag of $1000. But the Art Association was embarrassed when, at the end of the month, the publicist/prankster Jim Moran revealed that he was the true author of the painting. Naromji was Moran spelled backwards, with a ji "added for confusion." The title, "Three Out of Five," referred to a brand of hair restorer since, Moran said, abstract painting made him want to "tear his hair." More…

Han van Meegeren, a Dutch artist and art dealer, was arrested in 1947 for collaborating with the Nazis. He was charged with selling a painting by Johannes Vermeer titled 'Christ and the Adulteress' to Reich Marshal Hermann Goering. This painting was considered a national treasure, making it a crime to sell it to the enemy. Van Meegeren admitted selling the painting to Goering, but he defended himself by revealing that the painting was a forgery which he had painted himself. Surely it wasn't a crime to cheat the Nazis, he argued. More…

On May 29, 1947, the armed forces radio station in Tokyo, WVTR, interrupted its evening broadcast of dance music with a series of disturbing news bulletin describing a 20-foot sea monster that had emerged from the waters of Tokyo Bay and was making its way inland. The broadcast was intended as a joke, but this was lost on many of the listeners who took it seriously. In fact, the broadcast caused widespread panic. More…

Harold Dahl claimed that on June 21, 1947 he saw six "donut-shaped" discs flying above him while he was on a boat in Puget Sound. One of the discs ejected bits of molten metal, which (so Dahl said) killed his dog and burnt the arm of his son. Dahl also said that he was later visited by a man in a dark suit who warned him not to talk further about the incident. This was the first report of a "man in black". Air Force investigators identified the metal as scrap metal from a factory, and Dahl confessed that his report had been a joke that spun out of control. [wikipedia, mauryislandincident.com]

Ten days after residents of Twin Falls, Idaho reported seeing flying saucers in the sky, a woman reported finding a flying saucer embedded in the lawn of her neighbor's home. Police came out to investigate, followed by the FBI and three army officers who flew out from Fort Douglas, Utah. What they found was a small, gold-and-silver-colored saucer about the size of a bicycle wheel. The army officers removed the saucer and took it to Salt Lake City for closer investigation. But the police, working on a tip, then identified the saucer as the creation of four teenage boys, who had spent several days building it out of radio tubes, wires, an old phonograph, and discarded electrical parts. More…

In February 1948, giant three-toed footprints were found on a Florida beach. They looked like they had been made by an enormous sea turtle, except for the fact they were spaced too far apart. Over the following months, more prints continued to be found. In Nov. 1948, naturalist Ivan Sanderson examined some of them and speculated they had been made by a "vast penguin," 15-feet tall. The mystery wasn't fully solved until 1988 when a local prankster, Tony Signorini, admitted he had made them with the help of a friend. He had strapped cast-iron monster-print shoes to his feet and then stomped up and down along local beaches. [Tampa Bay Times, Orgone Research]

The painting "Figure of Eight, Skegness" (referring to a roller coaster at the Skegness amusement park) was displayed at a public library art exhibition in Loughborough, England. Critics praised it as a "fine specimen of modernism in colour." But then its creator was revealed to be 6-year-old Tommy Warbis from Barrow-on-Soar. Tommy had plastered a piece of white paper with multi-colored paints and then allowed his pet cat Jill to sit in the middle while the paint was still wet. Tommy's father, a commercial artist who disliked modern art, had been invited to submit work to the show and sent his son's work instead "as a joke to test people's knowledge of art."

Police in Miami, Florida accidentally discovered a crime ring that had been stealing thousands of dollars from the local phone company for years — in a highly unusual way. The thieves were young women, employed by Southern Bell Telephone Company to count coins collected from pay phones. They were smuggling coin rolls out of the building by hiding them in their bras. The exploits of the "brassiere brigade," once exposed, made headlines across the nation, and later inspired several movies. More…

After going missing for several days, French actress Nicole Riche reappeared claiming that she had been kidnapped by "Puritans" who kept her in a room without food while they lectured her about the immorality of her life. Finally, she said, her captors abandoned her in the Fontainebleau Forest, where she was found and helped to safety by kindly gypsies. The police believed none of her tale, and rightly so. Her "kidnapping" turned out to have been an elaborate publicity stunt designed to promote Paris's infamous Grand Guignol theater. More…

On July 14, 1951, Forestry Commission employee Lachlan Stuart took a picture of mysterious humps rising from the loch. Over twenty years later researchers visited the spot where he had taken the picture and realized the humps would have been in extremely shallow water close to the shore, meaning that Stuart's monster must have been awfully flat. Confirming their suspicions, author Richard Frere later revealed that Stuart had confessed to him the humps were nothing more than bales of hay covered with tarpaulins. More…

Science reporter Hugh Stewart approached his editors at the Chicago Herald-American with a hot tip. He had learned that a Chicago mother was about to give birth to sextuplets — the first time a confirmed birth of sextuplets had occurred in America. Stewart offered no verifiable sources for the news. Nor would he disclose the mother's name. Nevertheless, the Herald-American decided to run his story on its front page. They shouldn't have, because it turned out that Stewart had made the whole thing up. More…

A small ad ran in the Washington Post offering the services of "ghost artists" for those who wanted to be an artist, but lacked skill. The company's staff would produce art, to which clients could attach their name. This curious business quickly attracted media attention, until some reporters eventually recognized that the spokesman for the company was the notorious prankster (and professional illustrator) Hugh Troy. More…

The story of Rudolph Fentz was long considered an unsolved mystery, and a case of possible time travel. In June 1950, Fentz was said to have suddenly appeared in New York City's Times Square, as if from out of the blue, wearing old-fashioned clothes and sporting mutton-chop sideburns. Glancing around, a look of astonishment and then of panic flashed across his face. He sprinted forwards, and was then struck down and killed by a car. More…

Three young men reported running over a space alien on a rural Georgia highway. What made this case unusual is that the body of the alien was lying on the highway to prove their tale. The incident quickly made national headlines. But when scientists from Emory University examined the 'alien,' they determined it was actually a Capuchin monkey with its tail cut off and fur removed with depilatory cream. The boys confessed they had created it as a prank. More…

A 3-week exhibition of modern art in Birmingham town hall included a piece by a previously unknown artist, Jan Michel, which won praise for its picassolike features. Only as the show was closing did Ronald Allin, a musician with the Birmingham city orchestra, reveal that "Jan Michel" was actually his 8-year-old son Michael. The father had told his son to paint "anything he liked" and then secretly included the result in the exhibition. He titled the piece "Mermaid" because the image bore a vague resemblance to that mythical creature. The exhibition director said it was a pity the joke was only revealed on the last day because "it might have attracted more people."

When political newcomer Douglas R. Stringfellow was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican from Utah, much of the appeal of his candidacy lay in his decorated past as a hero during World War Two, a past which he made frequent references to during his revival-style campaign speeches. He served one term, and was running for reelection, when his heroic past was exposed as a fraud by his Democratic opponents. More…

In the 1950s, bestseller lists were partially based on the number of requests for a title at bookstores. So 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 this title, relayed by puzzled bookstore owners, eventually made their way to publisher Ian Ballantine who (once he figured out what was going on), decided it would be interesting to publish I, Libertine as an actual book. Author Theodore Sturgeon was commissioned to write it, and the book was released to stores (for real) on Sep 20, 1956. More…

Bank manager Peter MacNab took this photo on a "warm hazy" July afternoon in 1955, but 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 image (either painting in the monster, or painting out a boat) he may created multiple "original" negatives during this process and then forgotten which was the original "original". More…