Three students from the north-east Essex technical college at Colchester welded together bits of exhaust pipe and other pieces of metal. Then, posing as delivery men, they took their creation to the Colchester Art Society's show of modern art, where it was accepted without question and placed on display in the center of the exhibition. One of the hoaxers, John Everett, said, "We were staggered when they accepted it so easily." But the secretary of the Art Society took the deception with good humor, saying, "If this exhibit is going to attract crowds I am all in favor of leaving it where it is." [The Age]

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.

Showman Frank Hansen claimed to have a bigfoot-like creature frozen in a block of ice and was exhibiting it at carnivals throughout the Midwest. In 1968 the creature came to the attention of the cryptozoologists Ivan Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans, who became convinced the creature was real. Sanderson tried to get scientists interested in the "iceman," and for a brief time the Smithsonian Institution expressed interest in acquiring it. But as pressure mounted on Hansen to let scientists examine the creature, he claimed that the original creature was gone and what was now in the ice was just a replica. It has since become clear the creature was a fake all along.

Elmyr de Hory fooled the art world for thirty years with his forgeries of works by Picasso, Renoir, and other masters. To this day, many of his forgeries remain undetected and are in museums and collections throughout the world.

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…

A primitive, stone-age tribe found living in a rain forest in the Philippines attracted world-wide attention. Their apparently peaceful way of life stood in stark contrast to the militarism of the modern age. But the tribe was later alleged to be an elaborate fake, consisting of local farmers who had been persuaded to dress up in loincloths for the benefit of reporters. More…

In one of the most brazen literary hoaxes of all time, Clifford Irving forged the "autobiography" of the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, while Hughes was still alive. Irving's hope was that the famously reclusive billionaire would be unwilling to emerge from his seclusion to expose the fraud. For a long time it seemed like Irving was going to get away with it, but ultimately his plan failed, because Hughes did emerge to blow the whistle on the scheme. More…

Robert Patterson, a 66-year-old newsman, filed a series of five reports for the San Francisco Examiner detailing his odyssey through mainland China. His journey was inspired by the popular interest in Chinese culture following President Nixon's official visit to that country. The series ran on the Examiner's front page. Patterson discussed details such as his difficulty obtaining an entry visa, witnessing Chinese citizens doing calisthenics in the street every morning, and receiving acupuncture at a Chinese hospital for chronic hip pain... More…

In 1960, twenty-year-old Dan Rattiner started a small paper during his summer vacation in the Hamptons. He gave copies of it away for free, making money from the advertisements. It was the first free paper in the United States. Gradually Dan started more papers, each of them serving a different community in the Hamptons. He called all of them collectively Dan's Papers, and they soon became the most widely read papers in the Hamptons. Dan wrote most of the content himself, but from the start he approached the task with a sense of humor. Many of the stories were humorous hoaxes, which earned him the nickname the "Hoaxer of the Hamptons." More…

On the day before April Fool's Day, 1972, a team of British zoologists from the Flamingo Park Zoo found a mysterious carcass floating in Loch Ness. Initial reports claimed it weighed a ton and a half and was 15 ½ feet long. More…

Frank Searle, a former army captain, arrived in Loch Ness to search for the monster during the early 1970s and soon established a reputation as a definite character. He was like a colonial-style adventurer, assisted by a succession of attractive young "monster huntresses." He took an enormous number of photos of Nessie, many of which were published by the media, but all of which have been dismissed by experts as fakes. His early photos, such as the one to the right (taken in October 1972) have been identified as pictures of floating tree trunks. In later photos he progressed to cutting-and-pasting dinosaurs from postcards into his images. Searle left the loch in 1985 and died in 2005. More…

August 7, 1972: An expedition to find Nessie led by Dr. Robert Rines of the Academy of Applied Science struck gold when its underwater camera took a picture of what appeared to be the flipper of a large aquatic animal resembling a plesiosaur. However, the relatively clear image of a flipper shown to the public was not quite what the camera had initially recorded. The initial image was far less distinct. (It basically looked like a shot of a bunch of bubbles or sediment in the water.) This initial picture was then computer enhanced by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, and apparently the computer-enhanced image was further artistically enhanced by the Academy of Applied Science team (i.e. it was retouched), thereby producing the final flipper photo. Modern image-enhancement software has not been able to conjure anything resembling a flipper from the original image. More…

Police in Boise, Idaho were initially stumped by the case of an apparent ghost in the house of Peggy Zimmerman. The ghost made knocking sounds on the floor and could rap out correct answers to questions such as how many officers were in the room and how many guns were they carrying. The mystery was finally solved by a TV newsman who realized that the source of the rapping was Mrs. Zimmerman's 12-year-old daughter, Shelley, who was always present when the ghost was rapping. Shelley had the ability to surreptitiously crack her ankle by flexing it, thereby making a loud knocking sound. More…

At the 12th Annual Mid-Mississippi Art Competition, held in October 1974, there were gasps of surprise when artist Alexis Boyar walked up to the stage to receive the blue ribbon and $50 cash prize he had won for his entry in the weaving category. The shock wasn't caused by the art. Rather, it was caused by the artist himself since he was a 6-year-old Afghan hound dog. His owners explained that the weaving had originally been an old mitten Alexis found during a walk in the park which he chewed into a "rather interesting shape." They elaborated, "We thought it was interesting enough to enter in competition, but we were surprised when it won a prize." More…

Chuck Ross dreamed of becoming a writer, but he felt the odds were stacked against him since the publishing industry seemed incapable of recognizing talent. To prove his theory, he typed up twenty-one pages of a highly acclaimed book and sent it unsolicited to four publishers, claiming it was his own work. The work he chose was Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski. It had won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1969 and by 1975 had sold over 400,000 copies. All four publishers rejected the work, including Random House, its original publisher. More…

Sir Peter Scott of the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau participated in the 1972 expedition that produced the flipper photo. Feeling that the photo provided proof that some kind of large creature existed in the loch, he decided to give the animal a scientific name: Nessiteras Rhombopteryx (which meant "the Ness wonder with a diamond fin"). But London newspapers soon pointed out that if you juggled around the letters in this name, you got the phrase "monster hoax by Sir Peter S." Was this evidence that the flipper photo had been a deliberate hoax? Scott denied it. Dr. Rines came to his rescue by pointing out that if you juggled the letters around a bit more, you could spell "Yes, both pix are monsters. R." More…

Caltech is known for producing world-class scientists and engineers. But a few of its students have also demonstrated a flair for the law, as a highly controversial 1975 prank that turned on the legalistic reading of a sweepstakes entry form proved. The sweepstakes was held by McDonald's. It ran from March 3rd to March 23rd, 1975, at 187 participating McDonald's restaurants in Southern California. The prizes included a year of groceries, a Datsun Z, McDonald's gift certificates, and cash. But one part of the contest rules caught the attention of three Caltech students. The rules said, "Enter as often as you wish." What if, the Caltech students wondered, a person entered the sweepstakes one million times? More…

When 23-year-old Cherie Darvell went missing while searching for Bigfoot in the forests of Humboldt County, police launched a massive search for her, at a cost of $11,613. A few days later, Darvell showed up screaming outside a Bluff Creek resort, claiming she had been abducted by a Bigfoot. She said the creature had scooped her up and carried her off, but that it had abandoned her unharmed during the night, after which she had wandered through the woods for several days. Sheriff Gene Cox dismissed her claim as a hoax, noting that she didn't appear to have spent any time in the wilderness. Her clothes were clean and she smelled of perfume. More…

Who should you vote for in the next election? What about Nobody? After all, Nobody is clearly the best candidate. Nobody cares. Nobody keeps his election promises. Nobody listens to your concerns. Nobody tells the truth. Nobody will lower your taxes. Nobody will defend your rights. Nobody has all the answers. Nobody should have that much power. Nobody makes apple pie better than Mom. And Nobody will love you when you're down and out. More…