Time Period: 1960-1979

Francis Hetling’s Victorian Waifs
These photos of Victorian-era street children turned out to be modern frauds.
Continue reading…

The Missing Pole
This photo of a young woman screaming with grief over the body of a shot student at Kent State University is one of the most famous images of the 20th Century. But in the original version of the photo, a fence pole was positioned directly behind the head of the woman. Sometime an unknown photo editor airbrushed it out.
Continue reading…

The Bluff Creek Bigfoot
Bigfoot believers claim this is a photo of that elusive North American primate. Skeptics argue it shows a person in an ape suit.
Continue reading…

Thoughtography
Ted Serios was a Chicago-area bellhop who claimed he could transfer his thoughts directly onto film. He would create a "thoughtograph" by holding a small tube against a camera lens, and then beaming a thought-image through the tube into the camera. The photo shown here was his thought of an unidentified street scene. Skeptics argued that he probably concealed a photographic transparency inside the tube he held against the camera.
Continue reading…

The Vanishing Belly Button, 1964
Scandinavian Airlines placed an advertisement in newspapers throughout America. It featured a bikini-clad model posing on a rock above the caption "What to show your wife in Scandinavia." But the version that appeared in the Los Angeles Times had one detail altered. The editors of the Times airbrushed out the model's belly button. They said this was done in order to "conform to regulations."
Continue reading…