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

There's debate about whether the "panic broadcast" (as it's now known) was actually a hoax, since Welles warned the audience at the beginning of the broadcast that what they were about to hear was a radio play. (Welles had probably hoped to fool some people, but never imagined how successful he would be.) Some also suspect the media exaggerated the extent of the panic. Nevertheless, when people think of hoaxes, this is invariably the first example that springs to mind, making this an easy choice for the #1 spot on the list. More >>> In 1912 amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson unearthed a skull and jawbone from a gravel pit near Piltdown, England. The skull was unmistakably human, whereas the jaw appeared to be from an ape, but their proximity within the pit suggested they came from the same creature. Here at last, jubilant researchers believed, was the long-sought missing link between man and ape. For almost forty years the conjoined pair graced the pages of textbooks until finally researchers at the British Museum took a closer look and realized they had been harboring a fake. The skull belonged to a prehistoric human, but the jawbone (stained brown to make it appear older) came from a modern orangutan. More >>> Strictly speaking, the Loch Ness Monster is a legend, not a hoax. But for more than seventy years the legend has been exploited frequently and outrageously by hoaxers, thereby earning Nessie a place near the top of the list of the Top 100 Hoaxes. Popular interest in Scotland's most famous monster took off during the 1930s when a road was constructed along the northern shore of the Loch. Travellers almost immediately began reporting sightings of a creature, fanning media interest in the phenomenon and transforming Nessie into a global celebrity. The hoaxes soon followed. One of the earliest (and still best known) of the hoaxes occurred in 1934 when a British surgeon snapped a photo of something in the loch one early April morning. The photo, popularly known as the Surgeon's Photo, became the iconic image of Nessie. Sixty years later it was revealed that the picture actually showed a toy submarine outfitted with a fake serpent's head, not a lake monster. More >>> He's big. He's hairy. And he smells bad. Like Nessie, Bigfoot is a legend that has earned a place in the Top 100 Hoaxes thanks to the energetic activities of hoaxers on his (or her) behalf. Native American legends that speak of a hairy giant (aka "Sasquatch") wandering the woods of North America date back hundreds of years. European settlers began reporting sightings of such a creature in the nineteenth century. However, the name "Bigfoot" wasn't coined until 1958 when a California tractor operator reported finding massive footprints in the mud around the construction site he was working on. (The prints turned out to be the work of his prank-loving boss, Ray Wallace.) The most famous Bigfoot sighting occurred in 1967 when Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin caught on film what they claimed was a Bigfoot (shown in the thumbnail) wandering along a riverbank near Bluff Creek, California. The film continues to be extremely controversial. Bigfoot believers hail it as a crucial piece of evidence for the existence of the creature. But skeptics denounce it as a hoax. Boosting the skeptics' side, a credible source recently confessed that he was hired by Gimlin to pose in an ape suit for the film. As for whether Bigfoot actually exists... who knows. Personally, I very much doubt it. (How could a species that large hide in North America for so long?) But as long as any doubt remains, the search will continue, as will the hoaxes. MORE" style="color: red;font-weight:bold;">More >>> Almost seven hundred years ago a French church acquired a fourteen-foot piece of cloth bearing the three-dimensional image of a man. Ever since then the cloth has been the subject of intense debate. Is it the shroud in which Christ was wrapped after his crucifixion? Is the man on the cloth Christ himself, his image burned onto the material by supernatural means? Or is it a hoax created by a medieval forger? Those who believe the cloth is Christ's shroud argue that only supernatural means could have created such an image. Skeptics dispute this, pointing out that: 1) there was a flourishing trade in false relics during the middle ages, giving a forger a large incentive to create something like this; 2) a medieval forger could definitely have created a three-dimensional image of this kind—one method, recently demonstrated, would be to paint the image on a piece of glass, place the glass over the linen, and allow the sun to bleach the figure onto the linen; 3) the man's body is very oddly proportioned (his head is too large), which suggests the image is a painting; and 4) the Bible specifically states that Christ's head was wrapped separately from his body (John 20:7). So given that a forger could have created such a thing, and that there's no other explanation (besides the supernatural one) of how this artifact might have come into existence, it's logical to assume the shroud is indeed a medieval hoax. MORE" style="color: red;font-weight:bold;">More >>> 1917: Two young girls playing in a garden in Cottingley, England come inside and ask their parents if they can borrow a camera to take pictures of the fairies they had seen. Amused, the adults let them have the camera. The girls soon returned with a series of photos showing themselves interacting with delicate, winged fairies. These photos would become the subject of intense controversy for decades. Photographic experts examined the pictures and declared they weren't faked in any way. Spiritualists such as Arthur Conan Doyle (author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries) then latched onto them as proof of the existence of supernatural creatures. But the truth was that the fairy photos were faked. Almost sixty years later the girls (old ladies by then) admitted that the fairies were nothing more than paper cutouts held in place with hatpins. MORE" style="color: red;font-weight:bold;">More >>> October 16, 1869: A farmer in Cardiff, New York found an enormous stone giant buried in the ground as he's digging a well. He put it on display, and thousands of people made the journey to see it. Speculation ran rampant about what it might be: a petrified giant from Biblical times ("There were giants in those days," Genesis 6:4), or an ancient stone statue. The reality was that it was an elaborate hoax, created by an atheist tobacconist, George Hull, in order to poke fun at Biblical literalists. Showman P.T. Barnum tried to buy the Giant. When he was refused, he created a duplicate that soon was drawing larger crowds than the original. This led the owners of the "real" Cardiff Giant to mutter, "There's a sucker born every minute" (according to one version of the origin of this phrase). MORE" style="color: red;font-weight:bold;">More >>> Crop circles are areas of flattened crops, usually forming distinctive patterns, that appear mysteriously in farmer's fields. Some claim that the phenomenon of crop circles is centuries old, but it wasn't really until the 1980s that people began to notice them. The key question is: What causes them? Theories include that they're formed by extraterrestrials, whirlwinds, plasma energy vortexes, artists, drunken Englishmen, or the Tourism Council of Wiltshire (where most of them seem to appear). Whatever causes them (and I lean towards the drunken Englishmen theory) it's undeniable that they've become a favorite creation of hoaxers. For which reason, even if it were proven that little green men from outer space have been hard at work for the past two decades making designs in wheat fields for our benefit, the phenomenon would still deserve a place among the top 100 hoaxes, because so many other crop circles have undeniably been the handiwork of pranksters. MORE" style="color: red;font-weight:bold;">More >>> August 25, 1835: the New York Sun announced the discovery of life on the moon, explaining that the discovery had been made by the famous British astronomer Sir John Herschel, who had invented a new telescope "of vast dimensions and an entirely new principle." Over the course of the next week the Sun printed details about the moon creatures Herschel had supposedly spied with his telescope. These creatures included lunar bison, fire-wielding biped beavers, and winged "man-bats." The public was fascinated by the reports. Papers throughout the nation reprinted the Sun's articles. But over time, as word from Europe failed to arrive corroborating what the Sun claimed, people realized they had been hoaxed. However, the hoax provided the Sun with such a huge circulation boost that it became one of the most widely circulated papers in the world. Journalism itself was never again the same, because the hoax revealed to editors the power that sensational stories (whether true or false) have to sell papers. For the remainder of the 19th century, the term "moon hoaxy" was synonymous with fraud. MORE" style="color: red;font-weight:bold;">More >>> Are you one of those perverts who lets animals parade naked around your house? Whatever you do, don’t let the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals find out. Founded in 1959, the Society (or SINA, as it was abbreviated) campaigned to increase public morality by urging people to put clothes on animals. (Slap a pair of boxer shorts on old Fido!) The president of SINA was G. Clifford Prout, who soon became a regular on talk shows, delighting audiences with slogans such as "A nude horse is a rude horse." Surprisingly, although many people accused Prout of being a maniac, hardly anyone accused him of being a comedian, which is exactly what he was. The comedian Buck Henry, more specifically. Henry had been talked into playing the part by his friend Alan Abel, who dreamed up the bizarre idea as a spoof on America’s uptight sexual morality. (It was the 1950s, remember). The joke finally came to an end in 1962 when CBS news recognized Prout as Henry during a segment about SINA on the evening news with Walter Cronkite. The reason they recognized him? When not moonlighting as Prout, Henry worked at CBS. MORE" style="color: red;font-weight:bold;">More >>>