May 18, 1864: The Civil War Gold Hoax
New Yorkers read in their morning papers that President Lincoln had issued a proclamation ordering the conscription of an additional 400,000 men into the Union army on account of the "general state of the country." The news sent the stock market plummeting. But within hours the news was revealed to be false, planted by a rogue newspaper editor who had sent a forged Associated Press telegram to the papers, planning to profit from a decline in stock prices and a consequent rise in the price of gold, which he had heavily invested in.
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May 18, 1926: The Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson
Popular evangelist preacher Aimee Semple McPherson disappeared while swimming off Los Angeles. It was feared she had drowned, but she turned up unharmed five weeks later in Arizona claiming to have escaped from kidnappers. But it was widely suspected that she had actually spent the time in a seaside cabin having a romantic affair with a married man. [
smithsonian.com]
May 18, 1996: The Sokal Hoax
A front-page article in
The New York Times revealed that an article by physicist Alan Sokal, recently published in the cultural studies journal
Social Text was actually intended to be a parody "thick with gibberish." This had gone unrecognized by the journal's editors. Sokal argued that the publication of his parody demonstrated "an apparent decline in the standards of rigor in certain precincts of the academic humanities."
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