9 of History’s Most Famous Hoaxes

In October 1869, workers digging a well behind a farm in Cardiff, New York, hit what looked like a ten-foot petrified man. Crowds paid to gawk at him, and a debate broke out over whether he was a fossilized ancient giant or an old stone statue. Either way, the farm owner was raking in money.

It was neither. A man named George Hull had commissioned the figure from a block of gypsum, had it carved, aged it with acid and sand, and buried it a year earlier as a jab at people who took the giants of the Bible literally. Scholars quickly spotted fresh chisel marks, and Hull eventually confessed to the whole scheme.

When fragments of a skull turned up in a gravel pit in Piltdown, England, they seemed to be the “missing link” — a creature with a human-sized braincase and an ape-like jaw. British scientists were thrilled, partly because it suggested early humans had evolved in England. It shaped textbooks for forty years.

In 1953, modern chemical dating exposed it as a crude forgery: a medieval human skull married to the filed-down jaw of an orangutan, stained to look old. The teeth had literally been reshaped with a file. It remains one of the most embarrassing frauds in the history of science, and no one is entirely sure who did it.

Two young cousins in the English village of Cottingley borrowed a camera and came back with photographs of themselves surrounded by tiny winged fairies. The images caused a sensation, and none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — creator of the ruthlessly logical Sherlock Holmes — championed them as genuine proof of the supernatural.

The fairies were paper cutouts, copied from a popular children’s book and propped up with hatpins. The cousins kept the secret for decades before finally admitting it in the 1980s, though one of them insisted to the end that the very last photo was real.

In the summer of 1835, the New York Sun ran a series of articles claiming a famous astronomer had spotted life on the Moon through a powerful new telescope: forests, unicorns, beaches, and bat-winged humanoids going about their day. Circulation soared, and readers ate it up.

The astronomer named in the pieces had done no such thing and knew nothing about them. The whole series was invented, most likely by a Sun reporter as a mix of satire and circulation stunt. The paper never issued a formal retraction — it simply let the story quietly fade once everyone was in on the joke.

The Turk was a chess-playing machine built in 1770 — a wooden figure seated at a cabinet who could beat nearly anyone who challenged him, reportedly including Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin. For decades it toured Europe and America as apparent proof that a machine could think.

It couldn’t. Hidden inside the cabinet was a real human chess master, who slid along a sliding seat to stay out of view as the operator theatrically opened the doors. Observers had long suspected a person was tucked inside, and the full mechanics were laid bare in print after the machine was destroyed in a fire.

P.T. Barnum knew exactly what people wanted to believe. In 1842 he exhibited the “Feejee Mermaid,” billed as the preserved body of a genuine mermaid caught in the South Pacific. Handbills showed a lovely creature; the crowds lined up expecting the same.

What they got was a shriveled, grotesque thing — the top half of a monkey stitched to the tail of a fish, a type of curio manufactured in Asia. It was never real, and Barnum barely pretended otherwise; the point was to get you through the door. The specimen he showed is generally thought to have later been lost to fire.

The most iconic image of the Loch Ness Monster — a graceful neck and head rising from the Scottish loch — was published in 1934 and credited to a respected London surgeon, which is why it’s still called the “Surgeon’s Photo.” For decades it was the closest thing Nessie believers had to hard evidence.

Sixty years later, one of the men involved confessed on his deathbed that the “monster” was a toy submarine fitted with a sculpted head and neck, floated on the loch and photographed as a hoax cooked up in revenge against a newspaper. The surgeon had merely lent his name to make it believable.

On Halloween eve in 1938, Orson Welles and his radio troupe performed an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds as a series of fake news bulletins reporting a Martian invasion of New Jersey. Listeners who tuned in late, missing the opening notice that it was a drama, heard what sounded like live coverage of the end of the world.

This one is a little different — it wasn’t meant to deceive, and the story that it caused nationwide mass panic has itself been exaggerated over the years by newspapers eager to knock the upstart medium of radio. Some listeners were genuinely frightened, yes, but the legendary hysteria was largely a myth built on top of a broadcast.

In 1983 the German magazine Stern announced a stunning find: sixty volumes of Adolf Hitler’s personal diaries. The magazine paid millions, and reputable historians initially vouched for them. It looked like the scoop of the century.

They were forgeries, written by a con man named Konrad Kujau who had a sideline faking Nazi memorabilia. Forensic tests showed the paper, ink, and binding all contained materials that simply didn’t exist during World War II. Kujau and a Stern reporter went to prison, and the magazine’s reputation took years to recover.