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One
of the fairies photos that fooled Arthur Conan Doyle (b. May 22,
1859);
Frances
Griffiths with the fairies, photographed by Elsie Wright in July
1916
 May
22, 1859
| Birth of Sir
Arthur
Conan Doyle (d. July
7, 1930),
Scottish
physician
and author, creator of Sherlock
Holmes. After his son died in World War I, he dedicated himself
to spiritualistic
studies. An example is The
Coming of the Fairies (1922) in which he supported the
existence of 'little people' and spent more than a million
dollars on their cause. He
was apparently totally convinced of the veracity of the obviously
faked Cottingley
fairy photographs, which he reproduced in the book, together
with theories about the nature and existence of fairies.
 Doyle's
gullibility possibly was heightened because he had first been told
about the photographs by his fellow devotee of esoteria and
enthusiastic believer in the pictures, Gerald
Gardner, the founder of modern Wicca.
By May 1920 Gardner was using slides of the Cottingley pictures at
lectures. Doyle saw the first two photos and Gardner convinced him
they were real, whereupon Doyle wrote an article on the subject in
The Strand, the magazine that published his Holmes tales. Doyle did,
however, say that the photos should be tested by disinterested
people.
While
Doyle was in Australia on a lecture tour in 1921, Gardner sent him
information about three more photos that he had been shown by the
Cottingley cousins, and Doyle shed any doubts that he might have
had, apparently believing that Gardner fit the bill of his
"disinterested" person.
Doyle
at this time was a major international celebrity, but his
fascination with ghosts, fairies and "the afterlife" drew
ridicule worldwide. In 1923, as he toured America, an editorial in
the New York Times said: "Again Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
is placing on many of this country's inhabitants the embarrassing
task of trying to strike a balance between their long-established
liking for him and their equally well-settled dislike for what he is
doing."
Frances
Griffiths and Elsie Wright, two young cousins living in Cottingley,
near Bradford,
England. The children took a total of five photographs between
1916 and 1920 of what appeared to be fairies
dancing. The photos showed the fairies as small humans with 1920s
style haircuts, dressed in filmy gowns, and with large wings on
their backs. One picture is of a gnome,
about 12 inches tall, dressed in a somewhat Elizabethan
manner, and also with wings.
Examination
of the pictures today shows that the fairies look like paper cutouts,
having a flat appearance, with lighting that does not match the rest
of the photograph. At the time, however, the photos were viewed by
many as evidence of fairies, most notably by Doyle ... Read
on in the Book of Days
On the left, a Cottingley
fairy. On the right, a Shepperson fairy.
Click image for Shepperson's fairies to compare with the photo at
the top of this page
(opens in a new window)
January
16, 1749 | The Bottle Hoax of London
The
Battle of Bottle-noddles
On this day in
London, one of the worst theatre riots in history occurred. An
unknown person advertised that he would this evening, at the
Haymarket Theatre, 'play on a common walking cane the music of
every instrument now used, to surprising perfection' and 'get into a
tavern quart bottle, without equivocation, and while there, sing
several songs, and suffer any spectator to handle the bottle; that
if any spectator should come masked, he would, if requested, declare
who they were; and that in a private room he would produce the
representation of any person dead, with which the person requesting
it should converse some minutes, as if alive.'
Spectators did,
indeed, show up, in great numbers, including the Duke of Cumberland,
and paid up to 7 shillings and sixpence. When no performer showed
up, a joker in the audience called out that if they paid double,
someone would get into a pint bottle. Then pandemonium broke out,
with the audience pulling down the theatre sets and the good Duke
waving his sword. Someone grabbed it from him and ran with it,
saying "Fools should not have such chopping sticks!"
(Later, much fun was had by an advertiser in the paper called Old
England, who put in a Lost and Found ad for the sword, lost
'from the fat sides of a certain great general in his hasty
retreat from the Battle of Bottle-noddles'.) The hoaxer never got
any money: his whole reward was the sight of the Haymarket Theatre
being dismantled and burned in a pile.
The Bottle Hoax
of Haymarket Theatre, otherwise known as the Battle of
Bottle-noddles, was hugely famous in its day; Herman
Melville makes mention
of the event in Moby Dick.
January
21, 1813
| USA: Eight commissioners of the City of Philadelphia visited Charles
Redheffer on the outskirts of the city, near the banks of the
Schuylkill River.
Redheffer had
set up a working model of what he claimed was a miraculous perpetual
motion machine that required no source of energy, but the good
burghers revealed his hoax (actually, his fraud, because he was
trying to get the commissioners to invest city funds in his
device).
Redheffer
slipped out of Philadelphia, later that year taking his scam to
New York, only to be exposed by steamboat inventor Robert
Fulton, who removed some boards from the wall alongside the
machine and exposed a catgut
cord that led to the upper floor. Upstairs he found an old man who
was turning a hand-crank with one hand and eating bread with the
other. An angry audience smashed the bogus machine to bits, and,
once again, Redheffer fled.
More
And
more
August
10,  1840
| The Fortsas
Hoax
On this day,
an auction of a unique collection of very rare books was scheduled
to be held in Binche, Belgium. Earlier that year, a catalogue with
the lengthy title 'Catalogue d'une tres-riche mais peu
nombreuse collection de livres provenant de la bibliotheque de fen
M. le Comte J. N. A. de Fortsas' (Catalogue of a very rich but
very small collection of books coming from the library of Monsieur
Count J. N. A. Fortsas) had appeared in Europe and received a great
deal of attention from book dealers, librarians and book collectors
across the continent. Many of them had received the catalogue by
mail.
Although only 52
books were listed in this extraordinary auction catalogue, the
passions of the bibliophiles were excited because Jean Nepomucene
Auguste Pichauld, Comte de Fortsas, who had died aged 69 on September
1 of the previous year, had a special passion of his own: he
collected books of which only one copy existed, some of them new and
previously unheard of sources. His heir, it seems, was offering the
books for sale. "Buy, I conjure you, at any price, the follies of
our rascally grandfather", wrote the Princess de Ligne to her
agent, urging him to buy one of the Fortas collection's listed
items, the one and only copy of her grandpere's memoir, Mes
Campagnes.
In the days leading up to August 10, the hotels of Binche must have
been booked out, for prospective purchasers flocked to the town.
However, on the very day, it was announced in a broadside which
suddenly appeared that the sale had been cancelled, and that the
Count had donated his collection to the local library. The fact that
there was no public library in Binche dismayed the buyers even
further, but it soon dawned on the throng that they had been duped.
Someone discovered that there was no Comte de Fortsas either.
 The elaborate hoax had been contrived by Renier-Hubert-Ghislain
Chalon (1802 - 1889; pictured), a retired military officer,
prominent numismatist and sometime practical joker. In his later
years he was made honorary life President of La Société Royale de
Numismatique de Belge.
Biblio-Fraud
More
And
more
February
28, 1874 | Arthur Orton, the false claimant to the
Tichborne fortune, was found guilty of perjury.
 The
strange
Tichborne
Case
So ended a
celebrated English impersonation case. In March 1853, Roger Charles
Tichborne, heir to the ancient Hampshire baronetcy, sailed for South
America. On April 20 he departed from there on the Bella
for Jamaica. The ship sank, and Tichborne was not heard of again. In
October 1865, 'RC Tichborne' showed up in
Wagga Wagga, Australia,
in the person of a man known locally as Tom Castro.
On Christmas
Day, 1866, Tichborne/Castro landed in England where he claimed
the baronetcy. The real Roger's mother, Dowager Lady Henriette
Felicité Tichborne, confirmed the impostor as her son, though the
rest of the family was not deceived at all. We should note here that
antique pictures show that Roger Tichborne was a very slender man,
but the claimant was very obese, looking about twice the weight of
Roger.
Finally the impostor lost in court,
where he was revealed as Arthur Orton, son of a Wapping (England)
butcher. Orton found himself sentenced to 14 years' hard labour. The
false claimant to the Tichborne fortune had been found guilty of
perjury after 260 days, in the longest trial in English history to
that time.
The Gilbert and Sullivan opera Trial by
Jury is said to have been based on the famous Tichborne Case.
"Henriette died before the trial got
to court. Eventually, Orton was convicted of fraud and perjury. He
was sent to prison for 14 years, and after serving ten years, he
was released and immediately sold his story to a newspaper for £3,000.
He died a few years later, and his gravestone was inscribed:
'Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne; born 5 January 1829; died
1 April 1898'." Source
October 20,
1912 "On October
20th, 1912, readers of the New York American were regaled with a
startling and perhaps history-making story in a lavish two-page
spread. Paul Schliemann, grandson of Heinrich Schliemann, the famous
archeologist who excavated Mycenae and the legendary city of Troy,
revealed that his grandfather on his deathbed produced a mysterious
bequest for any of his heirs willing to devote their life to proving
the existence of Atlantis. He claimed that he had spent years
following up on this and now was about to produce actual physical
evidence of the reality of the fabled lost continent. Or was he
..."
Source
Heinrich
Schliemann in the Book of Days
Atlantis in
the Scriptorium
December
28, 1917
| USA:
In
a hoax article,
'A
Neglected Anniversary',
American journalist HL
Mencken celebrated the 75th anniversary of the advent
of the bathtub in America and lamented that the notable event had
passed without notice. The New
York Evening Mail published his facetious essay on the history
of bathtubs in America.
"To Mencken's amazement and delight, this history of the
triumphant American tub was swallowed and spread by newspapers
and radio stations across the country. The "facts" were duly
incorporated into reference books; the health and hygiene
industry, not to mention the plumbers, touted the happy day; the
White House calendar-makers, noting Mencken's claim that Millard
Fillmore (chosen surely for his name) was the first President to
install one, paid tribute to his tub."
Source
November
28, 1994
| Alan
Sokal, a lecturer from the Department of Physics at New York
University, wrote 'Transgressing
the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum
Gravity',
a hoax article that was published in good faith as a genuine
research paper in the postmodernist
cultural
studies academic journal, Social Text of Spring/Summer 1996.
The article contains a number of statements
that Sokal stated were "a pastiche of left-wing
cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright
nonsense". At one stage he asserts that "physical reality
is at bottom nothing more than a social and linguistic
construct", and at another he proposes that the New
Age concept of the morphogenetic field actually constitutes a
"cutting edge theory of quantum
gravity".
April
12, 1985
| USA: Federal inspectors declared that four animals of the Ringling
Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus were not unicorns (one was
called 'Lancelot, the Living Unicorn'). They were, in fact, goats
with surgically implanted horns. It was not a first: in the 19th
century, showman PT
Barnum himself had exhibited what he claimed to be the skeleton
of a unicorn.
Pictured:
Unicorn skeleton from Otto von Guericke's Protogaea (1663).
The skeleton was pieced together from mammoth and possibly
rhinoceros remains. Notice that the unicorn skeleton has no hind
legs." Source:
Clifford
Pickover's Encyclopedia of Hoaxes
Unicorns,
horned gods, in Book of Days More
I,
Rigoberta Menchú, hoaxer
 December 10,
1992 | Mayan Indian Rigoberta
Menchú Tum was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work
opposing US-sponsored military dictatorships, terrorism and genocide
in Guatemala.
The
prize was given to one
of the greatest hoaxers of the 20th century
"in recognition of her work for social justice and ethno-cultural
reconciliation based on respect for the rights of indigenous
peoples".
Wikipedia
tells us that her prize was based in part on her 1987 autobiography I,
Rigoberta Menchú. Several years later anthropologist David
Stoll conducted a series of interviews with Menchú's former
acquaintances for a follow-up book. During this time he discovered
that her account was largely fabricated. Specifically, Menchú was
not self-taught (she received a middle-school education) and the
land dispute in which her father was killed was with family members,
not the government. She
even described, movingly, witnessing the death by starvation of a
brother who in fact died years before she was born. No
steps have been taken by the Nobel Committee to revoke Menchú's
award.
The
'autobiography' was was
in fact written by a French leftist, Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, wife
of Marxist Regis Debray, "who provided the foco strategy
for Che Guevara's failed effort to foment a guerrilla war in Bolivia
in the 1960s", according to well-known author and Salon.com
columnist, David Horowitz ('I,
Rigoberta Menchú, liar').
Her
defenders claim that any dishonesties are offset by the overarching
importance of her tale of US-funded
Guatemalan
suppression of the Indian people.
Menchú's
response to her critics: she suggests that their charges should be
dismissed as political, while falsehoods in her account should be
forgiven … because they're political.
Her
own excuse when confronted : "It
tells my personal testimony, but it also has parts of the testimony
of the collectiveness of Guatemala," she said. "For common
people such as myself, there is no difference between testimony,
biography, and autobiography ... What we do is tell what we have
lived, not just alone."
I,
Rigoberta Menchú : An Indian Woman in Guatemala by
Rigoberta Menchú
Rigoberta
Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans
500
Years of Sacrifice Before Alien Gods
Rigoberta
Menchú meets the press
Women
Nobel Prize Laureates Heroines
of Peace
Biography
Japanese
archaeologist's fraud
Devil undermines Japan's Palaeolithic
research
November 5,
2000
|
Japanese archaeologist and Vice Chairman of the private Tohoku
Palaeolithic Cultural Research Institute, Shin'ichi
Fujimura, apologized for faking sensational archaeological
discoveries. He had been caught on the Mainichi
Shimbun newspaper's video cameras as he buried
eight stoneware pieces shortly after 6 a.m. on October
22.
Formerly known as 'God's hand' or the 'divine digger'
for his luck in finding important artefacts, Fujimura began making
his earliest discoveries as an amateur archaeologist in the 1970s.
The self-taught scientist had earned his reputation with a series of
finds including a remarkable discovery in 1981 of stoneware dating
back 40,000 years. He is said to have been involved in research
centred around 186 sites. Although in a brief press interview on
December 18, 2001 Fujimura would deny rumours that more dig finds he
was involved in were also fakes, he later admitted to having falsely
planted items at another 41
sites, including pieces he once labelled as the world's oldest
connected stone tool. The two parts had been excavated separately at
two different sites about 30 km apart. Fujimura had claimed that
both were 100,000 years old.
"The devil made me do it"
Rumours
of problems in Japan's Early and Middle Palaeolithic
research had been circulating for a long time and Mainichi
Shimbun put together an investigation team to look into all of
these rumours. Confronted with the damning evidence the disgraced
archaeologist admitted that he buried the items because he was
"desperate [to find stone tools] ... voices in my head told me
that I had to do something". Asked why he had perpetrated such a
deceit, Fujimura answered tearfully, "The devil made me do it".
The fraudster, his grand career now in tatters, broke down in tears
as he faced the media at a news conference at the Miyagi Prefectural
Government headquarters in Sendai. "I personally planted them and
no one else took part. Please don't discredit the whole dig,
because there were some authentic finds," Fujimura said. "My actions
were a disgrace ... I'm really sorry for my family and friends."
The fraud had yielded unintended consequences. Since the unearthing
of Fujimura's so-called Stone Age tools was announced in Tsukidate in
1993, the town had been in the epicentre of a Japanese archaeology
boom. Flintstone-like characters became town mascots, and Tsukidate
adopted as a motto: "Come and see the skies that were admired by
the original man". Soon tourists were flocking by the thousands to
admire the region's archaeological sites, and 'original man'
noodle shops sprang up in town. A road was renamed The Original Man
Way, and an Original Man Marathon quickly became a popular annual
event drawing runners from all over Japan.
Fujimura publicly confessed that he had buried 61 out of 65 items
that were unearthed from the Kami-Takamori dig at Tsukidate, Miyagi
Prefecture. He had also fabricated caches at the Soshin-Fudozaka
site in Hokkaido. On at least one occasion, he had even taken
reporters straight from a news conference to a site and
'discovered' artefacts on cue. Despite this, and the fact that
any trained archaeologist could have seen that the soil around the
caches had been disturbed, the deception was well received in
Japanese academic circles for two decades.
The dig at Kami-Takamori, thanks largely to Fujimura, had become
famous worldwide as the oldest Early Palaeolithic site in Japan,
with the ages of eight or more cultural layers ranging from 500,000
to 700,000 years. Even more significant amongst scientists was the
fact that several finds of stone artefacts indicated levels of symbolic
cognition in Homo
erectus much earlier than anything suspected from African
and European evidence.
Rewriting the textbooks
If
it had been true, the Kami-Takamori 'finds' could have rewritten
the textbooks on human evolution. However, some archaeologists, such
as Oda
Shizuo and Charles
T Keally, had, since at least 1985, published skeptical papers
on the direction in which Japanese Palaeolithic archaeology was
travelling.
Most scholars today accept that human beings lived in northern China
at least by 700,000 years ago. We know Japan was connected to the
continent by land bridges at least twice during the past 700,000
years, and that large terrestrial mammals migrated into the islands
over those land bridges. However, Fujimura's fraud has raised
questions of whether humans beings really were in Japan before
35,000 years ago.
Fujimura's fraudulent discoveries perhaps had been accepted by the
Japanese academic elites, as well as the public, because they
confirmed a popular notion – the great antiquity of the Japanese
people. Even the Mainichi English edition reportage, which
used the word 'fraud' on November
7, had attenuated this to the more comfortable term
'fabrication' the next day. Many scholars have also begun to
question not only the closed academic environment, but also the
Japanese educational standards that allowed such a hoax to take root
and thrive.
November
9, 1966
| Paul
McCartney died. At least, that was what the worldwide 'Paul
is Dead' rumour
of 1969 alleged.
The
'Paul is Dead' rumour started with a series of events in the 1960s
that led many fans of The
Beatles to believe that McCartney was actually dead and had been
replaced with a look-alike
... Read on
in the Book of Days
 October
30, 1938
|
Orson
Welles's Mercury Theatre broadcast a radio dramatisation of
English writer HG
Wells's War
of the Worlds -
listeners took it as a real newscast of a Martian invasion and panic
broke out. The original novel's English author was not pleased by
the performance. Wells is reported as having said on the following
day, "the dramatisation was made with a liberty that amounts to a
complete rewriting and made the novel an entirely different story.
It's a total unwarranted liberty".
"The
author of the original novel, H G Wells, was not particularly
impressed. On the following day he is reported as saying 'the
dramatisation was made with a liberty that amounts to a complete
rewriting and made the novel an entirely different story. It's a
total unwarranted liberty'. By 1940 his attitude had somewhat
mellowed because he was happy to meet and be interviewed by
Orson on live American radio. Why had his early antipathy
evaporated? It might have something to do with the fact that the
broadcast and publicity had boosted sales of one of his more
obscure novels."
Source
January
24, 2004
| Britain's Telegraph reported on the find of a 'baby dragon'.
It was, of course, a cute hoax.
An author, Allistair
Mitchell, was so desperate to get his fantasy book published that he
staged had a dragon made by model makers Crawley Creatures.
 November
20, 1752
| Birth of Thomas
Chatterton, English poet, who produced all his work by
the age of only 17, when he committed suicide (August
24, 1770).
The
former child prodigy produced some of the most remarkable works in
English literature that, even as forgeries, were brilliant in and of
themselves. However, his publishers took advantage of him and paid
him only pennies for his work, and often he would have no food for
days.
Thomas
Chatterton's father had died
before the poet's birth at Bristol,
England.
Also named Thomas
Chatterton, he was a musical genius, a poet, a numismatist,
a dabbler in the occult,
a sub-chanter at Bristol
Cathedral and master of the Pyle Street free school …
Read
on at the Thomas
Chatterton: Boy genius and forger
page in the Scriptorium
 August
25, 1835
The
New
York Sun perpetrated The
Great Moon Hoax.
The articles were falsely attributed to Sir
John
Herschel (1792 - 1871), perhaps the best-known astronomer of his
day (and nephew of Caroline
Herschel).
The headline read:
GREAT ASTRONOMICAL
DISCOVERIES
LATELY MADE
BY SIR JOHN HERSCHEL, L.L.D. F.R.S. &c.
At the Cape of Good Hope
[From Supplement to the Edinburgh Journal
of Science]
October
16,
1869
|
The
Cardiff
Giant, one of the most famous American hoaxes, was discovered,
in New York state by workers digging a well behind the barn of
William C 'Stub' Newell in Cardiff.
It became the
subject of huge interest and debate, with some saying it was an
ancient statue and others saying it was a petrified human giant from
days of old. Eventually it turned out that the Giant was the
creation of a New York tobacconist named George Hull who spent
$2,600 having the Giant carved and buried but who sold the creation
for $37,500 to a syndicate of five men headed by David Hannum. It
was moved to Syracuse,
New York for exhibition.
It drew such crowds that showman PT
Barnum (1810 - 1891)
offered $60,000 for a three-month lease of it. When he was turned
down he made a plaster replica and put it on display, claiming that
his was the real giant and the Cardiff Giant was a fake. As the
newspapers reported Barnum's version of the story, David Hannum was
quoted as saying, "There's a sucker born every minute."
This was in reference to the suckers paying to see Barnum's giant.
Over time, the quotation has been misattributed to PT Barnum himself
... Read
on in the Book of Days
Wilson is working on the next
article
Index of articles on
folklore and other topics
External
links
List
of hoaxes at Wikipedia
Meet
a 'Stone Age' Man So Original, He's a Hoax
More
scientific hoaxes
Scientific
misconduct (Wikipedia)
Strange
Hoaxes That Endure
The
Piltdown Inquest
Hoaxes
of the Ages
Hoaxbusters
Hoax
warnings
Moon
Landing Hoax?
The
Museum of Hoaxes
Internet
hoaxes, email rumours and urban legends - Current Netlore
Is
this song a hoax?
Scientists
don't read the papers they cite
Where
are they (scientific frauds or accused frauds) now?
The
DHMO Hoax
And
finally, from the polymathic Mr Pickover: Cliff
Pickover's Internet Encyclopedia of Hoaxes
(and spend a few days
at Cliff's incredible homepage
- "10,000 links from beyond the edge")
|
