Ten Hoaxes That Fooled the Entire Country

On August 25, 1835, the New York Sun, a young penny paper, ran the first of six articles announcing that the British astronomer Sir John Herschel had discovered life on the moon. Herschel was real, and he really had sailed to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa to set up an observatory with a powerful new telescope. Almost everything else was invented.

The articles claimed to be reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science, a publication that had already stopped printing, and credited a Dr. Andrew Grant, who never existed. Readers learned of giant amethyst crystals, lush valleys, unicorns, beavers that walked on two legs, and furry winged humanoids that looked something like bats. Sales of the Sun jumped. According to a later account, a group of Yale scientists traveled to New York to inspect the original reports and was shuffled from office to office until it gave up.

On September 16, 1835, the Sun admitted the series was a hoax. The usual suspect for the writing is Richard Adams Locke, a Cambridge-educated reporter at the paper, and the series is often read as satire aimed at popular writers who speculated about inhabited worlds. Readers mostly laughed it off, and the paper's circulation did not suffer.

In July 1842, New York newspapers carried pictures of a lovely mermaid with a human torso and a graceful tail. The creature that P.T. Barnum actually put on display looked nothing like that. It was a shriveled, dark specimen roughly 3 feet long, and most accounts describe it as the upper body of a monkey or ape sewn onto the back half of a fish.

The object was probably made in Japan in the early 1800s, where fishermen produced such curiosities. An American sea captain, Samuel Barrett Eades, bought it in 1822 and showed it in London until naturalists called it a fake. Two decades later, Barnum leased it from the Boston showman Moses Kimball. To build buzz, Barnum's associate Levi Lyman posed as Dr. Griffin, an English naturalist from a learned society that did not exist, and vouched for the find.

The publicity worked. Crowds filled a New York concert hall, and when the mermaid moved to Barnum's American Museum, attendance there climbed sharply. Barnum knew exactly what he had. The original was last recorded at Kimball's museum in Boston and may have been lost in a fire there, though nobody knows for sure.

On October 16, 1869, workers digging a well on William Newell's farm near Cardiff, New York, struck something huge: a stone man just over 10 feet tall, lying as if asleep. Within days, people were paying 50 cents a head to see what many believed was a petrified giant from biblical times. A group of investors soon paid $30,000 for a three-quarter share.

The giant had been planted by George Hull, a cigar maker and self-described atheist, who came up with the idea after an argument with a revival preacher. In 1868 he bought a 5-ton block of gypsum in Fort Dodge, Iowa, claiming it was for a statue of Lincoln, and paid sculptors in Chicago to carve it. They treated it with acid for an aged look. In November 1868 he had it buried on Newell's farm and waited almost a year. The whole project cost him nearly $3,000.

Yale paleontologist Othniel Marsh called it a recent fake. P.T. Barnum had a replica made and exhibited it in Manhattan, openly inviting the public to wonder which giant was the fraud. In February 1870 the carvers confessed. The original now lies at the Farmers' Museum in Cooperstown, New York.

In 1912, Charles Dawson, a lawyer and amateur fossil hunter, announced finds from a gravel pit at Piltdown in southern England: pieces of a humanlike skull, an apelike jaw, and teeth. With support from leading scientists, the creature was named Eoanthropus dawsoni and hailed as a missing link between apes and humans. It looked like exactly what many researchers expected to find, and that helped it survive.

For decades Piltdown distorted the picture of human evolution. It even helped push aside a real discovery, the Taung skull from South Africa, which Raymond Dart described in 1925. In 1949, Kenneth Oakley ran fluorine tests suggesting the bones were far younger than claimed.

In November 1953, Oakley, Joseph Weiner, and Wilfrid Le Gros Clark published the full exposure. The jaw belonged to a modern ape, most likely an orangutan. Its teeth had been filed down to look human, and the pieces had been stained to match the gravel. The skull was genuine human bone but not ancient; later radiocarbon tests put it at only several hundred years old. Suspicion has fallen on several people over the years, but no culprit has ever been proven.

On April 1, 1957, the BBC's serious current-affairs program Panorama aired a short report of about three minutes on an unusually good spaghetti harvest in the Ticino region of Switzerland. Viewers watched a family pluck long strands of pasta from trees and lay them out to dry in the sun. The calm narration came from Richard Dimbleby, one of the most trusted voices in British broadcasting.

The segment credited the bumper crop partly to the near disappearance of a pest called the spaghetti weevil. It was the voice and the setting, not the visuals, that sold it. Panorama was a sober news program watched by an estimated ten million people, and Dimbleby delivered the report with a perfectly straight face.

The idea came from a BBC cameraman, Charles de Jaeger, who remembered a teacher in Vienna teasing his class that they were so dim they would believe spaghetti grew on trees. Calls poured in afterward, some from people who wanted to grow their own. The BBC reportedly told them to stick a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best. The joke landed because nobody expected one from Panorama.

The April 1, 1985, issue of Sports Illustrated introduced baseball fans to Sidd Finch, a mysterious prospect in the New York Mets spring training camp who could throw a baseball 168 miles per hour. That was far faster than any pitch ever recorded. The writer was George Plimpton, a well-known author, and his byline made the story feel credible.

Finch had a backstory to match his arm. He had briefly attended Harvard, then studied in Tibet, where he learned a yogic discipline of mind and body that he credited for his speed. He also could not decide between baseball and a career playing the French horn, and he had promised the Mets an answer by April 1.

That date was a clue, and there was another one hidden in plain sight. The first letters of the words in the article's subheading spelled out Happy April Fools Day. Plenty of readers missed it. The magazine received close to 2,000 letters. On April 8 it reported that Finch had given up baseball, and on April 15 it admitted that the whole thing was a joke.

In 1995, London producers Ray Santilli and Gary Shoefield released about 17 minutes of grainy black-and-white footage that seemed to show doctors dissecting the body of an alien. They said it came from the 1947 crash at Roswell, New Mexico, and that they had bought it from a retired US military cameraman whose name they would not reveal. A private investigator who tried to find him came up empty.

The film became a television event. Fox broadcast a special built around it, Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?, several times, and one airing drew 11.7 million viewers. Critics pointed to problems from the start, including the lack of any verifiable chain of custody, but the footage had a long run in UFO circles.

In 2006, for a Sky documentary, Santilli admitted that the footage was staged. He said he and Shoefield built a set, hired people to play the doctors, and filmed what he called a restoration of an original reel he claimed to have seen years earlier but which had deteriorated. Manchester sculptor John Humphreys said he made the alien body, using lamb bones from a butcher for its joints. No original footage has ever been produced.

On October 15, 2009, a Fort Collins couple, Richard and Mayumi Heene, reported that their young son had climbed into a homemade, saucer-shaped helium balloon that had broken loose from their backyard. Cable networks carried live pictures of the silver craft drifting across Colorado. Law enforcement from several agencies joined the chase, National Guard helicopters were called in, and some flights at Denver's airport had to change runways.

When the balloon came down, nobody was inside. The boy was found safe at the family's home a short time later, having never left. Questions began almost at once, and within two days Mayumi Heene told investigators in police interviews that it had been a hoax. The county sheriff publicly called it one.

In November 2009, Richard Heene pleaded guilty to attempting to influence a public servant, a felony, and Mayumi Heene pleaded guilty to false reporting, a misdemeanor. In December he was sentenced to 90 days in jail and she to 20 days, both with probation, and they were later ordered to pay $36,000 in restitution. The couple maintained that they pleaded guilty only to avoid harsher consequences. Colorado Governor Jared Polis pardoned both of them in December 2020.

On the night of October 30, 1938, Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air performed an adaptation of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds on CBS radio, staged as a series of breaking news bulletins about a Martian invasion of New Jersey. The broadcast itself was not a hoax; it was a Halloween-eve radio drama. The famous hoax is what came next: the story that it sent millions of Americans fleeing into the streets.

The next morning, newspapers across the country ran dramatic stories of terror and chaos. Historians who have gone back to the evidence find little to support them. A ratings survey by C.E. Hooper that night reached 5,000 households, and only about 2 percent said they were listening to a play or to Welles. Welles was also up against Edgar Bergen's hugely popular variety hour on NBC. Reports of suicides and mass hospitalizations did not hold up.

Why the exaggeration? Newspapers had been losing advertising money to radio, and a story about reckless broadcasters suited them. A 1940 Princeton study estimated about a million frightened listeners, but critics argue it blurred being scared with panicking. Some people were genuinely alarmed. A nationwide panic is a myth.