Hoaxes
What are hoaxes? According to
Dictionary.com, a hoax is "something intended to deceive or defraud". Hoaxes are generally used just as a joke, to gain popularity, to scare the public or to get revenge on someone. How do people create hoaxes? Most of the time, the "hoax" was intended as a joke. It is sent throught email and keeps getting fowarded on and on and on and on... Other times, it starts as a small, fake, story and gets sent around. The origin of hoaxes are unknown, though they have been around since circa 750 A.D., with the "Donation of Constantine" hoax, or even earlier.
A hoax wordle!
Hoaxes over the years
Many hoaxes have taken place over the years. Some of them include the following:
670 B.C.E: The first recorded hoax. Archeologists found a story from the Jewish Bible that was plagarized from Assyrian text.
1769: Way before the IBM supercomputer, Deep Blue, a man built a "thinking machine" that constantly won chess matches. In reality, a chess master was hidden inside and would control the machine with wires and levers.
Toy Submarine Nessie
1824: A business was supposedly made to saw Manhattan Island in half when a rumor that the island was tipping because of new buildings. It never happened.
1912: One of the greatest hoaxes of all time was piltdown man in which archeologists "discovered" a skull with the skull of a human and the jaw of an ape. It was thought to be the missing link between humans and apes but the skull was actually made of a prehistoric human and the jaw was a modern chimpanzee.
1938: When a radio station broadcasted a dramatization of H.G. Wells War of the Worlds, it caused a nation-wide panic. People believed that aliens had landed because most hadn't heared the warning at the beginning.
1934: The most famous Nessie picture (left) is actually a two foot tall plaster head attached to a toy submarine. It was found out that the head is small because of the ripples.
1952: A man who was supposedly visited by Venusian UFO's took this picture (bottom). This picture is actually three ping pong balls glued to a lamp shade.
Fake Venusian UFO
Puppet Nessie (click for full size)
1977: Another Nessie hoax. This Nessie (left) is actually a puppet.
2008: A very recent hoax, Bernie Madoff pulled of one of the largest ponzi schemes using his company Bernie Madoff Investment Securities. He is now serving over 100 years in jail.
2009: When the parents of a six-year old boy claimed that their child was in a balloon, the whole county tried to find him. A couple days later, the parents showed that the whole time, the boy was safe in their garage. They are now in jail.
For more hoaxes, go to:
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax View Hoax in a larger map The different places that some of the hoaxes took place are in this map.
Lesson
The lesson here is that you can't believe every thing you hear. To prove the point I created this image (left) to show how easy it is to fake pictures.
Fake image