Creative Pranks and Hoaxes in History

39. The Emperor Who Invented the Whoopee Cushion

Roman emperor Elagabalus (204- 222) was declared ruler of the empire when he was barely fourteen. As might be expected, handing that kind of power to a teenager did not turn out well. While not as cruel as some of Rome’s more monstrous rulers – he was no gratuitously cruel Caligula or Commodus – Elagabalus did display the occasional mean streak.

That streak often showed in his practical jokes, which, considering that he was an emperor with none above him, always meant punching down. At the milder end of Elagabalus’ pranking was his propensity for seating some of his more pompous dinner guests on the ancient Roman version of whoopee cushions, that emitted farting noises when they parked their posterior. At the crueler end of the spectrum, as seen below, was putting people in fear of their lives.

38. Waking Up Next to Wild Beasts

Whatever its downside, embarrassing people by seating them on whoopee cushions is a relatively harmless practical joke, redolent of innocent fun. Not so Elagabalus’ habit of pranking people by putting them in mortal fear of life and limb. One of his favorite pranks began with the teenage emperor getting his dinner guests so drunk, that they had to crash and sleep it off in the palace.

Once the marks were zonked out, Elagabalus had his servants sneak tamed lions, leopards, bears, or a mix thereof, into the bedroom. Come the morning, the emperor would bust a gut laughing at his hungover guests’ reaction to waking up in the midst of a menagerie of man-eating predators. Between that and other behavior his subjects viewed as deviant, Romans heaved a sigh of relief when Elagabalus was violently overthrown at age eighteen. He was beheaded, his corpse was tossed into a river, and his memory was damned by a senatorial edict.

37. The Renaissance’s Most Creative Prankster?

Early in his career, Italian architect and designer Filippo Brunelleschi (1377 – 1446) rediscovered the principles of linear perspective once known to ancient Greek and Roman builders but lost in the Middle Ages. He is considered the founding father of Renaissance architecture, and the first modern planner, engineer, and sole construction supervisor. His major work is the Duomo in Florence – the dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore.

Brunelleschi’s creativity was not limited to architecture: the man was also a prankster who mastered the practical joke like few had before or since. His most famous prank targeted a cabinet maker named Manetto, also known as il Grosso, or “The Fat”. Manetto was prosperous and good-natured, but he had the misfortune of ticking off Brunelleschi by missing a social gathering. So the pioneering architect got him with an epic prank: he screwed with Manetto’s mind and got him to believe that he’d switched bodies.

36. Convincing a Mark That He Had Magically Switched Bodies

Brunelleschi was known for thorough preparation and paying attention to detail in his career as an architect. He was equally thorough in pranking Manetto. First, he assembled a wide cast of characters and coached them on what was needed to convince the mark that he had metamorphosed into somebody else: a well-known Florentine, named Matteo.

Finally, one day in 1409, while Manetto was closing shop, Brunelleschi went to his house, picked the lock, entered, and barred the door behind him. When the mark got home, he discovered that the door was barred from within. Rattling the door, Manetto was alarmed to hear his own voice – actually Brunelleschi’s, doing an impersonation – asking who it was. Upon identifying himself, he was accused of lying by the voice on the other side of the door, who declared that he was Manetto.

35. Taking a Prank to a Higher Level

Brunelleschi’s assertion that he was Manetto so confused his mark, that he retreated to a nearby piazza. There he met an acquaintance, Donatello, who addressed him not by his given name, but as Matteo. Then a bailiff passed by, addressed Manetto as Matteo, and despite his protestations that he had the wrong man, promptly arrested the cabinet maker for debt.

The now thoroughly bewildered Manetto was taken to prison, where his name was entered into the register as Matteo. Thrown into lockup, his fellow prisoners – all of whom were also in on the prank – addressed him as Matteo. Discombobulated, the cabinet maker spent a sleepless night in jail, solacing himself with the notion that it was all a case of mistaken identity, that would soon get cleared up. The following day, things got worse.

34. Messing With a Mark’s Head

After a night in jail, things got worse for Manetto’s mental health when the morning brought two “relatives” – the real Matteo’s brothers – to the prison, who claimed him as their kin. They paid his debt and freed him while berating him for his gambling and wastrel ways. More bewildered now than ever, Manetto was escorted to Matteo’s home in the other side of Florence.

There, the cabinet maker’s protests that he was Manetto, and not Matteo, were dismissed with derision. During that day and evening, he was nearly convinced that he had, indeed, morphed into somebody else. Eventually, Manetto was put to sleep with a potion supplied by Brunelleschi, and carried unconscious back to his own home, for the final chapter of the prank.

33. Putting the Final Touches on the Renaissance’s Greatest Prank

When Manetto came to the following day in his own home, he discovered that his house was in disarray, with furniture, tools, and other items rearranged. His confusion grew with the arrival of Matteo’s brothers, now addressing him by his real name, Manetto. They shared a fascinating story about the previous evening when their sibling got it in his head that he was Manetto.

The story was confirmed when Matteo arrived and described a puzzling dream in which he had been Manetto. That nearly drove Manetto around the bend, as he became convinced – at least for a while – that he had spent a couple of days morphed into Matteo. Eventually, when he discovered what had actually happened, Manetto felt so humiliated, that he left Florence and moved to Hungary.

32. A Hoax That Shaped History

Perhaps no single hoax has had a greater impact in shaping history than the one perpetrated by now-anonymous medieval monks, and known as the “Donation of Constantine”. The monks made up a document recording a generous gift from Roman emperor Constantine the Great, transferring authority over Rome and the entire Western Roman Empire to Pope Sylvester I (reigned 314 – 315) and his successors.

The text described how Sylvester I miraculously cured Constantine from leprosy, which convinced the emperor to convert to Christianity. The emperor showed his gratitude by making the Pope supreme over all other bishops, and “over all the churches of God in the whole earth“. Vast landed estates throughout the Roman Empire are also granted, for the upkeep and maintenance of the churches of Saint Paul and Saint Peter. To top it off, the Pope and his successors were granted imperial regalia, a crown, the city of Rome, and all of the Western Roman Empire.

31. The Donation of Constantine Transformed Popes From Mere Priests To Power Players

Incredibly, people – including kings, popes, and emperors – eventually ended up believing in the Donation of Constantine, and acted accordingly. The donation of such vast territories elevated the Popes from mere priests and religious leaders to independent princes and sovereign rulers of territory in their own right.

In reality, the Donation was forged in the eighth century by some unknown monks, hundreds of years after both Constantine the Great and Sylvester I were dead and buried. The forgery had little impact when it was concocted, but centuries later, during a period of political upheavals that wracked Medieval Europe, the Donation ended up playing a huge role in shaping Christendom and the West.

30. Dusting Off and Weaponizing the Donation of Constantine

The Donation of Constantine was stashed away and forgotten for hundreds of years after its initial forgery. Then, in the mid-eleventh century, Pope Leo IX dusted it off and cited it as evidence to assert his authority over secular rulers.

Surprisingly, the Donation was widely accepted as authentic, and almost nobody questioned the document’s legitimacy. For centuries thereafter, the Donation of Constantine carried significant weight whenever a Pope pulled it out to figuratively wave in the face of secular rulers.

29. Exposing the Hoax

It took the Renaissance and the spread of secular humanism to finally challenge the authenticity of the Donation of Constantine. With the revival of classical scholarship and textual criticism, scholars took a fresh look at the document. It quickly became clear that the text could not have dated to the days of Constantine the Great and Pope Sylvester I. One hint was the use of words and terms that did not exist in the fourth century when the document was supposedly written, but that only came into use hundreds of years later.

Additionally, the document contained dating errors that a person writing at the time could not possibly have made. The Popes did not officially renounce the document, but from the mid-fifteenth century onwards, they stopped bringing up and referring to the Donation of Constantine in their Papal Bulls and pronouncements.

28. A Prank That Wreaked Havoc With Archaeology

In 1912, an amateur English archaeologist named Charles Dawson announced the discovery of human-like fossils in Piltdown, East Sussex. In a Pleistocene gravel bed, Dawson had found fossilized fragments of a cranium, jawbone, and other bones. Britain’s premier paleontologist pronounced the fossils evidence of a hitherto unknown proto-human species. They were also deemed the “missing link” between ape and man, supporting the then-still controversial theory that man descended from apes.

The pronouncements were accepted uncritically by many leading British scientists. Further excavations in the vicinity were made in 1913 and 1914, during which stone tools were discovered. Two miles away, teeth and additional skull fragments were unearthed. So were animal remains, and a mysterious carved bone resembling a cricket bat. The excitement mounted with each new find.

27. The Toxic Mix That Fueled Britain’s Greatest Scientific Hoax

At the time of the Piltdown discovery, there was a growing, and as it ultimately turned out, correct, scientific belief that human evolution from ape to man had occurred in Africa. It was there that fossils of homo erectus, an early hominid, had been discovered. That however meant that the cradle of mankind was in Africa and that all humans were of African origin. The notion that they were ultimately African was too jarring for many Europeans, including many in the British scientific community.

The day’s prevalent racism and ethno-nationalism buttressed British scientists’ confirmation bias, causing them to interpret the Piltdown “evidence” in the light most favorable to their preexisting prejudices. Piltdown Man offered a feasible alternative, and thus a convenient out, from the challenge posed to the era’s racist theories by humanity’s African origins. So leading British scientists embraced the discovery, and defended it against all critics.

26. The European “Missing Link”

If the Piltdown Man discovery in England was accurate, it would mean that Britain had played a prominent role in human evolution. The “missing” link between man and ape would have occurred in Europe, not Africa. That would buttress the belief that Europeans – or at least the British – had evolved separately, and were not of African origins. Thus, the racist assumption that Europeans were a distinct and superior branch of the human tree could continue unchallenged.

In actuality, the Piltdown discovery was a crude hoax. However, because of a combination of ineptness, ethno nationalism, and racism, the discovery was strongly embraced and defended by much of the British scientific establishment. It took four decades before Piltdown Man was debunked, making it one of history’s most successful scientific hoaxes. It was also one of history’s more damaging hoaxes. During those decades, few resources were directed at studying human evolution in Africa, where the actual missing links were ultimately discovered.

25. The Belated Debunking of Piltdown Man

Despite the poor funding for African archaeological exploration, more proto-humans were discovered in Africa in the 1930s. Those finds, coupled with additional Neanderthal finds, left Piltdown Man as an odd outlier in human evolution. Nonetheless, the hoax had its powerful defenders, and it was not until the 1950s that the fossils were subjected to rigorous scientific examination.

They turned out to be fragments of a modern human skull, only 600 years old, the jaw and teeth of an orangutan, and the tooth of a chimpanzee. Chemical testing showed that the bones had been stained to make them look older, and the ape teeth filed down to look more human-like. As to the perpetrator, he was a disgruntled museum employee getting back at his boss, Britain’s chief paleontologist, who had denied him a pay raise.

24. Inventing a Stone Age Tribe

NBC Nightly News announced an amazing discovery on July 16^th, 1971: “The outside world, after maybe a thousand years, has discovered a small tribe of people living in a remote jungle in the Philippines. Until now, the outside world didn’t know they existed… and they didn’t know the outside world existed. Their way of living is approximately that of the Stone Age.”

Known as the Tasaday, the tribe’s discovery was announced by Manuel Elizalde, head of the Filipino government agency in charge of protecting cultural minorities, and a crony of dictator Ferdinand Marcos. According to Elizalde, he discovered the Tasaday after receiving a tip from a local hunter about encounters with primitive tribesmen deep in the jungles of Mindanao. Tracking down the tip, Elizalde was astonished to discover that the tribe had been isolated for over a thousand years, with no contact with the outside world.

23. The Peaceful Tasaday “Have No Words For Weapons, Hostility, or War”

As Elizalde described the Tasaday: “They didn’t realize there was a country. They didn’t realize there was a sea beyond Mindanao. … they did not even know what rice was.” They were also complete pacifists: “They have no words for weapons, hostility, or war“. Overnight, the Tasaday went from unknown to globally famous.

Their pictures appeared on magazine covers, including National Geographic, and clips of the tribe were featured on news programs. Numerous documentaries were made about the stone age primitives, and a bestselling book, The Gentle Tasaday, was written about them. Celebrities flocked to visit and be photographed with them.

22. It Was All a Huge Hoax

When professional anthropologists sought to study the Tasaday, they and their region were abruptly declared off-limits by Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos. It was only after his overthrow in 1986 that the truth came out, and it was revealed that the whole thing had been a huge hoax. Once journalists and anthropologists gained access to the Tasaday, they discovered that, far from being primitive stone agers, they lived like modern people, not in caves, but in houses. They did not run around naked and barefoot but wore shirts, jeans, flip flops and shoes.

Investigations revealed that Elizalde had pressured the Tasaday into pretending to be stone-age primitives. As to Elizalde? He had set up a charitable foundation which raised millions of dollars to protect the Tasaday, their “way of life”, and their jungle habitat from encroachment by the outside world. In 1983, he fled the Philippines, absconding with millions from the foundation.

21. The Petrified Giant Prank

In October of 1869, laborers were digging a well behind the barn of William C. “Stub” Newell, in Cardiff, New York, when they struck stone about three feet down. Clearing the soil around the obstruction revealed a huge foot. With mounting excitement, they continued digging and were astonished when they finally unearthed the petrified remains of a 10-foot tall man.

As news of the find spread, hundreds of archaeologists and scientists, and thousands of the curious, flocked to Newell’s farm, where he charged visitors fifty cents for a look. Newell made no claims about the giant’s authenticity but invited visitors to draw their own conclusions. While it seemed to many to be a crude statue, many more saw it as proof of the Bible’s assertions that giants had once walked the earth. The skeptics were right: it was all a prank.

20. Trolling Religious Fundamentalists

The Cardiff Giant was a prank by an atheist named George Hull, who got the idea after a heated debate at a revival meeting about Genesis 6:4, which claimed that giants had once inhabited the earth. Hull bought a ten-foot block of gypsum and commissioned a stonecutter to shape it into the likeness of a man, after swearing him to secrecy. Chemicals were applied to give the carving an aged look, and needles were used to puncture and pit its surface, making it look more weathered.

Hull then shipped it to the farm of his cousin, William Newell, who buried it behind his barn in 1868. A year later, Newell hired workers to dig a well behind the barn, where they came across the buried hoax. Archaeologists, scientists, and other scholars who saw the Cardiff Giant declared it a fraud. However, many theologians and preachers stepped forth and passionately defended its authenticity, and crowds of the curious and faithful kept coming in ever greater numbers.

19. P. T. Barnum Gets In on the Hoax

Hull, who had spent the equivalent of about $50,000 in today’s dollars, sold his share in the Cardiff Giant to a syndicate for the equivalent of about half a million. The Giant was then moved to Syracuse, where it drew ever-larger crowds. Eventually, huckster P. T. Barnum offered the equivalent of a million dollars for the find. When the owners refused to sell, Barnum commissioned his own plaster copy and exhibited it in New York City, declaring it to be the authentic Cardiff Giant, and that the one in Syracuse was a fake.

Barnum’s brazenness worked, giving rise to the phrase, coined in reference to those paying to see his copy, that “there’s a sucker born every minute“. Lawsuits about authenticity followed, and in the subsequent litigation, Hull finally confessed to the hoax. The court declared both Giants’ fakes and ruled that Barnum could not be sued for calling a fake giant a fake.

18. Discovering Life on the Moon

Excitement gripped America in the summer of 1835 when a New York newspaper, The Sun, announced the recent discovery of life and civilization on the Moon. In a series of six articles, beginning on August 25^th, Thus Sun described how Sir John Herschel, the era’s leading astronomer, had used powerful telescopes to get a clear glimpse of outer space. What he saw overturned all human knowledge.

The astronomer’s accomplishments were astonishing. “By means of a telescope of immense dimensions and an entirely new principle“, Sir John Herschel had discovered planets in other solar systems, and established new and revolutionary theories. He had also “solved or corrected nearly every problem of mathematical astronomy“. All of that was just a tip of the iceberg: according to The Sun, Herschel had discovered life on the Moon.

17. The Bat Men of the Moon

As detailed by The Sun in a 17,000 word six-part series, reprinted from The Edinburgh Journal of Science, Sir John Herschel had traveled to the Cape of Good Hope in 1834 to catalog the stars of the Southern Hemisphere. However, he discovered far more than stars with his powerful telescope when he turned it to the Moon. From his observatory, Herschel saw oceans, rivers, and hints of vegetation. A closer look revealed a beach and a string of pyramids.

As the focus was adjusted for sharper detail, herds of bison-like animals were seen. Next came blue goats that looked like unicorns. Yet more animals, such as walking beavers, were described in the third installment. More creatures roamed the lunar surface, including goats, buffaloes, walking beavers, and unicorns. And flying above them all, were human-like creatures with bat wings, who built houses and temples.

16. Never Underestimate the Public’s Gullibility

The biggest shocker came in the fourth installment of The Sun’s lunar series, which announced the discovery of hominids, about four feet tall, who flew with bat wings. “We scientifically denominated them as Vespertilio-homo, or man-bat, and they are doubtless innocent and happy creatures“, the article went on. That was when the mounting excitement grew into a fever pitch. It was also when the authors discovered that they had greatly underestimated the public’s gullibility.

The articles had been intended as satire, which the authors thought was obvious. But they ended up being taken as gospel truth. The authors eventually wound down the story with the telescope’s accidental destruction. It had been left exposed to the Sun, whose rays caused its lens to act as a burning glass. The result was a fire that destroyed the telescope and the observatory. Needless to say, Sir John Herschel had never claimed the astronomical discoveries attributed to him.

15. The “Luminiferous Ether” and the Revolutionary Engine

American hoaxer and huckster John Ernst Worrell Keely (1837 – 1898) worked a variety of jobs as a young man, including stints as a circus performer, painter, carpenter, member of a theatrical orchestra, carnival barker, and a mechanic. In 1872, he declared that he had invented a new engine that would revolutionize the world, by drawing energy from a new physical force that held limitless potential power.

At the time, there was a widespread and mistaken belief that all space was filled with something called a “luminiferous ether“. It was a hypothetical substance thought necessary for the movement of light or electric waves, and without which those things would be impossible. Keely claimed to have figured out how to tap into and extract energy from this (nonexistent) substance. Having unraveled the secrets of the luminiferous ether, Keely claimed that he could now tap the power of atoms in water to furnish energy.

14. A Perpetual Motion Machine by Another Name

As John Keely put it, atoms were in a state of constant vibration, and by harnessing and channeling water’s vibrations in his revolutionary Keely Engine, people could tap into limitless energy. By getting the water’s atoms to vibrate in unison in accordance with the principles of the luminiferous ether, one could use its “etheric force” to power motors. Put another way, the Keely Engine was a perpetual motion machine – an impossibility under the basic laws of physics, for violating the first or second laws of thermodynamics.

Nonetheless, Keely demonstrated a prototype in his workshop by pouring water into its engine, then playing harmonica, violin, flute, or other musical instruments to activate the contraption with sound vibrations. Soon, the machine would start gurgling, rumbling, then come alive, providing pressures of up to 50,000 psi on display gauges. Harnessing that power, Keely arranged demonstrations in which thick ropes were ripped apart, iron bars were bent, twisted, and snapped in two, and bullets were driven through twelve inch wooden planks.

13. Science-y Sounding Gibberish

Keely spouted science-y sounding words and phrases to describe the principles of his invention. He began by describing his engine as a “vibratory generator”. Then he started telling observers that they were witnessing “quadruple negative harmonics”. At other times, he told gullible investors that he was going to make them filthy rich with his “hydro pneumatic pulsating vacu-engine”. And whenever a listener sounded a note of skepticism, he drowned it with yet more science-y sounding phrases such as “vibratory negatives”, “atomic triplets”, “etheric disintegration”, and “atomic ether vibrations”.

Such words sounded impressive to non-scientists but were actually nothing more than pseudo-scientific gibberish. It was effective pseudo-scientific gibberish, however: within a short time, he convinced investors to give him the equivalent of about $20 million in 2020 dollars as startup capital, which he used to found the Keely Motor Company. In subsequent years, investors forked over the equivalent of another 100 million dollars for a stake in Keely’s enterprise.

12. The Keely Engine Took Investors on a Decades-Long Ride

Keely closely guarded the secrets of his invention for more than two decades, refusing to share its details with anybody. But he kept promising investors that the perfection of a commercial version of his machine was right around the corner. In the meantime, gullible investors kept giving him more and more money, notwithstanding the consensus of physicists that Keely was a quack and charlatan, and that perpetual motion such as he promised was physically impossible.

Finally, when Keely died in 1898, the secret of his engine was revealed to the world. It had not been powered by water, but by a compressed air machine hidden two floors beneath his workshop. The air compressor was connected to the Keely Engine by cleverly concealed pipes and hoses.

11. The Silly Prank That Started an International Craze

In 1976, people in Wiltshire, England, were baffled by a wheat field whose crops were mysteriously flattened in a circle. Soon, mysterious circles of flattened crops, in increasingly elaborate patterns, began appearing in other fields throughout Britain. Once the phenomenon became widely known, it attracted self-declared experts, who offered mystical, magical, and pseudo-scientific explanations for the mystery.

Theories ranged from secret weapons testing, to restless spirits and ghosts acting out, to Gaia, the primal Mother Earth, expressing her distress at what humanity had done to her planet. Early on, one explanation that gained great currency was that the circles were created by space aliens, communicating with mankind in code. Needless to say, all the pseudo-scientific and mystical explanations were hogwash.

10. England’s Roswell and Flying Saucer Nests

The argument that aliens were behind the circles was buttressed by the fact that a decade earlier, mysterious circles had appeared in Australian crops. Many had attributed the Australian circles to UFO landings, labeling them “[flying] saucer nests”. Wiltshire, where the first British crop circle appeared, is located near Stonehenge, and the region is rife with burial mounds and ancient marker stones. New Age types had long claimed those landmarks were linked to others throughout Britain via “leys” – mysterious energy paths.

For years, the region had also been a hotbed for UFO watch parties – England’s Roswell, if you would. So it seemed apt that the first crop circles, or saucer nests, would appear nearby. Before long, theories combining Stonehenge, ancient Druids, mystic energy paths, and the recently revealed crop circles, were combined in a complex explanation for the phenomenon. The circles themselves became magnets for New Age mystical tourism.

9. “Let’s Go Over There and Make It Look Like a Flying Saucer Has Landed”

The crop circles were the brainchild of Doug Bower, an English prankster. One night in 1976, while drinking with his friend Dave Chorley, the duo got to talking about UFOs, aliens, flying saucers and the mysterious Australian circles. Midway through the conversation, Bower suddenly said: “Let’s go over there and make it look like a flying saucer has landed“. As they confessed in 1991, it had been incredibly easy. Demonstrating their technique to print and TV journalists by creating other crop circles in mere minutes, all it took was rope, a wooden plank, and a wire to help them walk in a straight line.

A “cereologist” – a crop circle “expert” who had made a living for years by writing and lecturing about the phenomenon, was called in. He declared the circles authentic. Then the hammer was dropped on him, when it was revealed that it had been a simple hoax and prank all along. As Bower and Chorley explained, they had created all crop circles up to 1987, when other pranksters discovered how to make their own circles and patterns, and joined in on the fun.

8. The Accidental Hoax That Caused a Panic

Other pranks and hoaxes on this list were deliberate, but here is one that came about quite by accident. In the 1930s, the Columbia Broadcasting System’s radio network hosted The Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was a live radio drama series created by director and producer Orson Welles, that presented classic literary works.

On the evening of Sunday, October 30^th, 1938, Welles directed and narrated an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds as a Halloween special. It ended up causing widespread panic when many listeners mistook the radio play about a fictional alien invasion for a news broadcast describing an actual alien invasion.

7. There’s Always Somebody Who Didn’t Get the Memo

The original War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells described a Martian invasion of Victorian Britain, in which the aliens swiftly crushed mankind with advanced technology such as unstoppable death rays and lethal poison gasses. Orson Welles’ adaptation converted the novel into a series of news bulletins, describing an alien invasion of 1938 New Jersey.

Welles’ broadcast made it clear at the beginning that it was a radio play. However, not everybody got the message: many listeners had tuned in mid-broadcast, and thus missed the notification that what they were hearing was a play, not actual news. For such listeners, what they heard was alarming, as Welles, playing the part of a news announcer, fired off a series of news bulletins describing the arrival of Martians.

6. From Alarm to Headless Chicken Panic

The alarm triggered by Orson Welles’ broadcast soon turned into panic for many, when the Martians demonstrated their hostile intent by falling upon the good people of New Jersey with an unparalleled ferocity. Things got worse when an actor who sounded like President Franklin Roosevelt told America: ” Citizens of the nation: I shall not try to conceal the gravity of the situation that confronts the country, nor the concern of your government in protecting the lives and property of its people. . . .

we must continue the performance of our duties each and every one of us, so that we may confront this destructive adversary with a nation united, courageous, and consecrated to the preservation of human supremacy on this earth.” That was followed by reports that the US Army was heavily engaged in a desperate fight to resist the invaders, then by news bulletins announcing that New York City was being evacuated.

5. The Most Hated Man in America

The War of the Worlds broadcast was frequently interrupted to clarify that it was just a play. However, many listeners had not lingered by their radios long enough to hear such clarifications. Soon as they heard that Earth was under attack by extra terrestrials, many panicked and ran out of their homes screaming, or packed their cars and fled into the night. Telephone operators were swamped as thousands of frightened listeners called radio stations, police, and newspapers. Some people rushed to churches to pray, others donned improvised gas masks, and others simply ran around like chickens with their heads cut off.

The following day, Orson Welles woke up to discover that he was the most talked about – and hated – man in America. Once it became clear that Earth was not under attack, public panic was replaced by public outrage at Welles, who was accused of having deliberately caused the widespread hysteria.

4. Hoaxing a Nation

Hard to imagine, but some countries – or at least one country – have a national passion for archaeology: Japan. There, archaeology is particularly popular with the general public. The Japanese people revel in their country’s uniqueness and exhibit greater fascination with their prehistory than any other people do about theirs.

New archaeological finds are frequently announced in bold headlines on the front pages of leading Japanese newspapers, and bookshops have entire sections devoted to Stone Age Japan. In that environment, self-taught archaeologist Shinichi Fujimura became a national celebrity, and his findings were incorporated into school textbooks and taught to Japanese children for years. Unfortunately, his archaeological discoveries were nothing but a string of hoaxes.

3. Hoaxing 101: Tell People What They Want to Believe

In 1981, Shinichi Fujimura discovered stone age artifacts dating back 40,000 years. That established that humans were present in Japan for at least that long. It was a spectacular find which launched Fujimura’s career, gained him national and international fame, and quickly put him in the forefront of Japanese archaeology.

Fujimura’s discovery was particularly significant for the Japanese. Japan has a longstanding love-hate relationship with China, and is constantly uneasy with the fact that its civilization and culture are derived from China’s. Evidence of human presence in Japan for tens of thousands of years offered an out, and supported a counter-thesis that Japanese culture and civilization might have actually developed independently of China’s. A discovery that supports what people want to believe is a discovery that will be eagerly embraced by the public.

2. “God’s Hands”

After his first spectacular discovery, Shinichi Fujimura worked on over a hundred archaeological projects around Japan. Amazingly, the stellar good fortune with which he began his career continued without cease or letup. Fujimura kept finding older and older artifacts, that kept pushing Japan’s human pre-history further and further back. His fame and prestige, already high, reached stratospheric levels in 1993, when he discovered stone age evidence of humans near the village of Tsukidate, which dated back over half a million years. At a stroke, Japan became the equal of its rival, China, in the antiquity scale.

By any measure, Fujimura’s streak was remarkable. So fortunate did he seem in his ability to unearth objects that no other archaeologists could find, that awestruck admirers began referring to the seemingly divinely guided Fujimura as “God’s Hands”. His skills just seemed too good to be true – and as the saying goes, things too good to be true usually are.

1. “The Devil Made Me Do It”

Fujimura’s spectacular streak of discoveries – and his reputation – came to a screeching halt and crashed in 2000. That year, Japan was rocked when a daily newspaper published three photographs showing the respected and celebrated archaeologist planting supposedly ancient stone age tools at a dig site.

Fujimura was forced to confess after he was caught on film, red-handed. He admitted to planting evidence not only at that site, but in other locations across Japan, and throughout his entire career. When asked why he did that, a sobbing Fujimura tearfully responded “the devil made me do it“.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Ancient History Encyclopedia – Donation of Constantine

Archaeology Magazine, Volume 54, Number 1, January / February 2001 – “God’s Hands” Did the Devil’s Work

Ball, Warwick – Rome in the East: The Transformation of an Empire (2000)

Cracked – 4 Impressively Weird Pranks From Centuries Ago

Cracked – The 6 Most Amazing Pranks (You Won’t Believe Worked)

Encyclopedia Britannica – Donation of Constantine

History Collection – 10 Remarkable Fraudulent Discoveries and Inventions that Shook the World

Guardian, The, December 11^th, 2003 – Keely’s Trickster Engine

King, Ross – Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture (2013)

Listverse – 10 of History’s Most Prolific Con Artists and Their Famous Cons

Live Science, June 25^th, 2008 – A Savage Hoax: The Cave Men Who Never Existed

Lock Haven University – The Keely Motor Hoax

Marketplace, October 31^st, 2018 – What Orson Welles and ‘War of the Worlds’ Taught Us About Economic Panic

Museum of Hoaxes – Keely Motor Company

Natural History Museum – Piltdown Man

New Yorker, The, October 21^st, 2017 – Moon Shot: Race, a Hoax, and the Birth of Fake News

Palestine Herald Press, June 2^nd, 2009 – Waco Attorney Still Going Strong at 91

Smithsonian Magazine, December 15^th, 2009 – Crop Circles: The Art of the Hoax

Smithsonian Magazine, July 2^nd, 2015 – The Great Moon Hoax Was Simply a Sign of Its Time

Smithsonian Magazine, October 16^th, 2017 – The Cardiff Giant Was Just a Big Hoax

Wikipedia – Japanese Paleolithic Hoax

Wikipedia – Piltdown Man