The World’s Most Impressive Fakes, Forgeries, and Finds that Made History

The Transformation of a Native American Myth Into a Widely-Accepted Fake Tale

The legend of El Dorado changed like a message in a game of telephone, gradually altered with each retelling, until the final recipient hears something completely different. It began with the first Spaniards who came across the native Muisca people, in today’s Colombia. They heard tales of chiefs who coated themselves in gold dust, then rowed into Lake Guatavita, northeast of modern Bogota, to drop golden gifts for the water god. The first Spaniards to hear the tale named such chiefs El Hombre Dorado, Spanish for “the golden man”. Over the years and many retellings,El Hombre Dorado was transformed. What began as a tribal chief coated in gold dust became a city made of gold. Then it was a kingdom of gold. Finally, a legend grew of a fabulously wealthy empire, that had more gold than the rest of the world put together.

The fake story was helped by the fact that Spaniards and other Europeans had encountered plenty of real life gold among the natives of the Caribbean coast of South of America. So they reasoned that there must be a huge source of gold somewhere in the interior. Many Spanish Conquistadores and other European adventurers who heard the El Dorado narrative of a city of gold, came to believe in its existence. The lust for gold and fabulous riches said to be found in the mythical city fueled various expeditions and searches in the 1500s and 1600s. None of them managed to discover the nonexistent city of gold.

Many Lost Their Lives in a Quest to Find This Fake City

Those who stuck with the original version of the Muisca story, about tribal chiefs who dropped golden gifts into a lake, had some success. They set out to drain Lake Guatavita, and lowered its level enough to recover hundreds of golden artifacts from around the lake’s edges. However, whatever treasures had been tossed into the deeper waters remained beyond their reach. Other than that partial success, the only results of the search for El Dorado were numerous lives wasted in fruitless treasure hunts.

One jinxed search was carried out by the English courtier, Sir Walter Raleigh, who conducted two expeditions in Guiana in search of El Dorado. In the second expedition, in 1617, Raleigh was too enfeebled by age to endure the rigors of the search. So he set up base camp in Trinidad, and sent his son, Watt, up the Orinoco River to find El Dorado. It ended in disaster, and the death of Raleigh’s son in a battle against the Spaniards. Things did not end much better for Raleigh. When he returned to England, King James I ordered him beheaded for defying his orders to avoid conflict with the Spanish.

A Philosopher’s Fake City, That Many Came to Believe is Real

Plato kicked off the legend of Atlantis circa 360 BC, when he wrote in his Critias and Timaeus dialogues about a utopian, advanced, and dramatically lost country that vanished beneath the waves. In popular culture nowadays, Atlantis is presented as a peaceful and wise country, an idealized model of what humanity could be. That was not Plato’s Atlantis, though. He wrote about a rich, technologically advanced, and militarily powerful country that was corrupted by its power. It tried to conquer the world, and the good guys in Plato’s narrative were not the Alanteans, but Athens and her allies, who fought back. If Plato’s Atlantis existed today, it would be Wakanda’s evil sibling: rather than help the world, it would try to conquer and enslave us all.

That Atlantis, eventually sunk by the gods as punishment for its people’s hubris and moral decline, was fake – a fictional plot device to advance some philosophical points. Centuries later, many began to believe that Atlantis was real, and tried to prove its existence. The legend’s modern era revival and its transformation into popular pseudoscience can be traced back to a nineteenth century amateur historian and Congressman, Ignatius Donnelly. He wrote an 1882 book, The Antedeluvian World, in which he added new “facts” that became part of the Atlantis myth. He also theorized that all major human advances can be traced back to Plato’s sunken island.

The Modern Era Quacks Who Popularized the Notion that Atlantis Was Real

Ignatius Donnelly’s claims were dismissed by serious scholars. However, some writers took his version of Atlantis, and ran with it. Most prominent among them were a mystic named Madame Blavatsky, and a famous psychic named Edgar Cayce. Cayce imparted a Christian spin to the story, and gave psychic readings in which he claimed that many of his clients had led past lives in Atlantis. He also predicted that Atlantis would be discovered in 1969. It was not, despite Plato’s specificity about its location. The philosopher wrote of an island bigger than Asia (what Greeks called Asia Minor back then) and Libya put together, situated in the Atlantic Ocean at the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea, just past the Straits of Gibraltar.

Those who advocated that Atlantis was real and not a fake fictional account, argued that he was mistaken, or that for his own reasons, he sought to mislead. Over the years, there have been great advances in submarine, deep sea probe, oceanography, and ocean floor mapping technologies. Despite such progress, no evidence has emerged that Plato’s fable described a real place. Although the ocean deep is still full of mysteries, it is difficult to miss a submerged landmass bigger than Asia Minor and Libya. Nonetheless, the notion of a lost advanced civilization titillates people’s imaginations, so it is unlikely that the legend of Atlantis will die off anytime soon.

Archaeological Proof of the Biblical Accounts of Giant Men?

On October 16^th, 1869, as workers dug a well behind the barn of William C. “Stub” Newell in Cardiff, New York, they struck stone about three feet down. As they cleared the soil around the obstruction, a huge foot was revealed. The workers continued to dig, and were astonished when they finally unearthed the petrified remains of a ten-foot-tall man. As news spread, archaeologists, scientists, and thousands of the curious, flocked to Newell’s farm. He charged visitors 50 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 observant people to be a crude statue, many more saw it as proof of the Bible’s assertions that giants had once walked the earth.

Skeptics had the right of it, as the Cardiff giant was actually a fake. It was a statue created by an atheist named George Hull after a heated debate at a revival meeting about Genesis 6:4, which claimed that the giants had once inhabited the earth. Hull bought a ten-foot block of Gypsum in Iowa, and shipped it to Chicago. There, he swore a stonecutter to secrecy, and commissioned him to shape it into the likeness of a man. Chemicals were applied to give it an aged look, and needles were used to puncture and pit its surface to make 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.

Calling a Fake a Fake is Not Grounds for a Lawsuit

Archaeologists, scientists, and other scholars who saw the Cardiff Giant declared it a fake and a fraud. However, many theologians and preachers stepped forth and passionately defended its authenticity. In the meantime, crowds of the curious and faithful came in ever greater numbers. George Hull, who had spent the equivalent of about $60,000 in 2022 dollars, sold his share to a syndicate for about $600,000 in today’s money. The Giant was then moved to Syracuse, where it drew ever larger crowds.

Eventually, huckster PT 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. He declared that his was the authentic Cardiff Giant, and that the one in Syracuse was a fake. That brazenness worked, and gave rise to the phrase, coined in reference to those paying to see Barnum’s 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 were fake, and ruled that Barnum could not be sued for calling a fake giant a fake.

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

Adams, Mark – Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (2015)

Ancient History Encyclopedia – Troy

Ancient Origins – Questioning the Mycenaean Death Mask of Agamemnon

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

BBC – El Dorado: The Truth Behind the Myth

California History, Vol. 81, No. 2 (2002) – Who Made Drake’s Plate? Hint: It Wasn’t Francis Drake

Centre of Church Studies – The False Donation of Constantine

Classical Journal, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Oct., 1968) – Father of History or Father of Lies; the Reputation of Herodotus

Cracked – 15 Ancient Artifacts That Turned Out to be Worthless Garbage

Dolnick, Edward – The Forger’s Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century (2008)

Encyclopedia Britannica – Donation of Constantine

Encyclopedia Britannica – Herodotus

Faulkner, Neil – Lawrence of Arabia’s War (2017)

Federer, Kenneth L. – Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology: From Atlantis to the Walum Olum (2010)

Goodman, Matthew – The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Bat-Men in Nineteenth Century New York (2008)

Ha’artez, March 7^th, 2013 – Con Artist: The True Story of a Master Forger

History Collection – 10 Examples of Fake News in American History

History Today, Volume 61, Issue 7, July, 2011 – The Discovery of Machu Picchu

Journal of the Society of the History of Discoveries, Volume 40, 2008, Issue 1 – Discovery as Autobiography: The Machu Picchu Case

Lawrence, T.E. – Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922)

Live Science – ‘Lost City’ of Atlantis: Facts & Fable

National Geographic – Atlantis

National Geographic – El Dorado

NPR – How Mediocre Dutch Artist Cast The Forger’s Spell

PBS – Lawrence of Arabia

Science Beat – Drake’s Plate: The End of the Mystery?

Science Magazine, November 7^th, 2000 – Archaeologist Faked Important Discovery: Famous Amateur Admits Planting “Oldest” Stone Tools in Japan

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

Tribble, Scott – A Colossal Hoax: The Giant From Cardiff That Fooled America (2009)