THE LOCH NESS MONSTER HOAX

This has been a favourite subject for pranksters since 1933 — the Loch Ness monster, allegedly a 1,400-year-old resident of Scotland. In 1933, a picture of Nessie, as the monster is popularly known, made it to a newspaper. It was taken by one Colonel Robert Wilson, a gynaecologist, and involved an accomplice named Christian Spurling. In 1994, however, Spurling confessed that it was a hoax: the picture was actually of ‘‘a piece of plastic attached to a toy submarine’’. But the monster was not to be laid to rest so easily — it surfaced once again in 2003 when the fossil of a large ‘‘sea creature’’ was reportedly found in the Loch Ness, a water body.

THE CARDIFF GIANT HOAX

This one has even inspired a book, A Colossal Hoax by Scott Tribble. It dates back to 1869, when a man by the name of Stub Newell came across ‘‘fossilized remains of a human being’’, 10-ft tall, with each foot measuring 21 inches. Newell took the remains from his Cardiff farm and put them up for show and charged per viewing! It later emerged that the amazing discovery was nothing more than “a carved slab of gypsum”. When circus tycoon P.T. Barnum wanted to make the carving a part of his show, Newell opposed him. So, Barnum decided to make “a fake of the fake”. Why not?

THE COTTINGLEY FAIRIES HOAX

The year was 1917.
Location: Bradford, England. Frances Griffiths (10) and Elsie Wright (17) decided to go out in the garden armed with a camera that belonged to Elsie’s father. When they came back, they said that they had spotted fairies near the garden close to Cottingley Beck and had photographs of them. In the pictures, it appeared that the fairies were doing a dance. The case made headlines in 1920 when Arthur Conan Doyle penned a piece about it. Years later, in 1983, Elsie admitted to the hoax. The Cottingley Fairies “were actually paper cut-outs held up by hat pins”.

The Piltdown Man Hoax

The hoax of The Piltdown Man was perpetrated between 1911 and 1915, when amateur geologist Charles Dawson and his friend Arthur Smith Woodward, keeper of geology at the British Museum, dug up “fossil fragments” that seemed to establish the “missing link” between “humans and apes”. The Piltdown Man was said to be 500,000 years old. In 1953, Oxford University and British Museum scientists discovered that it was nothing more than the jaw of a female orangutan joined to a human skull.

 

DEATH HOAXES

What do former Beatle Paul McCartney, Hollywood actor Will Ferrell, rapper Eminem, singers Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, ex-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the late Michael Jackson have in common? They have all been the target of death hoaxes; i.e. false reports of death while the person in question is still alive.

The most famous of these was the 1968 “Paul is dead” rumour, in which the claim that McCartney had died swept throughout America and Great Britain. In December 2000, news reports claimed that Eminem was the victim of a car crash, while in June 2001, a Los Angeles radio station reported that Spears and Timberlake had together died in a road accident. In March 2006, an obituary uploaded to a wire service claimed that Ferrell had died in a paragliding accident. Michael Jackson was also the victim of a death hoax in 2004, in which it was alleged that he had overdosed on sleeping pills. That might have been prophetic.

 

 

THE FAKE AUTOBIOGRAPHY HOAX

Have you seen the 2006 film The Hoax, starring Richard Gere? It’s based on a scandalous true story, the “Howard Hughes-Clifford Irving affair”. In 1971, Clifford Irving claimed that he had written a biography of Howard Hughes, the reclusive business tycoon. Though Hughes himself dismissed it, Irving said that he had tapes, letters and manuscripts from their interactions with each other. Time magazine described the concoction as one which ‘‘came wrapped extravagantly — boxes within boxes, each festooned with its own diminished fantasies, each gaudily papered in ever thinner tissues of lies”.